Exploitable results
European transport policies are increasingly important but the tools available to evaluate the effectiveness of these policies are still inadequate and fragmented. It is necessary to provide the European Commission with a comprehensive methodology for assessing the impact of various transport policies and strategies on sustainability. The key challenge is to develop a methodology that takes into account the economic, the environmental and the social dimension of sustainability.
The REFIT consortium felt that the current weaknesses of sustainability assessments of transport policy are:
- the bad linkages between transport models and sustainability indicators;
- the incompleteness of existing modelling tool box;
- the tendency to address measures in isolation while assessment of policy packages is needed in order to include cumulative and cross-over effects.
The main result of REFIT has been the development of the transport sustainability impact assessment framework, which consists of a set of models and a large set of indentified indicators that enable ex-ante evaluation of the European Common Transport Policy considering the economic, environmental and social dimensions of sustainability. The REFIT framework can in principle be used for all sustainability impact assessments within the EU. However, to keep the REFIT framework working properly, it is necessary to use updated data and in some cases to make new calibrations of parameters.
Furthermore, in this project it has been proven that it is possible to calculate some additional indicators that previously were considered as an information gap. The framework has been established in such a way that the two core-models, Trans-tools and Tremove, provide several new developed ad-hoc models with input. The other data needed for the ad-hoc models is collected from existing sources. These ad-hoc models are designed to quantify the effects of transport policies on specific indicators.
In general, future research on this subject should focus on the use of different and more developed indicators to provide more detail at sustainable impact assessment level. Additional or improved collection of data would also improve the availability of new indicators and in some cases the quality of the existing indicators.
- To improve the reliability of the REFIT indicators, it is advisable to establish a more tight linkage between the ad hoc models (i.e. those developed by REFIT) to avoid inconsistencies among them.
- To improve the REFIT framework, it is advisable to reorganise the current list of the REFIT indicators. The number of indicators (102) included in the REFIT methodology are too many to be used in many policy assessment exercises, especially those relating to environment (59). It is then necessary to review and simplify the list only focusing on the most significant.
- The European scale of the REFIT models is not suitable to perform analyses at local scale. Further developments should be done to explore the possibility to apply the REFIT methodology to other regional scale models to calculate local scale indicators.
- It is advisable to explore the possibility to enlarge the suite of the REFIT models to include more indicators in domains not addressed by the current framework, for example the energy domain, which is important for transport policies addressing sustainability.
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