By offering new insights into the workings of policy measures, including adverse effects and interaction between policy measures, OPTIC will enable an assessment of the overall impact of any policy instrument or mixes of instruments aimed at the three objectives of efficiency, environment and equity.
Major contributor to climate change
It is widely recognised that the transportation sector is a major contributor to climate change. It is equally recognised that measures adopted to date are not sufficient to stop the growth in this contribution. According to the European Conference of Ministers of Transport’s (2007) review of progress in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, the measures implemented so far in the transport sector limit themselves to a cut of approximately 50% of the projected increase in emissions between 1990 and 2010 – this does not suffice to meet the Kyoto targets adopted by the EU.
Great challenge
The immense growth rates predicted for the transport sector in Europe represent a great challenge for the transport policy in the years to come. Consequently, integrated transport concepts have been discussed for several years, amongst them the EU White paper on Transport (2001) and its mid-term review (2006), the EU Green Paper on Urban transport (2007), the Freight Transport Logistic Action Plan (2007), the Integrated European Action Programme for Inland Waterway Transport (2006), the Single European Sky regulation (2004) and many transport plans or transport development strategies on national or even regional level.
Undesirable side effects
In spite of this, policy analysis has mainly concentrated on the impacts of changes in one input variable on travel behaviour. Individual policies, however, are often proven to have limited effects on their own, and also in many cases undesirable side effects (e.g. tolling of trucks on motorways leading to longer trips on untolled secondary lanes). The most effective individual measures, such as pricing and congestion charging, seem hard to design in practice and are often politically difficult to implement. The challenge now is to examine combinations of policies where packages of measures are considered and implemented together. In addition, new policies have to address issues relating to competitiveness, financial stability, environment and equity besides their own policy goals. This is the sustainability agenda.
Policy packaging
Policy packaging is one approach to meet such challenges, as it looks at outcomes more holistically through the synergies between policies and the means by which the benefits from policy interventions can be retained (lock-in). It also begins to address the outcomes of policy interventions that might seem unintended or counterintuitive, and it provides means to address the problem of adverse rebound effects. The OPTIC team will investigate approaches to understanding these effects, and develop conceptual methods and optimal implementation strategies to reduce adverse outcomes and capture positive outcomes.