The rolling motorway as an alternative to door-to-door unimodal road transport: lessons from the Trieste-Chop project

Although there is a consistent and strong political consensus that intermodal transport (in-termodal rail transport, specifically) should play a greater role in the movement of freight across continental Europe, the available statistics (especially) for the rolling motorway (RoMo) show only a moderate absolute increase over time and a worrying decrease in the last years. Understanding why that happened and what can be done about it is a challenging task for transport analysts. This paper adds to the existing literature - not very abundant for the rolling motorway - by illustrating, as a case study, the planned introduction of a new RoMo service, connecting Trieste Fernetti (Italy) with Chop (Ukraine). Sharing the difficulty common to freight mode choice studies in gathering a sufficiently large sample, only 42 valid interviews with freight forwarding and transport companies and truck drivers could be collected. However, the stated-preference interviews, generated via an efficient design, allowed us to estimate a quite robust mixed logit model containing several attributes of interest. The results indicate that: a) on average, road transport is, ceteris paribus, much preferred to RoMo both by freight forwarding and transport companies and truck drivers, with the first showing a stronger adversity towards RoMo; b) travel time and monetary costs are important variables for both actors; c) highway toll is a very sensitive variable especially for the freight forwarders and transport companies; d) differently from the truck drivers, the freight forwarders and transport companies appreciate the possibility of using the RoMo service on weekends. A simple simulation performed with the estimated model allowed us to conclude that, under the current circumstances, the probability that a RoMo service between Trieste Fernetti and Chop be used is close to zero. A road toll increase of €300 euros would not change the probability of using the RoMo. Only an increase of €660 euros, setting the road toll to a level equivalent to that imposed in Switzerland or Austria, where it is motivated by the need of protecting the fragile Alpine valleys, would increase to 29% the chances of the RoMo service to be chosen. However, no equivalent motivation could be advanced in the case of the Trieste-Chop corridor.