Measuring the Impact of the Trans-European Road Transport Network on the Accessibility of European Urban Agglomerations

Transport infrastructure investment is a catalyst for enhanced competitiveness and economic growth through an overall reduction in travel times and costs. These efficiency gains are among the goals of the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) program, one of the major European Union infrastructure policy packages. This study evaluated the benefits of TEN-T with respect to increased accessibility for the population that it encompassed and by using a detailed and up-to-date representation of the entire European road network. A routing algorithm that could efficiently exploit the high detail of the road network was used. By considering various impedance functions in outreach opportunities, the proposed methodology compared, for all major European urban agglomerations considered (695 in total), two measures of accessibility: one baseline measure that considered the TEN-T network as implemented in 2014 and one scenario measure that considered that the whole TEN-T network was completed. The proposed methodology addressed self-accessibility by considering a weighted travel time of the entire road network within each urban agglomeration under study. The results show where the major benefits (accessibility gains) are expected to occur following the completion of the TEN-T policy. In general, the main positive effects are to appear in European areas that are lagging behind in infrastructure investment (Eastern Europe) and in their neighboring counterparts (Central Europe). The presented quantitative estimates may be useful for an eventual review of the focus of and priority for the not-yet-implemented part of TEN-T policy.