Cross-border Car Traffic in Dutch Mobility Models

Abstract

Cross-border travel generates a substantial amount of mobility near the borders, but is not a large percentage of total Dutch mobility. However in the border regions of the country, these flows are important. For the Dutch national transport model LMS, O-D matrices are required that include cross-border car travel. This is a challenging task, due to scarcity of data. First, a production model (by travel purpose) is used to calculate the total production of car journeys. Next, these journeys are distributed over domestic and foreign destinations using a simplified destination choice model. From the resulting matrix, domestic journeys are removed and only the border crossing journeys are kept. Domestic journeys are then replaced by the results of the existing much more detailed mode-and destination choice models. The new models are estimated on the Dutch national mobility survey (MON) and are of reasonable quality. The predicted numbers of border crossing journeys to Belgium and Germany are lower than the numbers from traffic counts, and therefore an additional calibration to count data totals is carried out. The results indicate that for commuting the resistance to cross the border is equivalent to 35 (Belgium) or 46 (Germany) minutes extra travel time. Also for all other travel purposes in the model, it is found that the border resistance for journeys to Belgium is smaller than that for journeys to Germany, which can be explained by the additional factor of language difference. The smallest border resistance for both countries is found for shopping journeys.