Commodity Survey in Austria for the New Austrian Freight Transport Model

Official statistics on freight transport in Austria provided by Statistics Austria are generally based on modes. Consequently, no valid data at the level of individual shipments (commodity flow) exists in Austria (as in most European countries) that could serve as a basis for modelling logistic chains for the new Austrian Transport Model. Thus, a survey on commodity flows of shipping companies including Revealed Preferences (RP) and Stated Preferences (SP) experiments were commissioned for the first time in Austria in order to yield data required to model freight transport according to an Aggregated-Disaggregated-Aggregated (ADA) model approach. It was possible to motivate the planned number of companies to participate in the survey, but due to the amount of data requested and the associated time required for the respondent(s), there was an unexpectedly high drop-out rate, although considerably more motivation and reminder efforts than usual were undertaken. As a consequence, not all discrete choice models could be estimated as planned, but by means of summarizations and simplifications the resulting model is well-suited to answer key questions and provides demand matrices for all transport modes. However, appropriate synergies with the official freight transport statistics are recommended for future surveys to collect the desired quantity of different transport chains, taking into account the number of potential companies with relevance for Austrian freight transport shipments and leading to a reduced burden of the respondents.