Exploring the European Road Freight Transport Survey: Potentials, Challenges, and Limitations

This paper examines the European Road Freight Transport Survey, a comprehensive European microdata set compiled under Regulation (EU) No. 70/2012, to assess its potential, challenges, and limitations. These include both the limitations of the data collected and methodological inaccuracies in the surveys in different countries. The article describes the structure of the data set, which consists of three interlinked data sets: vehicle, journey and goods records. The aim is to explore methodological inconsistencies and data limitations, offering recommendations for enhancing the dataset’s reliability and usability. The analysis shows significant impact of different exclusion criteria such as the weight or age of vehicles. One effect is that the majority of routes that are recorded in one country are not recorded at all in other countries. Limiting to the most restrictive limit would have little impact on the overall data and would filter out less than 5% of the observations Another important result concerns the age structure of vehicles. In some countries, such as Italy and France, there are strict age limits for the vehicles surveyed, which has an impact on the representativeness of the data. The article concludes with recommendations for harmonizing the methodology or providing a harmonized data set and raising awareness of the limitations of this data in official disseminations.