LEF2 - A strategic freight transport model for Great Britain.

INTRODUCTION This paper reports some innovative model building that yields a useful addition to models of freight in Great Britain. Currently, the Great Britain Freight Model (GBFM) is part of the Department for Transport's (DtT) national model suite. That model is over-detailed for some purposes and internally only models mode choice effects. Freight modelling requirements in Great Britain were reviewed in work for the DtT, the Strategic Rail Authority (SRA), the Highways Agency (HA) and Transport for London (TfL). Arising from our work on that project, and our involvement with GBFM, we identified a need for a strategic freight transport model, near instantaneous to run, that could handle both the mode choice effects and market size effects of policies. Section 2 of this paper sets out the background to our work. Section 3 introduces the LEeds Freight Transport (LEFT) model series. Section 4 describes the model LEFT2 from that series, and section 5 gives some results using version LEFT2.6. Section 6 lists the plans we currently have for LEFT3, and section 7 concludes.