Five Traffic Designs in Combined Transport Systems - A Theoretical Discussion

Journal article, 1993

Transportation system design is influenced by geographical and infrastructural conditions as well as the demand of transport services, in terms of goods flow and transport quality. In this paper five significantly different theoretical layouts of traffic systems are described. These are direct connection, corridor, hub and spoke, fixed routes and finally allocated routes. The approach is rather universal, for example it can describe distribution networks of forwarding agents or, as in this application, systems for combined transport. The paper is divided into two sections. Part one is a theoretical discussion of the characteristics of the traffic designs, focusing on when they are suitable for general transportation. The system environment is described in terms of geographical and infrastructural factors and transport demand factors. Real world examples are given and one ideal transport situation is described for each of the five traffic patterns. Part two is an application to combined transport. Since the European railway network is dominated by national railway organisations, the size of the discussed traffic networks is comparable to the major European countries. Performance characteristics of different subsystems with special attention given to terminal performance, are described according to each solution. The discussion will include a survey of existing combined transport techniques and how these are related to the performance characteristics. The purpose of the paper is to discuss some alternate traffic solutions for combined transport systems.