A new dataset on distance and time related transport costs for the EU regions is now freely available for download on the European Commission’s Science Hub.
The main information contained in the dataset is the estimated average cost of road freight transport between and within NUTS-2 regions, alongside more basic variables such as the average geodesic distance, and the average time and distance travelled by road.
The estimated transport costs take into account both the time needed and the distance covered by a representative truck travelling along optimal routes between EU NUTS-2 regions (see Persyn et al., 2019, for more technical details). The resulting dataset contains an origin-destination cost matrix in euros for each region pair in the EU.
Transport costs data are a key input for trade analysis and for industry-level studies on spatial distribution and logistics, all with clear policy-relevant results. However, good transport estimates at a detailed spatial level for the EU were not readily available, until now.
The dataset focuses on transport costs by road, representing more than 75% of total freight transport in the EU.
The dataset is used, among other things, for the parametrisation of the spatial dynamic model RHOMOLO (Lecca et al., 2018) used by the European Commission for policy impact assessment.