This Insight illustrates the main assumptions behind the construction of the dataset and its core characteristics. The estimates take into account both the time needed and the distance covered by a representative truck travelling along optimal routes between samples of points within the EU regions (for more details see Persyn et al., 2019 and the version of the paper forthcoming on Transport Policy).

The resulting dataset (available here) contains an origin-destination cost matrix in euros at the region pair level. Moreover, the sampling approach allows calculating average (both arithmetic and harmonic) transport costs within each region.