NOTES AND COMMENTS THE RATIONAL DIVISION OF FREIGHT TRAFFIC BETWEEN ROAD AND RAIL

This note summarises a study of the rational allocation of freight traffic between modes in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia, Yugoslavia. Estimated door-to-door transport costs were compared for road, rail and transport. For com bined transport, the comparisons included containerised transport as well as conventional modes. The analysis was on the basis of economic costs. Thus, it was necessary to extract taxes and transfer costs from the individual elements of financial costs in the study. Overall, the economic costs of transport services were 78 per cent of financial costs. The elements of cost included direct transport costs (for example, the costs of labour, materials and maintenance) and depreciation of mobile facilities used, an allocation of costs for fixed traffic facilities, as well as other costs and losses caused directly in a definite transport process. For the purpose of the study the transport process was divided into individual transport operations: vehicle movement, terminal operations, shunting, reloading, and operations at container terminals. In addition to the costs of individual transport operations, the infrastructure costs per tonne-kilometre were calculated, taking into account the average utilisation of the railway (46 per cent) and road capacities (60 per cent). The analysis was based on 1981 data, but all calculations were at 1983 prices. For rail and road transport the costs cover one trunk haul and two terminal operations, and for rail also the necessary number of shunting operations (con ditioned by the length of the transport route). Where road delivery or collection was involved, either at one end or at both of a rail trunk haul we added the costs of one or two reloading operations and one or two local road hauls of an average length of 6 kilometres. These cases are referred to as semi-combined and combined transport, respectively. The running costs of railway vehicles were computed by the German method ZUKO; those of road vehicles were determined according to the Guidelines elaborated by Dorsch Consult and Louis Berger (1974). Both methodologies * ZG?Prometni Institut, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. The full results of this research are available in Zelenko ( 1984), which is available from the author. She is grateful to Milorad Duricic from the Traffic Institute of Sarajevo for assistance with the methodology.