Issues in freight transport modeling for emerging economies: Insights from Turkey

There is a good body of literature about national freight transport models for assisting governments in developed countries with decision-making on future transport infrastructure and on transport policies. These models provide a good starting point for freight transport modeling in emerging economies; however, their capability for addressing specific issues of such countries can be limited. They may lack the representation of characteristics that are specific to emerging economies, such as policy priorities, changing governmental and regulatory structures, unstable development rates, speed of technological diffusion, transition from traditional to contemporary logistics systems, changes in the competitive structure of logistics industries, and long-term uncertainties in market structure. Such features need to be explicitly addressed in freight transportation models to enable meaningful policy analysis. In this chapter, we discuss these freight transport modeling concerns using the framework about the main issues in modeling freight transport at the national level, as presented in a study by de Jong et al. We present the insights gained from the experiences from national freight transport modeling practices in Turkey.