Decarbonation as a service: An economic analysis of innovative shuttles for freight on highways
Martin Koning (Université Gustave Eiffel)
Abstract
Travail co-écrit avec Lucie Letrouit, François Combes et Anicet Kabre.
In the case of freight transport, even if the official objectives of modal shifts from roads towards railways or waterways were to be reached at the 2040 horizon, the vast majority of tonnages would still be moved by trucks and light-duty vehicles. In this context, this research proposes a socioeconomic analysis of one new service that may be proposed to carriers on French highways in a near future. Instead of moving the goods by their own, carriers could unload their shipments on logistic platforms located at the highway’s entrance where the parcels would be loaded on dedicated shuttles and moved by a service provider, before being reloaded onto carriers’ trucks. Whereas this new operational scheme would imply times losses due to transshipments, as well as the payment of tolls to use the shuttles, carriers would not be obliged to invest massively in decarbonized long-haul trucks and they could save resources on the regulatory break time of drivers. Using a simple microeconomic framework, we compute the usage toll of such a service – and we contrast the corresponding social welfare and GHG emissions – for three different settings: the private optimum (where the private company offering the service maximizes its profit), the collective first-best optimum (where a benevolent planner maximizes the social welfare) and the collective second-best optimum (where a benevolent planner determines the optimal subsidy given the pricing rule of the private company). These calculations are proposed for a wide range of trucks’ technologies, including two types of Electric Road Systems that vary in terms of network length and battery size.