Centre Conjoint de Recherche sur les Transports OCDE/FIT : Documents de référence
- Discontinué
- Is continued by :
- Documents de travail du Forum international des transports
The International Transport Forum at the OECD is an intergovernmental organisation with 52 member countries. It acts as a strategic think tank for transport policy and organizes an annual summit of ministers. Our work is underpinned by economic research, statistics collection and policy analysis, often undertaken in collaboration with many of the world's leading research figures in academia, business and government. This series of Discussion Papers is intended to disseminate the International Transport Forum’s research findings rapidly among specialists in the field concerned.
- ISSN: 20708270 (online)
- https://doi.org/10.1787/20708270
Long Run Trends in Transport Demand, Fuel Price Elasticities and Implications of the Oil Outlook for Transport Policy
This paper discusses the role of transportation in policies to address energy security and
climate change. It focuses on three elements: the impact of energy prices on transport
demand, the potential contributions of the transport sector to energy policies, and the
interaction between energy and other policy concerns in transport. Transport is relatively
unresponsive to broad-based price signals, in particular to changes in prices of fuels, but
there nevertheless is considerable scope to improve the fuel efficiency of vehicle fleets.
As a result, we should not expect energy policies to trigger dramatic changes in the
nature of transport systems. Furthermore, this unresponsiveness suggests that it is
relatively costly to reduce energy use in transport, and thus that efficient policies will
probably not extract as much energy savings (in percentage terms) from transport as
from other sectors. Reducing energy use in transport can be done with price incentives
or with regulatory measures. But if reducing climate change is a primary goal, measures
that mandate conservation need to be accompanied by others that make fossil fuels
economically unattractive – for example broad-based carbon taxes. Otherwise, fossil-fuel
reserves will remain economically usable and therefore will constitute a future source of
carbon dioxide emissions. We argue that other transport problems, notably congestion,
local air pollution, and accidents, are associated with considerably higher marginal
external costs than are climate change and energy security. It follows that policies to deal
directly with these other problems deserve high priority, regardless of energy policies.
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