The Poland-based Centre for EU Transport Projects (CEUTP) helps beneficiaries to prepare and deliver transport projects co-financed by the EU. As part of this effort, the CEUTP has been tasked with creating an integrated traffic model to inform the development of a national transport strategy and guide future investment in Poland.

Arup was commissioned to provide economic, technical and legal advisory services with the ultimate aim of creating a data-rich, bias-free integrated transport model to guide future transport investment decisions.

Combining road, rail, aviation and inland waterways in one digital model, our Integrated Transport Model (ITM) is the country’s first independent tool of this scale and complexity. Specialists from Arup offices across Europe worked together to create a network of data sources, which allowed us to map out some 60 million daily journeys within and through Poland.  

Our multi-modal ITM framework allows public authorities to assess travel demand and transportation needs – including mapping existing gaps and predicting potential bottlenecks – to effectively guide future strategy and policymaking, while enhancing connectivity both at national level and linking in with key European transport hubs. 

The model will enable forecasting of the planned infrastructure in various development variants (traffic forecasts) and with various socio-economic assumptions.

Paweł Engel

Deputy Director, Transport Analysis and Programming Department, CEUTP, during project summary workshop

Digital expertise supporting transport consulting 

Data-based traffic and congestion forecasting tools can inform a country’s transport policy and decision-making, but the lack of exhaustive data often poses a significant challenge. While different public bodies in Poland had previously developed a range of models, they were biased towards a specific transport mode: one based on rail, one based on freight and two focused on roads. 

Poland’s new Integrated Transport Model (ITM), developed by Arup’s multidisciplinary team of transport and airport planners, highway engineers, economists and data scientists, incorporates all transport modes to create a bias-free central tool for non-partisan, strategic infrastructure planning. The digital tool, a key requirement to verify future EU transport infrastructure projects, will accurately identify areas of transport exclusion to help prioritise future investments. 

24 hour rail flow through Poland

Rail journeys flow in Poland throughout 24 hours.

24 hour train and bus flow through Poland

Trains and bus journeys across Poland throughout 24 hours.

 
Car and truck flow through Poland in 24 hour period

Passenger cars and lorries flows across Poland throughout 24 hours.

The new multi-modal model estimates demand through a bottom-up assessment of travel behaviour. It uses four steps to compare investment programmes, generating the total number of trips, the impact on travel distance and travel modes, as well as spatial distribution to measure the economic impact. 

The model can react to changes in passenger behaviour caused by modifications in the network such as pricing, travel times, public transport services and other socio-economic changes, helping to forecast future traffic flows and ensure transport accessibility. To test the model’s reliability, we ran a test checking the forecast against data from a historical day, which confirmed the accuracy of the simulation. 

In Poland, enhancing rail infrastructure including high-speed is one of the country’s key decarbonisation strategies. The new ITM will demonstrate how mass transit systems like rail can reduce the country’s carbon footprint, while outlining its benefits to multiple stakeholders to encourage a widespread modal switch.