Author(s)

G. Mattrisch

Abstract

Ten societal trends and their potential impact on the movement of goods in European urban agglomerations G. Mattrisch Berlin, Germany 1 Introduction: About Forecasts If today someone is interested in middle- or long-term forecasts of transport volumes on the national or European level, one could be somewhat disappointed about the large variance and - as a means of that - the very limited reliability of the future projections. For instance existing projections for rail transport volume in Germany in 2010 differ by no less than 80 %.One might find this situation unsatisfactory and therefore look for explanations, and normally would even discover two plausible reasons: • The models based on econometric or classical transportation planning methods are inadequate • The "ceteris peribus"-assumptions are wrong. To illustrate this explanation approach look at Fig 1, in which published prognoses about energy demand in Germany -each of them structurally wrong, because essentially

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