TRANSPORT DEMAND DEVELOPMENT IN GERMANY AFTER THE UNIFICATION

The political changes in European east-west relations after opening th e borders will be reflected in new dimensions of economic activity and commercial exchange. This will have far-reaching consequences for the development of transport in the east-west direction in Europe. The Ge rman Ministry of Transport has charged a team of consulting companies and University Institutes to work out an integrated master plan for th e unified Germany. The forecasts which have been performed for this ma ster plan will be presented in this article. They consist of a forecas t of the socioeconomic development in German and European regions, of predicting the car ownership and deriving the traffic volumes and kilo meters traveled in passenger's and good's transport as well as the spa tial distribution of transport flows. These data are generated for the major transport modes such that the resulting flow matrices can be us ed as a base for the traffic assignment. All models used are policy se nsitive such that they can produce consistent patterns of transport ac tivities for every set of infrastructure/regulation policies. This pro perty has been used to develop the first master plan for the federal t ransport infrastructure in the unified Germany.