ASSIST

The main objective of ASSIST is to provide the EU with sound policy advice on the possible direct and indirect social and economic impacts of future sustainable transport policies that would bear the potential to contribute to the strategic objectives of the EU given by the Lisbon Strategy, the Sustainable Development Strategy and the EU-2020 strategy. Thus the ASSIST project will support the European needs to carry out impact assessments for preparing and providing policy proposals.

ASSIST - Assessing the Social and Economic Impacts of Past and Future Sustainable Transport is a research project co-funded by the European Commission DG MOVE under FP7. The ASSIST project runs over 30 months starting in April 2011 and is coordinated by Fraunhofer-ISI. The scientific research is carried out by a consortium of six partners involving NEA (The Netherlands), TRT (Italy), ProgTrans (Switzerland), FOMTERV (Hungary), CNRS-LET (France) and Fraunhofer-ISI (Germany).

The ASSIST project follows a broad definition of the meaning of Transport Policy including traditional transport policies (e.g. pricing, fuel taxation, regulation/liberalisation of transport markets), infrastructure implementation and transport technology related measures (e.g. technological/efficiency standards, R&D support, market introduction support). The ASSIST consortium summarizes such a broad understanding of policies as Transport Policy Measures (TPM), which then has a broader meaning then just transport policy. ASSIST follows two main lines of work: In the first line desk research on studies and empirical results of TPM will be carried out leading to one of the two main outputs of the project, the Handbook on Social and Economic Impacts of Sustainable Transport Policy. The second line foresees the development, preparation and validation of the ASTRA-EC model, which will be derived from the ASTRA model (Assessment of Transport Strategies, www.astra-model.eu) that has been developed and successfully applied for policy analysis since the 4th FP. ASTRA-EC is an integrated, strategic assessment model and is based on System Dynamics methodology. In order to make use of the synergies of both, the ASSIST project will consider also inputs from the TRANSTOOLS model.

The project is supported by an internal and external quality board to validate the qualitative and quantitative findings of ASSIST. Project workshops are planned to communicate findings and involve the EC and stakeholders in model validation.