An stated preference analysis of Spanish freight forwarders modal choice on the south-west Europe Motorway of the Sea Marı ´a Feo a,n , Raquel Espino b , Leandro Garcı ´a c a Fundacio ´n Valenciaport, Avenida del Muelle del Turia s/n, 46024 Valencia, Spain b Departamento de Ana ´lisis Econo ´mico Aplicado, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Edif. Dep. CC.EE. y EE., 35017 Campus de Tafira, Las Palmas, Spain c Instituto de Economı ´a Internacional, Universitat de Val  encia, Campus del Tarongers, Edif. Dep. Oriental, 46022 Valencia, Spain article info Available online 15 June 2010 Keywords: Motorway of the Sea Stated preference Freight transport Modal choice Error components mixed logit abstract This paper aims to contribute towards the design of effective freight transport policy by means of empirical analysis. In order to do so, a stated preference survey is undertaken to model the modal choice between door-to-door road transport and short sea shipping in the Motorway of the Sea of south-west Europe. The proposed analysis will provide policymakers with the necessary tool to identify the critical areas that should be addressed by future policy action in order to boost short sea shipping on Spain’s Mediterranean coast. By applying the proposed method, we will be able to obtain estimates of the subjective values of transport attributes – value of time, value of reliability and value of frequency – in freight transport, values for which barely any empirical evidence on a national scale exists. Quantifying such values is a key part of the cost benefit analyses performed when evaluating transport projects. & 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction It is a well known fact that European Transport Policy faces a difficult task that involves rebalancing the modal split while at the same time maintaining European trade flow competitiveness. As a matter of fact, as road pricing schemes aimed at penalising road use spread, the development of alternative modes is hindered by various problems. More specifically, short sea shipping has received aid from national governments and the European Commission itself that has not as yet resulted in significant modal shift initiatives, in contrast to forecasts in the 2001 Transport White Paper (European Commission, 2001) made at the beginning of this decade. According to the forecasts made by the European Union, the ambitious package of measures included in said document should have seen the modal split return to the level observed in 1998 and achieved equilibrium in the market share of the different modes by 2010. However, approaching the end of the 10-year period covered by the White Paper, short sea shipping appears to have been clearly unable to satisfy the requirements of freight transport demand, as the desired modal shift has not occurred. According to the latest European transport figures available (European Com- mission, 2009), in 2007 road transport accounted for 45.6% of total intra-European freight (in tonnes-kilometre), up by 2.9 percentage points on the figure recorded in 1998. Meanwhile, over the same period, the share of maritime transport shrank by 0.3 percentage points. By creating Motorways of the Sea, the European Union hopes to resolve the gap between supply and demand by providing door-to-door maritime services that can compete with the road alternative in all four corridors that make up the Trans-European Network of Motorways of the Sea: motorway of the Baltic Sea, of Western Europe, of South-East Europe and of South-West Europe. Defining this new type of intermodal service therefore requires extensive prior knowledge on freight transport demand, on the variables that determine modal choice and on the factors that have prevented traditional short sea shipping services from developing to their full potential. This article falls within this line of research and proposes to model freight transport modal choice among the corresponding hinterlands of the Motorway of the Sea under study – Motorway of the Sea of south-west Europe – and to estimate the subjective values of transport attributes by means of a binary discrete choice model as a support tool for designing an optimum promotion strategy for short sea shipping. In order to achieve this, the stated preference (SP) technique has been used, which makes it possible to consider situations that do not exist at present in the area under study. The article is structured as follows: the design of the ques- tionnaire and the field work conducted is detailed in Section 2. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tranpol Transport Policy 0967-070X/$ - see front matter & 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.tranpol.2010.05.009 n Corresponding author. Tel.: + 34 96 393 94 00; fax: + 34 96 393 94 61. E-mail addresses: mfeo@fundacion.valenciaport.com (M. Feo), respino@daea.ulpg.es (R. Espino), leandro.garcia@uv.es (L. Garcı ´a). Transport Policy 18 (2011) 60–67