3: Transport Demand, Transport and Traffic Flow – Key Elements of City Logistics

The authors were motivated in addressing the subject of the current paper by the too frequent misuse of the following notions – transport demand, transport flow, and traffic flow – and by the vast amount of literature dedicated to describe the four step demand models. Is it justified to attribute reference value to these models for dimensioning the transport supply in the urban freight distribution? Could demand models contribute to the estimation of the operation parameters associated to the transport means in the conditions of a public infrastructure on which other transport flows exist (apart from those that made the object of the modeling)? The paper tries to answer these questions and to clarify some other related issues.