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This special issue explores the dynamic relationships between transport network design and agents' preferences by outlining the relevance of the spatial components. The seven papers in this volume focus on both changes in the spatial network connectivity structure and changes in consumer preferences/choices due to policies at different spatial levels. The goal is to provide a prospective review on new methodological directions in analyzing transport networks, spatial choices and their related policy implications within the framework of recent European policy interventions and transportation research developments.

The value of travel time savings (VTTS) has been investigated by transport economists since the mid‐1960s. Although the first two decades of research were mainly devoted to VTTS in passenger transport, since the mid‐1980s several studies have analysed the VTTS in freight transport from both a theoretical and an empirical viewpoint. The first part of the paper is devoted to a review of the proposed theoretical models for the value of freight travel time savings (VFTTS), and it discusses the issues arising from the use of different methods to collect empirical VFTTS estimates. The second part is based on a meta‐analysis of a sample of empirical VFTTS observations related to several European and North American countries. It is shown that both the per‐capita gross domestic product and the transport mode are statistically significant variables that can partially explain the variability in VFTTS estimates.

The paper aims to analyse and compare synthetic indices of accessibility in order to measure the impact of high‐speed trains on European cities. In particular, it considers the data and results concerning two previous articles by Gutierrez et al. and Martin et al. that analyse the accessibility gains produced by the construction of Trans‐European Transport Networks (TEN‐Ts). In these two papers, accessibility is studied using, first, a partial approach with three different indicators: location, potential market, and daily accessibility; and, second, data envelopment analysis (DEA) to calculate a synthetic index of global accessibility. The present paper extends these studies by applying principal component analysis (PCA) to obtain a new synthetic accessibility index. DEA and PCA are two good candidates to synthesize the partial information provided by different methods that have been employed in the previous literature that studies accessibility. It is shown that DEA and PCA methodologies yield a...