Abstract
In both Europe and North America the continued growth in both passenger and freight traffic promises growing competition for road space between these two forms of travel. Forecast traffic levels call into question the ability of current infrastructures to sustain the efficient movement of both goods and people over increasingly crowded roadways and through increasingly delay-prone terminals. Costs of maintaining current highway networks in the face of heavy truck use also limit the budgets available for capacity expansion. In this paper the authors examine potential areas of both conflict and synergy in the movement of goods and people and consider the sort of data and analytical tools available for understanding the needs of, in particular, mixed use highway systems. Similarities in the movement of goods and people within urban areas exist on both continents, suggesting a number of promising areas for complementary research efforts.Limited data on the intra-urban activities of commercial vehicles is identified as a major barrier to our current understanding of how best to use available road space, and this too is a common situation on both continents. In contrast, the different histories, geographies and population densities associated with inter-city transportation activities make comparative work in this area more difficult and may suggest different modal solutionson the two continents. In either case the authors argue that there is considerable value atthe present time in �predicting the present� especially as it applies to the functional linkages between personal, goods and a rapidly growing services transport sector.