Quantitative Analysis of Road Transport Organization for Agricultural Product Distribution in South - East Romania

Transportation organization in the field of high production volumes and geographically dispersed supply depends largely on an efficient and profitable agricultural distribution system. The South-East Development Region of Romania obtains high yields of cereals and horticultural products and delivers them by road. This potential is however compromised by transportation costs and inefficiencies in the system that leave agricultural distribution vulnerable. The South-East Region of Romania’s road transportation infrastructure for distributing agricultural goods is looked at in this quantitative, model-based study. The study looks at the size and density of farming in the area by using modeling of transportation costs, allocating space, and measuring economic performance. The demand-weighted transportation distances are reduced by the aggregation depot location at the center of gravity. A population-based consumption model is used to estimate transport demand. The total transport costs consist of fixed and variable costs. The baseline distribution scenario and two alternative hypotheses are analysed in a detailed case study of the urban markets of Galaţi, Brăila and Tecuci: an increase in consumption of 20% and the creation of a new urban market to improve the distribution network. Income depends on the daily volume of sales and the unit price. Elasticity-based metrics are used to evaluate the transport performance. The results show that with the increase of the demand there are economies of density (density return > 1) and diseconomies of scale through spatial extension (scale return < 1). The results show that volume concentration and spatial closeness are important for the economy and the efficiency of transportation. The study adds to regional transportation planning and agricultural logistics policy with new facts and methods. It also gives other agricultural areas a way to easily use the same analytical framework.