Significance

Significance is an independent research institute specializing in quantitative research focused on passenger and freight transport.

The Significance team consists of highly motivated specialists who share a collective passion for quantitative research. The company operates fully independently and is owned by the employees themselves. Characteristic aspects of our working method include a strong analytical foundation and the use of the latest methods and techniques. In our projects, we translate the international state-of-the-art in mobility research into state-of-practice applications. We do this for clients both domestically and abroad, being particularly active in Northwest European countries such as Belgium, Denmark, France, Austria, Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland, in addition to the Netherlands.

Our core activities are:

• Developing passenger transport models, which may involve multimodal models or mode-specific models; Dutch examples include LMS/NRM, VMA, or AEOLUS.
• Developing freight transport and logistics models. This concerns both international and interregional freight transport as well as issues in the field of urban logistics. Examples in the Netherlands include the national BASGOED model and regional models in the MRDH region and Amsterdam for trucks, vans, and parcel delivery.
• Modeling car ownership and transitions in the vehicle fleet, as well as the interaction between housing, work, and mobility (example models include SPARK and TIGRIS XL).
• Designing, conducting, and analyzing traveler behavior through Stated Preference research, used among other things for the valuation of travel times, travel reliability, new connections, or time-of-day choice.
• Supporting policy analyses with quantitative indicators and analyses, such as new accessibility indicators, reliability indicators, indicators for promising public transport connections, or analyses of the effects of roadworks on the transport of goods by road.