Revised model for estimation of ferry operator costs for Norwegian counties’ general grant scheme

The Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development (KDD) has asked the Institute of Transport Economics Institute (TØI) to develop a new model to calculate ferry operator costs for the counties’ general grant scheme. The most important extensions of the existing model is to establish a) a cost model for zero-emission ferry operations and b) a revenue model based on the AutoPASS billing scheme. A new cost model using optimization and a new income model using Ordinary Least Squares have been developed within this project. The new cost model shows a reduction in energy costs and an increase in capital costs compared to the model KDD uses today. The new revenue model estimates higher ticket revenue than the old model. Regardless, the income requirement per county is quite similar when comparing the results from the new and existing model apparatus. We therefore recommend continued use of KDD's simple cost model in the short run, but implementation of the new simple income model developed in this project.