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Seaports are multifunctional socio-economic spaces that provide a wide range of services and serve a wide range of customers including shippers, forwarders, logistics operators and transport companies. One of their main tasks is to facilitate the domestic and international trade of goods. The paper attempts to highlight the major role that ports have in the transport system together with the minimization of the transport costs. Ports provide a crucial interface between land and sea. Ports, as integrated logistics centers and multifunctional socio-economic spaces, are key components of the European and global transport system. They also cover transport, logistics, distribution and space functions that influence the city development. Port improvement plays a major role in reducing the transport costs. In order to reduce transport costs, we need to identify the necessary changes to the system (additional berths, reducing the service time by upgrading the operating facilities etc.) to reduce the penalties. Most often, in order to minimize costs, the economic function (sum of waiting costs) have to be optimized. A useful tool for approaching port optimization problems is provided by the theory of queuing: ships can be regarded as "customers", while the "service stations" can be represented by the berths of a seaport. In the case of transit storage, the transfer of goods between sea and land transport is not a single-stage process. In these circumstances the optimum number of berths should be replaced by the optimum number of cranes and the optimum area for transit storage. However, in the hypothetical case study from the paper we will consider the case of a single-stage and single-channel facility (one berth) in order to reduce the queuing time. The main conclusion from the analysis is that the expected queuing time may be reduced either by increasing the handling speed or by making ships more homogeneous (by specializing in serving a particular type of ship or cargo).

The urban transport models are used in the development of Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans. These models are designed to reproduce the actual traffic flow on transport network infrastructure and to test and evaluate the solutions that will lead to a sustainable mobility. One of these solutions is represented by the development of park and ride facilities, for users that are coming from extra urban area. The authors propose in the paper an algorithm for traffic allocation when are developed park and ride facilities. The initial data are obtained from a classic four steps model and are processed to evaluate the degree of demand of transport network when a multi-stage phased scenario is pursued. The results obtained with the proposed method are useful for local and regional decision makers to conceive a strategy to develop new park and ride facilities as well as to obtain a series of quantifiable results for transport network users.

This paper presents part of the research on traffic risk estimation for Bucharest City area. The aim of our research is to develop complex models as tools of urban traffic risk assessment in planning phase. In this way, several urban planning alternatives could be analysed and evaluate before important transport infrastructure investment are made. The first part of the paper analyses the state of road accidents recorded in Bucharest. The second part of the paper demonstrates how the intersection conflict index can be used in traffic micro-simulation models to assess measures of traffic risk reducing.

Sustainable development is a necessity, solutions for satisfying users’ needs having to be adopted in relation to criteria that often integrate divergent interests of those involved. The optimal location of production centers has the best effect on production costs. The paper focuses on industrial location from the user's point of view, taking into account elements like maximum distance for efficient road transportation, resources proximity and available infrastructure. The developed model has a large scale of applicability in economic sectors like: distribution, automotive industry, constructions. Results of applying this model proved its utility and necessity of further researches on location problems.