With growing urban populations, higher mobility needs, limited available space for transport infrastructure, and the increasing need for more attractive urban areas, these urban areas are faced with a complex dilemma, which gets more challenging by the day. This paper examines the role of flexibility in the relationship between structural spatial development and passenger transport, its economic, environmental, and social perspectives, the long-term impacts of this relationship and the role of this relationship in developing countries. The paper identifies the need for a better understanding of long-term flexibility in development options in order to make better future-proof decisions as a key research avenue, and sets a pathway to achieve this. Main research gaps as identified in the paper include the lack of understanding on the potential for flexibility in optimizing the structural spatial development and passenger transport relationship, the valuation of flexibility, and the application of flexibility approaches in developing countries. This paper emphasizes the importance of acting sooner rather than later, since the future costs of sub-optimal development are rising by the day and the bill is being pushed towards future generations.

Inland ports are becoming more important in enhancing hinterland accessibility of deep-sea ports. Their increasing size and number can however also pose a threat to quality of life in adjacent urban regions, for spatial conflicts between port and urban functions may arise. Therefore, inland port governance strategies are needed. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the findings of an international comparison of municipal governance strategies for inland port development in four different countries along the Rhine-Alpine Corridor. Our findings reflect the difficult position of inland ports relative to urban functions within a densely populated corridor. Sufficient capacity is needed to prevent the occurrence of bottlenecks on links and in nodes, which could limit flows on other parts of the corridor. Increasing inland port capacity should however also be aligned with policy measures in urban regions, to avoid the overlapping of inland port and urban functions which could lead to mutually exclusive land-uses. This poses challenges in terms of inland port governance. We observe that cases in which the port and urban administrations open up the policy process to relevant private stakeholders and the civil society, integrated governance strategies for inland port development are more likely to emerge.

Most scientific attention in freight transportation port studies centers on the characteristics of deep-sea ports, in particular container ports. In our paper, in contrast, we focus our attention on the performance of inland ports in a European context, which is up to now an overlooked part in the scientific literature on port development. Based on a large-scale quantitative dataset of Dutch inland ports we perform various statistical analyses to arrive at a more detailed understanding of the performance of inland ports. We try to explain the performance of inland ports in terms of transshipment level and growth in transshipment by several transport and economic factors. We test for differences in size and in volume growth and control for differences in diversity of transshipped goods and in availability of a container terminal in the inland port. Our findings contribute to the understanding of the performance of inland ports, as explained by general port characteristics. A better understanding of the characteristics and growth patterns of inland ports might also be beneficial to European practitioners and policy-makers in dealing with inland ports' development strategies in their daily practice.