The global COVID-19 outbreak has demanded drastic actions and policies from the governments and local authorities to stem the spread of the virus. Most of the measures involve behavioural changes from citizens to reduce their social contact to a minimum. Thus, these actions influence individual activity patterns and transport systems in different ways. This paper studies the short-term impacts on the transport system caused by the different policies adopted by the Colombian government and local authorities to contain the COVID-19 spread. Using official and secondary data concerning the seven most populated cities in Colombia, we analyse the impacts on three components of the transport system: air transport, freight transport, and urban transport. Results show that national policies and local decisions have decreased the demand for motorised trips across the cities, diminishing congestion levels, reducing transit ridership, and creating a reduction in transport externalities. The country banned air transport for passengers and only allowed air cargo for medical and necessary supplies, which will have negative consequences for the economics of the airline industry. During the first three months of the COVID-19, freight was the most resilient transport component. However, freight trips diminished around 38%, affecting mainly the supply chain of nonessential products. During the pandemic, governments need to provide subsidies to maintain the system supply to avoid crowdedness and promote active transport by allocating less-used street space to cyclists and pedestrians. In the short term, transportation service providers will face a financial crisis, deepened by the pandemic, which will require government assistance for their recovery.

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A relevant issue for the strategic modeling of interregional freight transport networks is to include external costs as part of a policy that supports the mechanisms for managing and pricing to achieve the social optimum. In this paper, a freight transport model, including external cost, is developed and applied to the Colombian intercity intermodal strategic network involving equilibrium between the phases of distribution and traffic assignment. Each link on the network includes internal costs: time and operation, and external costs: congestion, accidents, air pollution and CO 2 emissions. Marginal costs on the freight transport network are calculated using two approaches. First, it is assumed that an additional unit of demand does not affect the equilibrium of the transport network, and then the marginal cost is estimated as the sum of marginal costs on the shortest path links. The second approach assumes that an additional unit of demand changes the network equilibrium and, consequently, the marginal costs are estimated by calculating the difference between the two equilibrium scenarios. Both approaches are applied to seven selected route corridors covering the most important national freight transport corridors. It was found that both methods produce similar results. Average external costs were rated equal to 0.014 US$/ ton-km for highways, 0.000105 US$/ton-km for inland waterway transport and 0.0016 US$/ton-km for rail. In highways, external costs are equivalent to 37% of internal costs, in railways 12%, and in inland waterways they represent only 1%.

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