The freight transport in the EU is mostly performed by trucks (47.3%), followed by seagoing ships (37.8%), by trains (11.2%) and by ships using the inland waterways (3.7%). Trucks still dominate the inland EU freight transport with a 76.1% share of tonnes/kilometer and about 94% of the CO2 emissions. By comparison, the air freight transports hold a marginal part of the volumes, although this part is considerable in terms of value. The figures belong to Eurostat.
One of the great challenges for the transports consists in shifting a volume of freight as large as possible from the road to the railway. Although the specialised industry has developed railway vehicles adaptable to any type of freight, although the international railway freight transport market was completely liberalised in 2007 and although the EU policies equally converge to the promotion of the railway freight transport, there still is a series of impediments for the effective increase of the share of this type of transport.
The great project developers, shippers, logistics operators accuse the lack of cross-border interoperability, a fairly reduced speed of the freight transport in Eastern Europe but also the lack of prioritisation of certain railway sections exclusively for freight.
For the clients which are logistics operators, quality firstly means competitive transport times, safety of the freight transport and a capacity adapted to needs. In order to reach this objective, several factors must be considered, including an approach which should integrate operational procedures and processes coordinated on the entire territory of the Union. The availability of infrastructure represents in turn another factor.
The key to efficient transport is the consolidation of large volumes for transfer over long distances, in between the so-called first and last miles. Waterborne and railway transport are particularly suitable for this objective, as it can be noticed in other countries such as Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkey or China. While encouraging the use of the most efficient solution in all distances, it is above some 300 km that a significant re-balancing should take place, with 30% of road freight shifting to multimodal solutions by 2030, and more than 50% by 2050.
A first basis for cross-border interoperability has been established in 2010 through the adoption of Regulation 913 on the set up of ten railway corridors exclusively for freight transport. However, for the moment actions were undertaken only for Corridor no. 7 “Orient” and for Corridors no. 1 and no. 2 in Western Europe. For the remaining corridors, things are moving slower.
We could still add a plus to freight transport interoperability through the EU agreement on the TEN-T network, an agreement establishing the creation of a core transport network which should rely on railway freight corridors.
Nevertheless, by 2030, when we should have fully established this core network, the railway freight transport will have faced a series of difficulties which partially explains its incapacity to increase its market share. These difficulties affect mainly reliability, available capacities, information management, average speed, as well as flexibility.
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