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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2008

Port inland transportation in Europe: Combined versus road transport

Résumé

Containerization is the backbone of globalization. In fifty years, it has totally transformed international freight distribution chains. A virtuous circle has been set up in which the use of ever-larger vessels (Cullinane et al., 2000), with its consequent large economies of scale and reduction in the cost per transported TEU (Brooks, 2000), goes hand in hand with an increase in transported volumes. Port hinterland services mostly rely on road transport, particularly in Europe. However, the uninterrupted increase in port traffic is making the road's dominance of hinterland services increasingly frail because of costs, the risk of congestion and growing environmental constraints. On land, high volumes are achieved by using combined rail-road or waterway-road transport. The ability of transport operators to attract freight from the hinterland at the lowest possible cost and with reliable and regular services is an essential condition for them to have the advantage in the competitive situation in which they are placed. Consequently, those ports which manage to be a port of call for the largest container vessels and offer high volume inland services establish themselves as the major loading centre in their maritime range as a result of their control of a large hinterland (Hayuth, 1992; Heaver, 2002; Robinson, 2002; Panayides et al, 2002; Notteboom, 2004). However, combined transport must still demonstrate that it can compete with road transport. Certain conditions must be met for combined transport to be set up: the waterway or rail infrastructure must exist, there must be sufficient volumes of geographically concentrated flows, transport integrators who provide door-to-door services to shippers. But in addition to these conditions, we shall make the simple hypothesis that combined transport becomes competitive when it is able to offer lower prices and additional services in comparison to the road. This hypothesis will be tested for the ports in the Northern European range, with a particular focus on river services from the port of Le Havre to the Paris region. This example, for which we have collected pricing data, is of particular interest as, on the face of it, Le Havre's position is much less favourable for the development of combined transport than the principal ports in the range. In the first part of this paper, we shall show that at the present time a large number of actors in the different ports of the Northern European range share a dynamic that is very favourable to the development of combined transport. However, the conditions of development are very unequal from one port to another and mean that the development of combined transport varies a great deal. We shall then show that road transport and combined transport do not share the same organizational patterns. They are, in fact, two different transport services which are not immediately comparable. The example of river services between the port of Le Havre and the Paris region will then be used to highlight the extent to which combined transport is competitive in terms of price and services compared with different organizational patterns of road transport.
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hal-02148737 , version 1 (05-06-2019)

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  • HAL Id : hal-02148737 , version 1

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Antoine Fremont, Pierre Franc. Port inland transportation in Europe: Combined versus road transport. Association of American Geographers, 2008 Annual Meeting, Apr 2008, Boston, United States. 20p. ⟨hal-02148737⟩
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