As one of the main goals of container transferia is to relieve the port area of road congestion, we estimated the societal impact of transport during peak congestion to gain insight in the problem for transport from the Port of Antwerp to its Belgian hinterland. The analysis was performed in a similar way, as for the evaluation of the LHV introduction. As a benchmark, Figure 12 shows the marginal external cost ratio, comparing direct road transport from the Port of Antwerp to any Belgian municipality in a scenario of free flow traffic to a scenario of direct road transport in structural congestion.28 The marginal external costs for container transport in free flow traffic are in any case lower than the external costs during congestion, but the difference between both scenarios can be spatially different. For the areas depicted in green, the difference between both scenarios is smallest, while the areas depicted in red suffer from the highest (relative) increase in total marginal external costs, when container transport has to be performed during congestion periods. It are thus the areas in red and orange which could benefit a lot from the implementation of a transferium, if the road transport to and from the transferium can be performed outside congestion. It is not a coincidence that these locations are close to the locations suffering from congestion as depicted in Figure 11. The image thus illustrates that substantial societal gains can be achieved by implementing congestion avoiding transport concepts.
28 As input for this analysis, the same methodology as described in section 2.4 was used.
Figure 12 External cost ratio comparing direct road transport outside congestion to direct road transport during congestion29
A second comparison can be made between the external costs of direct road transport and the external costs of barge transport to the transferium in Grobbendonk added up by the required post haul transport by road transport (Figure 13). The left figure suggests that for most of the eastern part of the country, societal gains could be achieved when employing the transferium concept as inland terminal during congestion periods. The areas in green and to a lesser extent the areas in orange are from a societal perspective preferably served by the intermodal alternative. The relative gains, following the external cost ratio, are highest close the transferium and in the direction away from the Port of Antwerp (south-southeast). The figure on the right suggests that these societal gains decrease when all road transport can be performed outside congestion situations.
29 Important to note here is that the lower percentages correspond to the largest relative increase in external costs during congestion periods.
Figure 13 External cost ratio comparing intermodal transport, using the Grobbendonk transferium as transshipment node, during congestion (left) and outside congestion (right) to direct road transport
When comparing the societal impact of intermodal transport using the transferium in Grobbendonk to the societal impact of transport through the cheapest intermodal terminal30, it is obvious that in most cases intermodal transport through the cheapest terminal is a better solution from a societal perspective (Figure 14). The area where the transferium performs better or equally good (green and orange) corresponds roughly to the area where it also is the cheapest intermodal alternative. If the transferium can be used as a transshipment node for barge-barge transport to other terminals, the total external costs will be equal to the ones of intermodal transport, under the assumption that no additional external costs for transshipment operations would occur.31 This is in accordance with the findings of Bouchery and Fransoo (2014) stating that the optimal location of a transshipment terminal is located further away from the port, when the aim is to maximize the carbon emission reductions, while it is closer to the port when the aim is to reduce transport costs.32
30 This is through the terminal offering the cheapest door-to-door chain, as simulated with LAMBIT.
31 In practice, the external costs would, however, increase (slightly) due to additional transhipments.
32 This however does not mean that terminals should be located close to the port to optimize the transport costs of the intermodal system. But they should be located closer to the port, than when optimizing the emission-related performance of the network.
Figure 14 External cost ratio comparing intermodal transport, using the Grobbendonk transferium as transshipment node, during congestion (left) and outside congestion (right) to intermodal transport using
the cheapest alternative
Focusing on transport price, the Grobbendonk transferium can only catch a small local market area (see Figure 3 top left) due to its location close to the port. Due to additional economies of scale, this area might, however, be enlarged when its transferium functionalities can bring price reductions. But price levels should be decreased by a rather large extent, if an additional transshipment to another barge is required for the further transport to more remote intermodal terminals. Figure 15 shows the impact of adding a transferium to a regular intermodal chain, focusing on the Limburg region. It appears that only a few municipalities can be served (slightly) cheaper when compared to direct road transport (areas depicted in shades of green).
Figure 15 Price ratio comparing intermodal transport, using an additional transshipment in the Grobbendonk transferium to direct road transport to/from the Port of Antwerp, with a focus on the greater Limburg region
(Source: Macharis et al. (2014))33
3.4 Conclusion and outlook
This section discussed the concept of transferia in the Flemish context. In the introduction, we tried to define the concept and to focus on the difference between ‘traditional’ inland terminals and transferia. The main distinguishing features relate to the location of transferia (close to the port) and its functionalities. Next, we described the existing transferium network in the Netherlands and Belgium.
In a third section, we used the LAMBIT model to simulate the societal impact of using a transferium, through external cost simulations. It was shown that especially during congested periods, the use of a transferium can bring substantial societal benefits. Outside congestion periods, the gains are smaller. When comparing the use of a transferium concept to ‘traditional’ intermodal terminals, the latter still causes less societal costs in most cases. Therefore, it can be concluded that a modal shift from road transport to intermodal transport, using the transferium, with the drayage performed by road transport will often bring societal benefits if the destination or origin of the transport does not require a big detour. When transferia are used as additional transshipment locations in an
33 Only the terminals depicted in the map are included in the simulation.
intermodal chain, its use is however often not competitive for short distance transport operations.
This remark is also made by Warffemius and Francke (2010), stating that it is unclear if the market share of inland waterway transport will increase following the implementation of transferia, as transport time and transport time reliability will improve for transport operations using the transferium as hub, when drayage operations can be performed over longer distances outside congestion periods. The cooperation of terminals along strategic axes (such as the Albert Canal), could however increase the potential use of transferia, to decongest the port area.
The analysis above also brings up new questions. First, to what extent will the congestion problem be spatially moved from the port area to the transferium area, when its use is substantially increased?
Second, the modal shift issue discussed above can be related to the modal split of ports, terminals, regions etc. When using barge transport between port and transferium, while requiring long distance road transport between transferium and origin/destination, the share of intermodal transport will increase substantially when expressed in the share of intermodal trips. When expressed in the share of ton-km performed by each transport mode, modal split statistics will however only shift slightly towards the more environmentally friendly modes. A recommendation that can be made here, is to clearly state this difference in the modal split statistics of ports and regions, comparing both the share of in/outgoing TEUs by each mode and the share of TEU-km by each mode. A third remark which follows both from this paper and the beleidsnota mentioned above, is the need for an extensive inland terminal classification, not only based on their location, but also on their service offers and their extended network.
4 Modal choice analysis
As a previous policy paper (Meers and Macharis, 2014) already dealt with many relevant aspects in modal choice decision making, this chapter will not deal with a description of the main modal choice criteria, opportunities to decrease transport cost as enabler of a modal shift and the use of modal choice criteria in a multi-criteria setting to enhance a mind shift. This chapter, however, focuses on the importance of modal choice criteria for short distance container transport within Belgium. This information is crucial as input for the three items discussed in the previous paper.
The focus of the European Commission’s modal shift policy lays in the long distance transport segment, with the explicit goal to shift 30% of road freight over 300 km to other transport modes by 2030 (European Commission, 2011b). As discussed by Tavasszy and van Meijeren (2011), however, intermodal transport below this 300 km ‘threshold’ distance exist, as the case of maritime-based transport in Flanders proves and can be successful. In Europe, this <300 km distance segment corresponds to 44% of the ton-km and 89% of the total tons transported. A key to successful short distance services lies in the reduction of transhipment costs and time in combination to sufficient transport volumes (Trip and Bontekoning, 2002).
This chapter addresses the short distance container transport market which – up to now – received limited attention in the modal choice literature (Reis, 2014). In this chapter, we first describe this general setting. The second part focuses on the survey that was conducted to disentangle the modal choice preferences of decision-makers. The third section describes the results of the survey.