The transport of containers on IW has increased in many countries and regions over the last decades and has always been seen as a “promising” market, even more so with the ongoing transformation of our economies towards climate neutrality. But at the same time, container transport on road and rail has seen higher growth rates. In addition, the overall competitiveness of inland waterway transport is having a hard time, even more so in a context of where macroeconomic conditions are difficult, thereby negatively influencing international trade and transport of containers.
This report provides an overview on the use of inland waterway transport (IWT) for containers in different areas of the world and more generally points to the untapped potential IWT still has to reveal. Using specific examples from river systems in Europe, Asia, South America, North America, this report identifies ways to strengthen IWT’s competitiveness in container transport and to develop inland container shipping globally. It also highlights, on the one hand the existing and new bottlenecks, on the other hand some best practices for IWT, structured in categories such as infrastructure, technology, operations and human factor. The authors also strived to formulate recommendations, taking into consideration the different stage of development/maturity of IW container transport depending on the regions.
As to bottlenecks, a basic challenge lies in justifying towards the client why transporting containers on IW is more valuable than transporting it on trucks or rail even though it comes up with extra handling costs. It also appears that seaport container operations are the main cause of unreliability, unproductive procedures, congestion and waiting times for barges. This highlights the strong interaction and interdependence between maritime transport and IWT. Other bottlenecks relate to climate change or inadequate infrastructure.
As to the best practices identified, one of the most promising solutions lies in the use of information and the cooperation between the various partners along the transport chain. Moreover, the report underlines that a sufficient and capable inland waterway infrastructure with constant and reliable draught conditions, well-functioning and properly operated locks, with state-of-the-art control technology would be a must.
Besides, as to areas of improvement, IWT will have to become more efficient, more reliable and more customer oriented to be able to compete with the road and the rail segments. In addition to this, particularly regions where container transport is already quite mature, IWT will have to keep pace of the development of trends such as digitisation, automation and robotisation, which will change the overall transport system in the near future. In this regard, the implementation of remote-control centres for specific rivers and specific vessels are excellent best practice examples that can be found in China and in Europe
