A well functioning transport system is a very important requirement for a modern industrialised society with expanded trade and integration between countries.
Transport is also responsible for an increasing portion of the energy consumption and thereby for many of the harmful effects on the environment.
Pollution from transport is a significant component for all transport modes with direct pollution in the road, sea and air sectors and mainly indirect pollution from the electricity production for railways.
The essential harmful impact on the environment from transport can be summarised as follows :
- Operational pollution
- Air pollution
- Water pollution
- Soil pollution
- Noise
- The use of land and barrier effects
- Risk inherent in the carriage of dangerous goods
- Congestion
The use of land and boundary effects is most severe for the road network that, in 1986, took up a land area of about 1.3% of the total area of the European Union.
The corresponding figures for the community railway network was approximately 0.03%. The occupied area for manmade waterways was then judged as negligible.
The” risk with transport of dangerous cargo is a growing problem considering the intensive traffic and the difficulties to localise the different vehicles on roads and railways. For shipping in narrow sections of the most important waterways however, there exist traffic information systems that can follow and identify every single vessel.
Congestion in Europe today is a severe problem especially for road and air traffic. Railway traffic has also difficulties with congestion resulting in many stops and low average speed of the trains.
For coastal and inland shipping however there exists a large spare capacity. Inland waterways can statistically expand their traffic with up to 100% with the present situation.
The possibility to change the transport infrastructure drastically and thereby the congestion would require large capital resources over a very long period of time. Working group no 14 has therefore concentrated its efforts on operational pollution and the ways to minimise the effects by selecting and developing the different transport chains for cargo transport.
The main areas that have been considered are as follows.
- air pollution through exhaust gases
- noise from the different transport modes and their vehicles
- water pollution and reception facilities
Overall statistics for the energy consumption and air pollution from exhaust emissions caused by different transport modes does not exist.
In order to show the situation, six European examples with comparison between road-, railway-, and inland/river sea shipping have been chosen.
The consumption of energy and the pollution from exhaust gases like CO2, NOx and SO2, that cause global and regional damage, have been calculated.
The calculations show that a better use of shipping related transport chains could considerably take down both the energy used and the emissions from CO2, NOx and SO2 compared with road traffic.
The same situation is also valid concerning energy NOx and SO2 compared with railway traffic in continental Europe. The emissions of CO2 are of the same order for European shipping- and railway related transport chains.
In order to guide the transport choice towards the most environmental way of transport, it is however essential to apply the same rules concerning charges both for the different transport modes and for emissions from the transport- and industry sector. The exhaust pollution from electricity producing power plants is also an indirect pollution for electricity driven trains.
The noise disturbance is an effect that concerns all the transport modes.
Measurements show however that shipping has a much lower noise level and duration of the noise than especially the road -but also the railway traffic.
The average noise levels from a motorway and from the railway traffic are approximately 10 decibels louder than for ship traffic. As the decibel values are rated in a logarithmic scale, an increasing volume of 10 dB would be described by the average listener as a doubling of loudness. The noise from a motorway is a continuous sound while a ship only produces a temporary disturbance when passing. The noise from rail traffic is of intermittent type with a frequency between that of road and waterway traffic.
There are problems with waste and waste disposal for all the transport modes. There are today no common international rules for road- and railway traffic. For European shipping there exist two different systems concerning reception facilities for ship related waste.
There is one system for pure inland navigation and another for international sea traffic with a specific application for the Baltic Sea. The requirements and the financing are different for the two systems.
It is essential to establish links between these two systems so that collection and disposal of ship related waste can function smoothly along the whole transport chains.
There is no doubt that a better use of shipping related transport chains based on inland river/sea shipping could solve much of the congestion problems in Europe. Shipping has also the best potential of all cargo transport modes to minimise the negative environment impact from transport.
