Long-distance freight workshop held in Duisburg.

05.06.2014 |

Duisburg workshop

The TRANSFORuM project continued its second series of thematic workshops with a stakeholder event in Duisburg on June 4 and 5 2014, focussing on long-distance freight. The related goal in the European Commission’s 2011 White Paper on Transport specifies that “30% of road freight over 300 km should shift to other modes such as rail or waterborne transport by 2030, and more than 50% by 2050.” The first question of the workshop was therefore whether this goal is well formulated, clear, useful and, very importantly, whether it is achievable.

The eleven participating external stakeholders also discussed the various building blocks and policy packages that have emerged as potential recommendations in the TRANSFORuM process so far. On the second day, these themes were addressed with a focus on two concrete examples: The Rhine-Alpine corridor and the Rotterdam-Poland corridor. This helped to “ground” the discussions and to test ideas and the likely impact of potential policy interventions on two real-world cases.

The overall purpose of the workshop was, of course, to sharpen the existing draft roadmap where appropriate and, where required, to identify an alternative structure of the roadmap. The TRANSFORuM team also wanted to elicit suggestions for different and/or additional content in terms of policies and priorities of the European Commission; but not only – it was also intended to collect suggestions for possible activities of private sector actors.

Our stakeholder guests came from seven different countries from every major region of the European Union. They represented a large logistics company, a pro-rail NGO, public administrations, two universities, one semi-public research organisation, two hauler companies, an industry federation, one European pro-environment lobby organisation and one service provider to the long-distance freight industry.

The minutes of the workshop will soon be made available on the TRANSFORuM website and the final results (roadmaps and recommendations) will be released at a large final conference in Brussels on December 8^th 2014. If you are interested to attend please register on our website.