TRANSFORuM workshop on Long-Distance Freight held in Basel

28.11.2013 |

TRANSFORuM’s fourth theme-specific stakeholder workshop was held on November 25 – 26 2013 in Basel, Switzerland. This was the last of our workshop series in the autumn of 2013; a second series of four workshops will be held in the spring 2014.

The Swiss city of Basel was chosen as a location because of the extremely high market share of rail in the Swiss freight sector. The 20 attendees learned about Switzerland’s underlying integrated policy approach from representatives of the Swiss ministry of transport. They also had a chance to witness first hand the particularly innovative intermodal rail/road hub at Oensingen.

The main purpose of the event was, however, to hear practitioners’ views about suitable criteria to determine good practice in the rail and waterborne freight sector, to learn about good practice cases that our project should investigate in detail, about the transferability of proven success cases and ways of and barriers to sharing. On the second day, we also kick-started TRANSFORuM’s roadmapping process with a discussion about its most suitable content, structure, style etc.

In order to capture a possibly broad and comprehensive view on these issues we invited a strategically chosen sample of practitioners and we were lucky to have attracted a total of 12 stakeholders from nine countries (Netherlands, Denmark, Lithuania, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Romania, Austria, Sweden). If we add the participating TRANSFORuM consortium members to this calculation the whole workshop represented expert views from 12 countries (additionally UK, Poland, Czech Republic).

The stakeholders represented a large transport operator, consulting company, retailer, start-up service company, multimodal freight provider, national transport ministry, multinational shipper, policy advisor and NGO. This variety was crucial because TRANSFORuM’s explicit approach is to give a voice to incumbent players in the European transport arena as well as to new, emergent and innovative actors.

The workshop programme, list of attendees and key background information about this workshop is available in the briefing paper, which can be downloaded from the TRANSFORuM website. Also the workshop minutes will be available there soon.