Author(s)

B Kavalov

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the intensive economic growth in the European Union (EU) has been accompanied by a strong increase in the freight transport volumes. Apart from the evident positive impact on competitiveness of the EU economy, the latter really questions sustainability of the EU transport industry, because of more and more expanding adverse transport externalities - sharply increased oil consumption, congestion, accidents and environmental pollution. Some of these externalities are due to subjective factors like inefficient use of resources and poor split amongst transport modes. Generally, it is feasible these factors would be corrected by various technical, market and regulatory means. In this connection, the potential, offered by the inter-modal transport chains with participation of waterborne transport for surmounting of these disadvantages, should be assessed carefully. However, switching of the freight transport demand to inter-modal transport solutions with participation of waterborne transport could be feasible only when the aggregate quality of the inter-modal transport service is higher than the aggregate quality, supplied by other transport alternatives. The key pre-condition for this suggestion is availability of fair rivalry amongst transport modes. 1 Introduction Over the past two decades, the intensive economic growth in the EU has been accompanied by a significant increase in the freight transport demand. In relative terms, the main share of this transport growth belonged to the road transport, exclusively at the expense of the rail transport and at a lesser extent -waterborne transport. As a result, the current modal split in the EU freight transport consists of 44 % of the road transport, 41 % of the short sea shipping, 8 % of the rails, 4

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