EU road-hauling cuts ‘unrealistic’ without policy shift, auditors warn

Christian Ernhede

Intermodal transport has been overlooked in the EU’s ambition to boost freight by train and barges, according to a new report, as industry voices concerns about the political influence of the road sector.

On Monday, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) published a damning report on the EU’s approach to intermodal freight transport, warning that ambitions to boost freight by rail and inland waterways are in jeopardy unless the European Commission comes forward with more targeted measures and updated legislation.

“You can dream of… a more sustainable way of dealing… with freight transport [through] targets like the Commission does have, but we see that all these targets are unrealistic, and that actually transport via road is cheaper, is more flexible,” ECA member Annemie Turtelboom, who headed the audit, told reporters at a briefing on Monday.

“Intermodality can play a key role to make freight transport greener,” she explained. “We found that the EU’s green strategies and targets overlook intermodal freight transport [as] the existing broader strategies for greening freight transport only set general targets for increasing the share of rail and waterway”.

By 2030, the European Commission aims to increase freight by rail by 50% and inland waterway by 25% compared to 2015, as set out in its Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy unveiled in 2020.

But the International Union for Road-Rail Combined Transport said that most of the likely increase in rail freight over the past decades has already come from

intermodal freight, rather than conventional rail freight. Any future increase in rail freight “is likely to be to a very, very, very high percentage [from] intermodal and not from conventional rail freight,” Akos Ersek, the group’s chief policy advisor, told ENDS Europe. “It’s a big mistake [in the report] – you should really be comparing apples to apples.”

Turtelboom’s audit underscored that the 1992 Combined Transport Directive is in urgent need of an update. The Commission has delayed previous plans to present a revision proposal in 2022, and has tentatively scheduled the proposal for the second quarter of this year as part of its sustainable transport package.

Contrary to EU ambitions, the auditors warned of a slight relative increase in freight by road over the last decade, which was, according to Turtelboom, accompanied by increasing CO2 emissions. “In 2010, rail and inland waterways represented around 25% of the total, and by 2020, their share had further decreased to below 23% by 2020,” the report reads.

Ersek also cautioned against the road sector’s apparent hold over EU policymakers, while underscoring that there are factions within the Commission “that want something else”.

“Wherever you look you find these small openings on European legislation which at least maintain this illusion that our objectives can be reached by technology change in the road sector,” Ersek said. “But the fact is that this is not possible.”

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Follow-up: ECA report on intermodal freight transport