SERIE RESEARCH MEMORANDA Freight transport in Europe: Policy issues and future scenarios on trans.border alpine connections

This paper presents an overview of European policy on interconnected cross-border transport networks as well as of severe problems in estimating empirically the avalanche of goods movements in the European Union (EU). In particular, it deals with the Transalpine freight transport case, which represents one of the most challenging operational and policy issues of the present and future both international (EU) and national (the Alpine countries) freight transport developments. The paper is organised to briefly describe the main objectives of EU transport policy, to generally introduce the concept of intermodal transport with particular emphasis on intermodal freight transport and to describe past, present and future developments of the Trans.Alpine inter-modal transport. Various scenarios on the future development of Trans.Alpine intermodal transport are analysed as well. 1 . Department of Economics, Faculty of Statistics, University of Bologna, Piazza Scaravilli 40126 Bologna (Italy); email: reggiani @economia.unibo.it; 2. Centre for Transport Studies, Department of Civil and Building Engineering, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leics (United Kingdom); email: M.Janic @lboro.ac.uk; 3 . Department of Spatial Economics, Free University of Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam (The Netherlands); e-mail: [email protected].