The European transport policy as well as national transport policies aim at increasing the market share of more environmentally friendly transport modes (rail, inland waterway, and short sea shipping integrated into intermodal transport alternatives). Road transport has still the biggest mode share and despite the fact that forecasts show that short sea shipping willgrow slightly faster than road transport in the mid- and long-term view, it still is a dominant mode of transport for intra-European freight transport. One of the main reasons for this development is intermodal logistics inability to adequately meet the customer requirements in the new logisticenvironment that emerged during the 1990s. Road transport is often considered to be more flexible, cost effective, transparent, efficient and providing higher service quality than intermodal transport alternatives. Organisational, technical, financial, economical, infrastructural and logisticalbarriers hinder today a wide breakthrough of intermodal logistics. The paper gives a general overview on policies and measures to support and promote intermodal transport in Europe and explains in more detail the Swiss approach to support and promote intermodal transport on the transalpine freight corridor through Switzerland. Besides the concrete measures also the experiences and effects of the Swiss approach are shown. The paper is basedmainly on the work of the PIARC Technical Committee "2.4 Freight Transport and Intermodality" which is presented in the report "Measures promoting alternatives to the road and intermodal terminals" and intermodal concepts, research and evaluation projects carried out in Switzerland. Also interim results of the running European PROMIT project (Promoting Innovative Intermodal Freight Transport) have been taken into account. The paper focuseson governmental measures addressing non-accompanied intermodal transport.For the covering abstract see ITRD E139491.
Abstract