The performance of intermodal inland waterway transport: Modeling conditions influencing its competitiveness

In Europe, numerous obstacles have been identified which prevent the (extensive) use of intermodal transport. A major motivation to promote intermodal transport is that its cost performance is often assumed better than road-only transport. Considering that the cost of transport services remains one of the most important criteria for the modal choice, the better cost performance of intermodal transport should be a major trigger to attract customers and to increase the market share of intermodal transport. However, despite that intermodal freight transport has developed into a mature industry over the last decades its market share is still modest. The relationship between costs and operations in the intermodal transport chain is often not well elaborated, leading to unclear results or even sometimes incorrect estimates. In this paper, we developed a model that is capable to calculate intermodal freight transport cost for any origin destination pair in Europe accessible by both intermodal inland waterway and road-only-mode road transport. Furthermore, we relate the level of transport cost to the effective transport operations (e.g. empty kilometers, capacity usage of terminals, etc.) in order to analyze the sensitivity of the respective transport cost elements for operations. By doing this it is possible to analyze to what extent intermodal freight transport is competitive with road-only transport in terms of transport cost and effective operations for any origin destination combination accessible by inland waterways and road