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Short sea shipping in today’s Europe: A critical review of maritime transport policy

  • Policy Perspectives
  • Published:
Maritime Economics & Logistics Aims and scope

Abstract

During the last two decades, the European Union has led the promotion of Short Sea Shipping (SSS) corridors as an alternative to road transport. The need of establishing a level playing field between transport modes as well as of reducing congestion and other environmental damages from road transport have been pointed out as the main motivations of this promotion. Although other regions are currently evolving action policies to establish and encourage SSS corridors, these are recent and based on the European experience (the first US initiative was developed in 2002). Thus, Europe has come a long way in encouraging SSS. Therefore, it provides a proper scenario to analyze the success and failures of its policies after more than 20 years, in order to provide lessons to other regions and for the future. Here a review of the role of SSS in the European Maritime Transport Policy is presented. The main reasons of its promotion are explained, together with the two different sets of policies: those to fund specific infrastructure and those to fund SSS operations. A critical discussion on those policies concludes the article. The main purpose of this study is to provide to researchers and policymakers with an analytical review of the SSS transport policy with the aim of forming the basis of future research on SSS policy and competitiveness.

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Notes

  1. Decision No 1692/96/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 July 1996 on Community guidelines for the development of the TEN-T. Official Journal L 228, 09/09/1996 P. 0001–0104.

  2. This action consisted of an agenda for EU economy in the last decade, whose objectives were to make it more competitive by enhancing a more sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion.

  3. In 2010, the Commission listed the European social and economic objectives to be achieved by 2020. The EU headline targets for current decade were that 75 per cent of the population aged 20–64 should be employed; 3 per cent of the EU’s GDP should be invested in R&D; the 20/20/20 climate/energy targets should be met (including an increase to 30 per cent of emissions reduction if the conditions are right); the share of early school leavers should be under 10 per cent and at least 40 per cent of the younger generation should have a tertiary degree; 20 million less people should be at risk of poverty (COM, 2010).

  4. The main objectives of the agency are: (i) the ‘management of the preparatory, funding and monitoring phases of the financial assistance granted to projects of common interest under the budget for the TEN-T, as well as the supervision required for this purpose, by taking relevant decisions where the Commission has delegated responsibility for it to do so’; (ii) the ‘coordination with other Community instruments by ensuring better coordination of assistance, over the entire route, for priority projects which also receive funding under the Structural Funds, the Cohesion Fund and from the European Investment Bank’; (iii) the ‘technical assistance to project promoters regarding the financial engineering for projects and the development of common evaluation methods’; (iv) the ‘adoption of the budget implementation instruments for income and expenditure and implementation, where the Commission has delegated responsibility to it, for all operations required for the management of Community actions in the field of the TEN-T, as provided for in Council Regulation (EC) No 2236/95, in particular those relating to the award of contracts and grants’; (v) the ‘collection, analysis and transmission to the Commission of all information required for the implementation of the TEN-T’; (vi) ‘any technical and administrative support requested by the Commission’.

  5. This document also collects the four corridors designated by the EU, which are: Baltic Sea (linking the Baltic Sea Member States with Member States in Central and Western Europe, including the route through the North Sea/Baltic Sea canal); Western Europe (leading from Portugal and Spain via the Atlantic Arc to the North Sea and the Irish Sea); South-East Europe (connecting the Adriatic Sea to the Ionian Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean, including Cyprus); and South-West Europe (western Mediterranean, connecting Spain, France, Italy and including Malta and linking with the Motorway of the Sea of South-East Europe and including links to the Black Sea).

  6. As COM (2001a) states, considering the case of Spain and its commerce with Germany, an intermodal rail-maritime service between two countries has taken over 6 500 truck journeys per year congested road corridors. However, no comparison between the cost of this measure and its achievement has been carried out.

  7. Marco Polo identifies five potentially fundable categories: (i) Modal shifts from road to rail and waterborne systems; (ii) Catalyst actions which promote modal shifts (providing supporting services for modal shift like management systems, integrated cargo control via GPS, or common IT platforms for inter-operability between modes); (iii) Motorways of the sea between major ports (They must be innovative and intermodal, and operate between the larger European ports fully equipped to handle this traffic); (iv) Traffic avoidance (Projects which introduce new ways of avoiding or reducing road traffic, such as avoiding empty runs or improving supply chain logistics); and (v) Common learning actions (Projects related to enhanced knowledge and cooperation in inter-modal transport and logistics are a regular feature among funded projects).

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Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Javier Campos and Lourdes Trujillo for their valuable comments and remarks, as well as to the MEL editors for their input in improving earlier versions of the paper. The usual disclaimer applies.

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  1. Economics of Infrastructure and Transport Research (EIT), University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Las Palmas, Spain

    Ancor Suárez-Alemán

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Suárez-Alemán, A. Short sea shipping in today’s Europe: A critical review of maritime transport policy. Marit Econ Logist 18, 331–351 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/mel.2015.10

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