For logistics and transport operators, as well as for European industry, access to reliable, competitive, and predictable freight services by railway, inland waterways, and short sea shipping largely depends on a well-functioning Combined Transport system.
Combined Transport (CT) is a key contributor to achieving the EU Green Deal’s ambition, which targets the reduction of transport greenhouse gas emissions by 90% until 2050. Moreover, CT plays a crucial role in improving energy efficiency, reducing road congestion, and tackling driver shortages.
Shifting freight from unimodal road freight transport to include rail, inland waterways, or short sea shipping is not a plug-and-play exercise. Cargo owners and distributors will use CT more widely only if it is reliable, cost-competitive, and operationally straightforward, supported by adequate infrastructure, sufficient capacity, and end-to-end digital information flows.
The current Combined Transport Directive is based on outdated 1990s definitions, paperbased enforcement mechanisms, and nationally fragmented incentive schemes. This results in ambiguous eligibility criteria, uneven application, and inconsistent enforcement practices across Member States, ultimately emerging as a growing misalignment with today’s Single Market realities, digital logistics practices, and various EU policy objectives. In practice, this leads to legal uncertainty for cross border operations, a persistent uneven playing field between road only and multimodal freight transport solutions, as well as administrative complexity that discourages uptake, in particular by SMEs.
A fit-for-future framework for intermodal transport is essential to enable seamless, efficient, and sustainable transport, ensuring that CT can fully deliver on its potential.
The amendment of the Combined Transport Directive is therefore key to improving the competitiveness of intermodal and combined transport and to strengthening the resilience of European industrial supply and distribution networks.
For more information and for the industry’s recommendations, please see here.