The “State Transport Policy for 2006-2025” outlines the directions for the development of intermodal transport and the conditions that must be met for its efficiency. This document prioritizes the clarification of state aid and the introduction of legal and tax incentives, including the creation of a network of terminals and logistics centers. The “Infrastructure and Environment Operational Programme” provides for measure 7.4, “Development of intermodal transport,” for which 111.3 million euros have been allocated. Actions to increase the share of intermodal transport are also announced in the “Strategy for the development of seaports until 2015” and in the “Master plan for rail transport until 2030”.
In 2007, intermodal transport accounted for 2.4% of the total mass transported in Poland (rail transport) and increased by 19.4% in terms of mass transported compared to 2006. For comparison, in the old EU-15 countries, this share averages 10-15%. As can be seen, intermodal transport in Poland is much less developed than in other member states. In 2003, the containerization rate in Polish ports was 5.79%, and three years later it was already 8.76%. For comparison, in 2006 it was 15.31% in Portugal, 24.96% in Spain, and 15.56% in Italy. The launch of the Deepwater Container Terminal Gdańsk in 2007 was enough for this indicator in Polish ports to rise to almost 11%. It is also worth recalling that only the DCT Gdańsk in the southern part of the Baltic Sea can accommodate ships with a draft of up to 15 meters (i.e., fully loaded container ships of about 6,500 TEU) and can therefore serve as a transshipment port for Russia, Lithuania, or Latvia.
An insufficient number of terminals and a lack of modern equipment make this transport much more expensive in Poland than in other countries, and in the deteriorating economic situation of carriers (both road and rail, with a decline in maritime transport), its already low share in transport may even decrease in the years 2009-2010.
Successive Polish governments have declared that they are committed to increasing the share of intermodal transport in freight, and the Marco Polo Programme was associated with great opportunities for EU support for market activities and the state budget. Unfortunately, for many reasons, there is currently only one project involving a Polish rail carrier (Polzug Polska) called TRIANGLE and one project called NETHPOLA, utilizing the Gdynia/Gdańsk port. The POLITE RAIL CORRIDOR project, submitted in the 2008 call with the participation of PKP CARGO SA, was withdrawn from negotiations.
The results of the 2008 project call (a decrease in the total modal shift planned in the projects), as well as the 2007 results, following an external analysis of the first Marco Polo Programme commissioned by the European Commission (it is estimated that only 64% of the target will be achieved), show that the Programme in its current form will not achieve the goal of avoiding or shifting the expected total increase in road freight traffic (assumed in Regulation 1692/2006). Moreover, the new actions introduced by this regulation (Marco Polo II), namely motorways of the sea and traffic avoidance, have attracted very little interest (only 9% of projects in 2007 and 4% in 2008 in total). In this situation, the European Commission has proposed changes consisting of:
1. increasing the participation of small enterprises in the Programme by allowing projects to be submitted by individual enterprises (and not only consortia of at least two enterprises from at least two member states), while maintaining the condition that the actions covered by the project will have an international character;
2. changing project eligibility thresholds (changing the monetary eligibility criterion to a criterion expressed in tkm, which will allow for comparable thresholds for all actions, lowering eligibility thresholds for actions related to modal shift for inland waterway transport, and abolishing the 10% threshold for actions related to traffic avoidance);
3. increasing funding intensity by:
– introducing the possibility of including the weight of transport units in the calculation of actions related to modal shift,
– increasing financial outlays from 1 euro to 2 euros for every 500 tkm of cargo shifted,
– the possibility of extending the duration of projects (in exceptional cases by 6 months, and for education-related actions by 26 months),
4. simplifying administrative procedures (including additional infrastructure costs in the eligible costs of projects up to 10% of the total eligible costs of projects, establishing uniform rules for the procedures for submitting and selecting actions under the Programme for its entire duration, instead of setting new rules annually);
5. ensuring the consistency of the Programme with other EU transport policies (specifying the link between trans-European networks and actions related to motorways of the sea, referring to the external costs of transport during the selection of projects by the Commission).
It is assumed that these actions at the national and community level will contribute to the implementation of the declared Polish and European transport policy in the field of intermodal transport.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 2/2009.