Logistics services constitute a set of mutually complementary services, among which the basic ones include activities related to movement and warehousing (transport including special transport, short- and long-term storage, packaging, handling of returnable packaging, waste disposal, consolidation and packaging of deliveries, implementation of Just in Time systems in the sphere of production and trade, full supply service, independent distribution management).
Thus, an essential element of logistics services is transport. And although one can recently encounter attempts to underestimate or marginalize the importance of transport in logistics, economic practice, in which companies incur high transport costs, acutely feel the losses resulting from the unreliability of transport services (both tangible and intangible) or maintain expensive warehouse space to protect against potential losses of this type, proves that without efficient, reliable transport, logistics services will be incomplete or very expensive. Research conducted at different times and in different countries shows that transport costs account for about 30-50% of total logistics costs, which means that underestimating this element of logistics services can significantly affect their economic attractiveness.
Transport infrastructure, as the basis for the functioning of transport and a component of logistics processes, should ensure the efficiency of the flow of material goods, understood primarily as the reliability of deliveries, and the minimization of the costs of this flow.
The low quality of transport services is often associated with the mismatch of infrastructure to needs: the size and structure of transport, transport technology, and the requirements of modern rolling stock. In Poland, the problem of infrastructure mismatch to the requirements associated with the need to provide modern logistics services occurs in basically all branches of transport, but due to the large and constantly growing role of road transport in freight transport and the trend in Europe for the development of combined rail-road transport, problems related to the mismatch of road infrastructure to European standards are particularly strongly felt in various sectors of the economy and seriously hinder the development of logistics services, contributing to an increase in their costs.
Roads in Poland, mostly built or modernized in the 1970s, were adapted to the traffic of that time and the technical standards in force then. Their pavement structure was designed for a 20-year service life assuming a specific traffic index.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 2/2003.