European Transport / Trasporti Europei (2004) 25-26/VIII

In any service market, the price/quality relationship is of main importance. In the container terminal handling market, quality is important in attracting and retaining customers. Meeting customer needs and delivering high quality for low costs are critical factors for terminals to be successful. Container transport companies are interested in speed and reliability. The time a ship or barge stays in a port must be minimised, and, therefore, the handling of containers must be executed in a fast and reliable way. The operations at the terminal, after the handling of the containers on and off the ship, must be reliable as well. Quantitative information on container terminal quality is hard to obtain. Container terminals are monitoring their quality levels, but the results are not publicly available. Therefore, a literature survey forms the main input for this paper combined with interviews with terminal operators. The aim of this paper is to offer an operational approach for the measurement of the quality of container terminal services. The central research question is; ‘Which are critical performance conditions in terms of quality for container terminals?’ For the container terminal sector in Europe, ‘reliability’ is now the number 1 quality aspect in their transport services (including container terminal handling). Quality levels must meet high standards set by container carriers. Costs, incurred by better quality performance cannot be recovered through higher rates. ‘Reliability’, in terms of meeting container carriers’ demand, is thus a critical performance condition for maritime container terminals. An external performance improvement characteristic might be ‘flexibility’. Deep-sea ship arrivals are no easy planning task, as weather influences and other problematic developments make the terminal operator’s task more difficult. Through strict contracts, all risks of delays and terminal berth congestion are passed onto the terminal operator. This makes ‘flexibility’ a critical performance condition. A critical performance condition for continental terminal operators is a ‘total service’.

This paper is about distance and time in alternative bundling networks and roundtrip models. First the relevance of transport costs and time for customers of intermodal transport is reviewed. Then the paper focuses on vehicle roundtrip design in European intermodal rail networks and the perspectives to accelerate roundtrip speed. Acceleration often implies an increase of service frequency. As transport volumes often will not justify higher frequencies, the introduction of so-called complex bundling (e.g. hub-and-spoke or line services) may be an outcome. Complex bundling allows applying a relative large vehicle scale, despite of restricted flow sizes. This cost advantage is likely to overrule the cost disadvantage of longer routes in complex bundling networks. An important indication for this fact is a comparison of total network distances and times. The last part of the paper compares the distances and times of about 150 networks (different bundling concepts and network geometries). It shows that the additional length of routes of complex bundling networks is always overruled by the distance and time impact of a lower number of connections between begin- and end terminals in complex bundling networks

The introduction of the container revolutionised maritime trade and shipping. Since 1956 container vessels have evolved from converted tankers and cargo ships, via full cellular container ships that could navigate the Panama Canal, to post-Panamax vessels with a capacity of approx. 8500 TEU (Twenty foot Equivalent Unit). Even bigger container ships (9600 TEU) are to be delivered soon. However, current technical and physical constraints such as propulsion and port limitations pose restrictions to further growth. Moreover, the diminishing economies of scale in ship costs are offset by the increase of other costs involved (e.g. port fees, terminal handling charges). Nevertheless, empirical research shows that the concept of mega container vessels is appealing and that, if available, most shipping lines will deploy such ships. So, the next generation container ships will probably consist of Suez-max vessels (up to 12,500 TEU) with twin propulsion systems. Albeit feasible from a technical point of view the ultimate 18,000 TEU container ship i.e. Mallaca-max has too many limitations to become popular.

Globalization and European integration increase the claim for better quality in freight transport and logistics services. The paper focuses on the evaluation of different quality attributes of transport services in a significant segment in the Swiss freight market. The paper is based on conjoint analysis, generated by discrete binary choices between alternatives of hypothetical transport services, described by a combination of four attributes articulated on different levels. The estimated results confirm the high importance of punctuality and avoidance of damages. It could also show the statistically significant relation of the declining value of time with increasing distance.

In this paper we present preliminary evidence from a pilot study carried out with the primary objective of testing the validity of adaptive conjoint data collecting methods in analysing operators’ preferences when redirecting current on-land transport services to a hypothetical maritime ro-ro service alternative. The analysis has focussed on a sample of freight forwarders. Through a combination of Revealed Preferences and Adaptive Stated Preference Experiments we have constructed a database of their preferences’ toward the maritime ro-ro alternative using a set of transport service attributes: price, reliability, frequency, transit time, etc. We have estimated the relevant parameters through a Tobit model and have been able to calculate relative trade-off values among the significant attributes. The resulting ranking highlights the relative importance of reliability and frequency in the decision to switch to maritime services.

This paper shows that, when modelling freight demand, taking into consideration the presence of attribute cutoffs is important and has relevant repercussions on the estimates of service attributes coefficients. In this paper we focus on mode choice models for freight transport demand in the Marche region in Italy. Specific reference is paid to furniture and metallurgic productive sectors given their relevance for the region and their potential vocation for intermodal transport. Preference elicitation is done using choice based conjoint analysis. The study shows that there is a structural difference among the two sectors and that they have heterogeneous preferences.

During recent years, freight transport has been experiencing an enormous growth, affecting in particular the road transport. In Italy as well as in most developed countries, this has called for appropriate policies aimed at a modal switch. A notable role in this context could be played by intermodal transport. This paper supplies a new transport attributes’ evaluation, estimating the possibility that firms rely on intermodal transport rather than on road transport. Consistently, the transport mode is threaded as a choice attribute. Differently from other studies (see for example Matear and Gray, 1993 and Lu, 2000), the modelling framework introduces attribute cut-offs (Swait, 2001), in order to account for a two-stage decision process. The dataset used for this study is the result of 30 interviews, which have been realised in the Italian region of Friuli Venezia Giulia. Results show that the transport mode does not represent a discriminatory choice variable, while attributes related to the quality level of the service (e.g. damages and losses) are as important as cost attributes.

In this paper the multi actor, multi criteria analysis method or in short the MAMCA method is presented for the evaluation of transport project. In this method stakeholders are explicitly taken into account which is very important in the freight transport sector. Starting from an overview of evaluation methods, the paper comes to the integrated MAMCA approach. Several applications of this method are discussed.

Transport of empty containers, which arises from the need to reposition containers, is an expensive business. This holds in particular for shipping lines, who are usually responsible for container repositioning and have to bear these container management costs. Shipping lines are known to follow various strategies to reduce these costs of empty transport as much as they can. A rather unfamiliar, but interesting option to save costs is the possibility to fold empty containers. This could save transport costs, but also transhipment and storage costs. Using foldable containers could therefore be commercially attractive, provided that foldable containers can fulfil the technical and logistical conditions demanded by the users. Despite their potential benefits however, there seems to be a reluctance to use these containers. In this paper we analyse this reluctance and we discuss the important role container lessors could play in initiating the use of foldable containers. The special relationship between shipping lines and container lessors appears to be of particular importance and is a key to pave the way for using foldable containers.