The shipper’s perspective on distance and time and the operator (intermodal goods transport) response

Abstract

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