A cry of alarm is raised from the productive world: the freight transport system (road, rail, sea) is collapsing. For businesses, especially those who export, shipping goods is becoming complicated. But essential supplies of raw materials and semi-finished products for the Italian processing industry are also at risk.
It is not just a question of price, although in Italy road freight rates have risen by 20-30% in the last six months and sea freight rates have skyrocketed in the last year. Among the most serious consequences of the exit from the pandemic, with the resumption of traffic, there are the increase in delays that are accumulating in the logistics chain and the congestion of road and rail networks in most of Europe, starting with Germany. . In seaports there are delays in the departures and arrivals of containers traveling on intercontinental routes. Before the pandemic, 20% of goods shipped by sea were delayed, in recent months this percentage has reached 70%.
Tilt roads and railways
Land transport suffers greatly. At the moment, the shipment of goods is in crisis because the infrastructure system, road and railways, is clearly inadequate to meet the demand for transport, which grows at a rate of around 3% every year. Congestion has become the norm. And not only in Italy. Everywhere in Europe there are bottlenecks, hitches, limitations along roads and railways, which cause severe obstacles to the circulation of vehicles (trucks, trains) and significant delays in the delivery times of goods. In addition, new construction sites are announced.
The next, for example, will be months of passion along the German railway network, for a series of works destined to upset the north-south traffic route: in some days only 50% of the trains will be able to circulate. An emergency that will affect the Italian trains bound for Germany and vice versa. In the road sector, the most sensational case concerns the Austrian side of the Brenner motorway, where the modernization works of a bridge will require the narrowing to a single lane, starting from 2024 and up to the end of 2025, for a long stretch. It is easy to foresee heavy consequences on traffic, given that it is a corridor already at the limit of capacity. But above all it is the most important corridor for guaranteeing the exchange of goods between Italy and Europe, equal to 170 billion euros per year.
Trucking in difficulty
A picture that scares the productive world. Since in Italy most of the goods (over 80%) travel by road and our main commercial partners remain Germany and France, markets that require crossing Alpine passes to be reached, the role of road transport is crucial. . Here the situation is paradoxical. Thomas Baumgartner, a South Tyrolean logistics entrepreneur, explains: he is president of Fercam and Anita, the Confindustria association that represents the transport and logistics companies active in Italy and in Europe.