Modes of Freight

#Freight Modes #Introduction

Road freight is easily spotted in our daily life. As discussed in What is Road Freight, road freight can make up a dominating fraction of freight transportation in some countries such as Malta. However, other modes of transportation are also key to the material flow.

Characteristics of the Transportation Modes

	Road Freight	Rail Freight	Water Ways	Ocean Freight	Air Freight
Speed	Fast	Fast	Slow	Slow	Fast
Capacity	Small	Large	Large	Large	Small
Price	Low	Low	Low	Low	High
Environmental Impact	High	Low	Low	Low	High
Coverage	High	Low	Low	Low	Low

Each mode has its own use cases. In the real world, the modes are competing with each other in many situations.

Speed

Different countries has different speed limits for freight vehicles. In Europe, the general speed limit is around 80km/h on expressways.¹ ² For completeness, we also visualized the data table on Wikipedia in topics: speed limits.

The rail freight speed is comparable to road freight speeds (around 80km/h).³ However, European court of auditors found that the speed of freight trains are actually quite slow on some international routes (18 km/h) as well as some countries (20-30 km/h).⁴ Ocean container ships cruise at the speed of 30–46 km/h.⁵ Cargo aircrafts cruise at the speed of 500-900 km/h. ⁶

However, the speed of the vehicles doesn’t necessarily determine the time for the cargo from door to door. Rail freight, ocean freight and air freight relies on the locations of ports and thus are mostly not door to door services. Additional transitions are requires for the cargo to reach from pickup locations to drop off locations.

Coverage

In principle, freight trucks can go whereever the road is covered if we ignore the regulations. Ocean freight only connects ports. In 2019, 2397 ports in EU reported nonzero cargo volumes.⁷ Air freight connects airports. In Q4 of 2019, there are 272 airports reported nonzero freight and mail volumes in all the 28 countries of EU.⁸

References

Planted: 0001-01-01 by L M;