The freight transport sector is a low profit and high competition business and therefore has less ability to invest in research and development in the field of autonomous vehicles (AV) than the private car industry. There are already different levels of automation technologies in the transport industry, but most of these are serving niche demands and answers have yet to be found about whether it would be worthwhile to industrialise these technologies. New innovations from different fields are constantly changing the freight traffic industry but these are less disruptive than on other markets. The aim of this article is to show the current state of development of freight traffic with regards to AVs and analyse which future directions of development might be viable. The level of automation is very different in the case of different transport modes and most probably the technology will favour road transport over other, less environmentally harmful traffic modes.
The Chinese Silk Road concept is attracting more and more attention. It involves (geo)politics, economics, infrastructure and transport development. The idea of faster transport of goods overland via Central-Asia by rail between Europe and China has become very popular, but there has been little attention devoted to the fact that the possibility of direct European Union-China rail freight transport has already existed for decades. This article examines statistical data about the rail traffic between the European Union and China and seeks to provide an answer to the question, what can be the realistic future of this transport connection? Trade data suggests that despite the growth in rail freight transport, this mode will be marginal for the transport links between China and Europe
CR Express containerised rail transport between Europe and China is a flagship project of China’s “Belt and Road”. Yet operational and financial details of the project remain scarce. Due to poor governance and logistics transparency, the actual quantity of containers and goods transported is essentially unknowable. The authors doubt the efficacy of the CR Express intercontinental rail system and test its real and possible capacity throughputs. In the article they compare China public media statements with European Union statistics and reveal discrepancies between the number of trains supposedly departing China and the number of trains arriving in the European Union. This article provides numerous data sources and estimates on China–Europe rail freight traffic and demonstrates that the actual transported quantity of goods is probably lower than anticipated or reported. The article also analyses the political development of the CR Express rail freight system and China’s wider “Transport Power” policy. It concludes that while the political concept of the CR Express rail freight system is progressive, and the economic development of creating new cumulative causation systems is theoretically possible, that the evidence for actual economic use is underwhelming. This research helps European Union, Russian, and Central Asian policymakers better assess the viability of participating in the continued rollout of China’s CR Express intercontinental rail freight system. The authors warn that while the CR Express system has potential to be an economic good for Central Asian development it exposes the Eurasian economies to China's political and financial risk. For China the CR Express system fulfils only geopolitical and geoeconomic functions, and ultimately participation in the policy is of minimal utility to European Union economies.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.