Current Situation and Optimization of Inland Waterway Infrastructure Financing

Abstract

This paper explores and summarizes the experience of financing water transport infrastructure of a number of countries with developed network of inland waterways, namely the USA, Russia and Germany. The purpose of the work is to generalize current situation and find ways of optimization of inland waterway transport infrastructure financing. The first part of the paper analyses the state of inland waterways infrastructure. The next part describes the existing financing systems. The last part examines the main problems that hamper the development of the industry and looks for possible ways to solve them.

Sustainable development of inland waterways transport: a review

“…In general, the distribution of public spending between different transport means is usually unequal; Oulfarsi (2016) argues that French infrastructure investment was 66% to road transportation while 1% to IWT. One of the most relevant problems to developing IWT is the lack of financing for infrastructure, Miloslavskaya and Plotnikova (2018) suggest the implementation of public private partnerships and user fees to meet the requirements of the state, industry, and society.…”

“…Finance challenges for IWT infrastructure have been reported since the mid-eighteenth century (Sidaway et al 1995). Since then, there is necessary to create financial frameworks and identify strategies for investment, such as public private parentships (PPP) with the participation of private and public stakeholders (Jiang et al 2018;Miloslavskaya and Plotnikova 2018;Nguyen and Nguyen 2020). These strategies Source Compiled by the authors Improve waterway network and connectivity with other transport modes Mako and Galieriková (2021), Nguyen and Nguyen (2020), Sidaway et al (1995) Integration between transport modes Vilarinho et al (2019) Financial frameworks Nguyen and Nguyen (2020) should waterways maintenance funds and capital investment for infrastructure construction (Nguyen and Nguyen 2020).…”

Impact of carrying capacity on the functioning of the railway network

“…Since the definition of throughput for this calculation is general, it does not take into account the actual operating conditions that may be encounter on the entire railway network of Russian Railways. Therefore, for example, the problems of "congestion" at the approaches to seaports lead to a critical situation in the movement of trains and the appearance of "abandoned" trains along the entire route [7]. In addition, with a decrease in traffic volumes, the nature and type of stations changes -marshalling stations are transferor to the category of divisional ones, and divisional ones -to the category of intermediate ones.…”