When the road controls the sea: a case study of Ro-Ro transport in the Mediterranean

Abstract

This paper presents, as a case study, a descriptive critique of the system of liner Ro-Ro services, sailing between some Turkish ports and the Italian port of Trieste. These Ro-Ro services were started in 1987, and have developed rapidly since 1992. In that year, the no-pro® t Turkish International Transport Association (UND) decided to independently manage a number of Ro-Ro vessels on that route. The increasing success of the service (from circa 25 000 lorries in 1993, to almost 86 000 in 1998) has caused the UND shipping companies to broaden their services, introducing new vessels and improving the organization. The UND shipping companies aim to manage the¯eet in the unbiased interests of all the haulage companies, maintaining rigid neutrality towards each one of the road hauliers. Outlining in detail a single subject for the case study is considered of general interest, since this system of maritime supply displays such singular and innovative elements (e.g. the capital coming from the road transport sector itself, transferring of lorry-drivers by plane, using of railway services) as to make it unique, at least in the European and Mediterranean shipping arena.

The role of European «ro-ro» port terminals in the automotive supply chain management

“…In spite of the fact that the European continent has a considerable number of ports, not all of them are appropriate to handle vehicles since they are goods of high added value that need specific intermodal (Bichou and Gray, 2005) ro-ro terminals (Torbianelli, 2000). Thus, the integration of ro-ro port infrastructure in the logistics channels that support vehicle industry, multiple supply chains is recommended.…”

“…There are several typical examples of intermodal transportation (Lambert et al, 1993;Torbianelli, 2000) and one of them is known as 'ro-ro' (roll-on/roll-off) because trucks or cars are driven onto and off the vessels. This paper considers ro-ro inter-modality, which is evident in port movements of new cars and vehicles (Evangelista and Morvillo, 2000), and its relationship with the outbound inventory of automotive supply chain; in special port terminals the cars are driven on or off special vessels called car carriers (Mendonça and Dias, 2007).…”

Sea-Land Interdependence in the Global Maritime Network: the Case of Australian Port Cities

“…Hinterland delineation, a longstanding issue in transport studies, recently improved but tended to ignore shipping linkages per se (Halim et al, 2016;Tiller and Thill, 2017;Zanon Moura et al, 2017;Jung et al, 2018). Most related empirical investigation of sea-land interaction remains qualitative to date (see Torbianelli, 2010). Such an approach is more developed in airline network studies such as Choi et al (2006) crossing airline networks and the Internet backbine, Matisziw and Grubesic (2010) looking at air transport flows in relation to land access, and Derudder et al (2014) combining airline flows with planar networks such as bus schedules, railways and roads in Southeast Asia.…”

A framework for use in modelling the modal choice decision making process in North West England’s Atlantic Gateway

“…Potentially the most popular approaches have been: case studies (Torbianelli, 2000), cost benefit analysis (Paixao and Marlow, 2001), SWOTH analysis (De Oses and Castells, 2008) and logit based models (Rich et al, 2009).…”