INNOVATIVE TRANSPORT:The world's largest inland harbour, Duisport in Germany, has become one of Europe's leading logistics hubs
A STIFF BREEZE blows through the port in Duisburg that, at first glance, looks like any other harbour around the world. Huge cranes rise overhead, container ships glide by and colourful, empty containers are stacked, ready for collection beside the glittering water.
The only difference is that we are 200km from the coast, on the banks of the River Rhine. Duisport is the world’s largest inland harbour which, 300 years after it was created, has become one of Europe’s leading logistics hubs. Since its days serving heavy industry, the port has completed a remarkable transformation and now offers customers complete logistics solutions to store and move their goods around Europe – independently of the road network.
Duisport’s integrated model for innovation in transport and logistics – and how to create more models like it – was high on the agenda of last month’s World Transport Forum in Leipzig.
Despite its landlocked location, the western city of Duisburg, near Düsseldorf, has had a port since 1716. The port came into its own during the 19th-century industrial revolution that turned the Rhine-Ruhr region into one huge, smoking factory, fuelled by coal and steel.
Because of its strategic importance, the harbour was heavily bombed in the second World War but it rose again from the ruins to help drive the West German economic miracle in the 1950s and 1960s.
Where once steel was exported, the 1970s brought imports of oil, a business that kept the port in business but changed the face of the Ruhr forever, and undermined the region’s coal and steel foundations.
By the 1980s the port was, like the entire Ruhr region, struggling for survival, and it was granted subsidies worth €500 million to rebuild and refocus.
A new north-south train axis was constructed, complete with freight train station, and the first transport and courier companies were attracted. Old manufacturing facilities were transformed into warehouses and further space was created on reclaimed land after filling in disused areas of the port.
The final stage of the transformation, to attract international customers, was the creation of the “Logport” logistic services company.
Today the port is booming with numbers that speak for themselves: over 110 million tonnes of cargo pass through Duisport annually, generating revenue of €145 million for the facility, a joint shareholding of Duisburg city and the federal and state governments.
More than 300 companies specialised in transportation and logistics have settled here, including DHL, NYK and Wincanton, in some 1.6 million m2 of warehouse space.
That in turn has created over 36,000 jobs in the region dependent on the port, the most important water hub linking the harbours of Rotterdam and Hamburg. As well as reaching faraway markets, companies located here know that they have 30 million potential customers living and working on their doorstep.
The transformation into Duisport saw the creation of three main business units: one provides the infrastructure, the second offers logistics services and the third, packing logistics.
Duisport executives say it was this leap from infrastructure operator to service provider that has been crucial in winning customers, by improving the attractiveness of water and rail transportation.
“Companies were saying to us ‘we don’t want to use the roads’,” said Jan Boruszewski, head of Duisport corporate development. “Now we are providing them with a real, integrated alternative.”
For years, companies wishing to move their deliveries off the roads have backed away from change because of the logistics headache involved. Few companies are able to afford staff dedicated to moving goods from factories to trains and to the final destination. Even the best will in the world cannot overcome the time-consuming and expensive business of moving goods from factory to truck to train or ship and back to truck again for final delivery.
Duisport is happy to fill the gap with a logistics system that, for example, eliminates the need for a customer to fill an entire train with their own goods. Instead Duisport staff source other companies travelling the same route by rail and solves capacity problems.
The port company offer companies some 350 scheduled freight train links to over 80 destinations around Europe, from Munich to Warsaw and Turin to Budapest. The result: some 50,000 containers shifted annually from road to rail.
“While logistics might not need as many people as the old coal and steel industries, it offers huge employment potential for the region,” said Boruszewski. “The transformation of the region is well under way and, though cliches about the Ruhr smokestacks and pollution persist, people here are used to knuckling down and aren’t afraid of hard work.”
Jack Short knows the hard work involved in transport and logistics. For nearly a decade, the cricket-loving Corkman has been secretary general of the International Transport Forum, a strategic think tank for the transport sector affiliated with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Last month he invited transport ministers from the organisation’s 50 member states as well as industry decision-makers to the forum’s annual Leipzig think-in, an event he hopes will become the “Davos of the transport world”.
From electric cars to volcanic ash, the theme of transport – or the lack thereof – that has dominated the headlines of late and ensured a lively discussion on closer international co-operation.
“The ash cloud has shown us quite clearly how vulnerable we are, how much we take transport for granted and how crazy it makes us when it doesn’t work,” he said.
“It shows us as well how, when one mode of transport gives us trouble, we’re not good at getting the other modes to work.”
He presented the agency’s annual transport forum showing that the economic crisis has caused a 20 per cent drop in freight transport while air is the fastest growing mode of transport, with volumes set to triple between now and 2050.
Speakers from the airline industry, headed by Lufthansa chief executive Wolfgang Mayrhuber, vented their frustration at recent air space regulation measures to the assembled transport ministers. Organisers contemplated inviting Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary but decided against it because, as one source put it, “governments are scared of him”.
For Short, discussion is urgently needed on what he describes as the “asymmetry” in how, after the Icelandic volcano eruption, European authorities assess airspace risk.
“We closed our airspace on a risk but could not open against until we were certain,” he said. “We need to see how we can make risk assessments more reliable.”
Looking to the future, Short says world leaders need to have a shopping list of worrying transport trends: western European investment in transportation infrastructure is dropping while transport CO2 emissions continue to rise, despite a brief drop thanks to the recession.
“We are still nowhere near solving the climate change problem with no clear plan to reduce emissions that are set to double in the next 30 years,” he said. “We have no overreaching project just bits of deals on things like electric cars.”
The momentum building in Europe around the electric car was clear earlier this month when Germany announced a €2 billion investment fund for research into electric cars and other alternatives to traditional engines.
“Finally we’re seeing a huge consumer curiosity and our task now is to follow through with products that satisfy that curiosity,” said Dr Andreas Scheuer, German state secretary for transport.
Short welcomes the growing number of electric car strategy plans springing up around Europe, including Ireland’s plan to have 250,000 electric cars on the road by 2020. But he urges caution, too.
“Countries are very optimistic about how things will go,” he says. “But we still have issues of car range and battery weight, and we cannot afford breakdowns, to see electric cars abandoned on the roadside.”
