ChemLog: Strengthening the Danube Waterway as an Alternative Transport Mode in Austria: An empirical study aiming at examining both actual and perspective performance of the Danube Waterway

Recently, the EU strategy for the Danube region has emphasised its relevance for Europe and defined objectives to be reached within the next decade. Among others, transportation should be strengthened on the Danube waterway in order to increase transport volumes by 20 percent by 2020. Plenty of projects related to improvement of the Danube waterway have been conducted, especially by via donau, the Austrian institution in charge of managing and developing the Danube waterway. In alignment with the Central Europe Project ChemLog, the Logistikum Steyr placed its focus on this transport mode, too. Insights into some interesting questions have been provided by means of a preceding desktop study as well as a subsequent empirical study. In total, 24 companies as well as other organizations have provided their support to conduct this study in hand. Basically, questions related to current transport flows as well as current challenges on the one hand and future improvement measures and particularly the potential for shifting transport volumes towards the Danube waterway on the other hand were examined. The results imply that there is a potential for shifting transport volumes, which is directly linked to certain improvement measures, e.g. removing nautical bottlenecks. As a conclusion, these days the situation might refer to the well-known chicken-and-egg problem: Companies expect well-developed infrastructure in order to shift transport volumes but logistics service providers or infrastructure operators are not willing to provide services and/or infrastructure desired unless there are not sufficient transport volumes to be shifted by companies. Therefore, this study aims at merging these supplying and demanding sides in order to establish cooperation and, of course, shift transport volumes from road towards the Danube waterway in the near future.