Sustainable freight transport in South Africa:Domestic intermodal solutions

Jan H Havenga,Pieter F Fourie,Anneke De Bod,Zane Simpson

doi:10.4102/jtscm.v5i1.26

Abstract

Due to the rapid deregulation of freight transport in South Africa two decades ago, and low historical investment in rail (with resultant poor service delivery), an integrated alternative to road and rail competition was never developed. High national freight logistics costs, significant road infrastructure challenges and environmental impact concerns of a road-dominated freight transport market have, however, fuelled renewed interest in intermodal transport solutions. In this article, a high-level business case for domestic intermodal solutions in South Africa is presented. The results demonstrate that building three intermodal terminals to connect the three major industrial hubs (i.e. Gauteng, Durban and Cape Town) through an intermodal solution could reduce transport costs (including externalities) for the identified 11.5 million tons of intermodalfriendly freight flows on the Cape and Natal corridors by 42% (including externalities).

Highlights

Domestic intermodal solutions have been proposed as a key element to address South Africa’s freight logistics challenges with specific reference to improving economies of density and size, increasing access for marginalised rural economies and sustainably lowering logistics costs (DoT, 1998, 2005; CSIR, Imperial Logistics and University of Stellenbosch, 2009; Van Eeden and Havenga, 2010).Intermodal services in South Africa are, still commonly understood to denote the movement of import and export containers – the concept of ‘domestic’ intermodal services does not really exist
Peetermans and Sellnick (2010) confirm Journal of Transport and Supply Chain Management | November 2011 that in Europe there is an increasing trend towards companies delivering both domestic and international services, with the number of companies providing both services increasing from 45% to 57% of total intermodal service providers between 2005 and 2009, and their TEU weighted market share increasing from 68% to 80%
An initial approach to determining the target market for domestic intermodal solutions in South Africa was proposed by Van Eeden and Havenga (2010), identifying intermodalfriendly flows based on uniform, dense freight flows on long-distance corridors, derived from South Africa’s national freight flow model (Havenga, 2007)

Summary

Introduction

The development of intermodal technology has kept pace with the demands of shipping companies, but developments in domestic intermodal services have been neglected. According to De Witt and Clinger (1999), domestic intermodal services are ‘a significant and critical factor in the execution of supply chains’. Journal of Transport and Supply Chain Management | November 2011 that in Europe there is an increasing trend towards companies delivering both domestic and international services, with the number of companies providing both services increasing from 45% to 57% of total intermodal service providers between 2005 and 2009, and their TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit) weighted market share increasing from 68% to 80%. Intermodal operators providing only domestic services have on average grown their businesses; the opposite occurred with companies providing only cross-border intermodal services

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion