Abstract
The European Union (EU) is confronted with too low a share of inland rail freight transport. The implementation of two-sided online exchanges for rail-road freight transport could increase this share. However, such exchanges focusing on the EU market are mainly designed for single modes of transport. Their matching of supply and demand for multimodal services, especially including rail, is still in its infancy. This paper applies a maturity growth framework to speed up the implementation of such multimodal online exchanges. The framework integrates insights from industrial organization theory, platform economy theory, and maturity growth theory. Online exchanges, summarized in a new taxonomy, are compared to study their practices on matching supply with demand on the exchange, especially for multimodal services. Data is collected from case studies, exchange websites and semi-structured interviews. The analysis shows the emergence of new market actors and business models, including digital freight forwarders. These offer a variety of transport mode solutions for EU inland and EU related global freight transport. Maturity in matching supply and demand appears to result from clear objectives to provide benefits to the exchange participants, notably by digitizing the data for transaction completion and providing real time support for operational issues. In this context of rising online exchanges, especially in road and global multimodal transport (air, ocean, and road), the competition to capture a fragmented freight market seems to steadily increase. A similar maturity analysis of exchanges could not be found.
Highlights
Rail freight transport in the European Union (EU)-28 countries has been facing challenges in increasing its market share in terms of transport volume since 2011 (18.7% in 2011, 18.0% in 2018 in EU inland freight transport) [1]
Since the previously studied online exchanges do not appear to yet solve key challenges of organizing multimodal freight transport, this paper explores how online exchanges in other freight transportation industries to bring the matching of supply and demand of multimodal services to a higher level of performance
The analysis enables us to learn lessons for designing multimodal online exchange using rail and road that are effective in improving the share of rail freight in the EU
Summary
Rail freight transport in the EU-28 countries has been facing challenges in increasing its market share in terms of transport volume since 2011 (18.7% in 2011, 18.0% in 2018 in EU inland freight transport) [1] This conflicts with the European Union (EU) white paper policy goals to shift 30% of the long-distance road freight transport beyond 300 km to multimodal transport by 2030 and more than 50% by 2050. A special subset of digital platforms concerns two-sided multimodal online exchanges, linking service providers at one side (supply) with service consumers at the other side (demand). Such exchanges in other network industries typically facilitate the efficient and smooth matching of supply of and demand for the industries’ services. Lessons learned from network industries inside and outside the freight transport sector can be helpful in conceptualizing and implementing multimodal online freight transport exchanges (called FTE from here on) for contributing to a sustainable growth of rail transport by integrating it with road transport
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