Freight transport in Europe : policy issues and future scenarios on trans-border alpine connections

This paper presents an overview of European policy on interconnected cross-border transport networks as well as of severe problems in estimatingempirically the avalanche of goods movements in the European Union (EU). In particular, it deals with the Transalpine freight transport case, whichrepresents one of the most challenging operational and policy issues of the present and future - both international (EU) and national (the Alpinecountries) - freight transport developments. The paper is organised to briefly describe the main objectives of EU transport policy, to generallyintroduce the concept of intermodal transport with particular emphasis on intermodal freight transport and to describe past, present and futuredevelopments of the Trans.Alpine inter-modal transport. Various scenarios on the future development of Trans.Alpine intermodal transport are analysed as well.