Freight: why trains haven’t (yet) replaced lorries

Every­one agrees on the prin­ciple. Trans­port­ing our goods by train rather than in lor­ries is a lever to be used for the envir­on­ment­al trans­ition. In addi­tion to redu­cing CO₂ emis­sions, it reduces road traffic, con­ges­tion and space con­sump­tion, road acci­dents and dam­age to road infrastructure.

And yet, for dec­ades now, there has been a suc­ces­sion of plans to revive rail freight, and their tar­gets have been missed with a stable share of rail freight, but this has not pre­ven­ted the announce­ment of object­ives that are increas­ingly ambi­tious. The latest tar­get set in 2021 is to double the mod­al share of rail freight by 2030. Sev­er­al ques­tions arise. Where do past fail­ures come from? Is it likely to work this time? What should be integ­rated into pub­lic think­ing and policies?

In France, rail freight trans­port star­ted about two cen­tur­ies ago. The first line in France was opened in 1827 and was ini­tially designed to trans­port coal between Saint-Étienne and Andrézieux, with wag­ons pulled by horses or des­cend­ing the slope by grav­ity. At that time, road trans­port dom­in­ated, ahead of river trans­port. Then rail trans­port grew enorm­ously, account­ing for almost 80% of traffic in France at the begin­ning of the 20^th Cen­tury, releg­at­ing road traffic to only 10% of the mod­al share¹. 

Since the mid-2000s, road trans­port has accoun­ted for 88% of freight flows in France, while rail has stag­nated at 10% of traffic, leav­ing a small 2% for river freight².

Many attempts have been made to revive the rail­ways. For example, in 2000, the SNCF aimed to double rail traffic by 2010³. The res­ult? Between 2000 and 2010, rail freight traffic was… divided by 2. There are many reas­ons to explain the decline of rail and the fail­ures of past mod­al shift policies: the lack of invest­ment in infra­struc­ture, insuf­fi­cient qual­ity of ser­vice⁴, the gradu­al aban­don­ment of cer­tain activ­it­ies (such as single wag­on­loads), the de-indus­tri­al­isa­tion of France, and the lack of dynam­ism of French ports (and their poor rail con­nec­tions)⁵.

But the reas­ons are also to be found in the incred­ible growth of road trans­port. The entire organ­isa­tion of logist­ics and the eco­nomy has been built around heavy goods vehicles. Thus, if the mod­al share of rail has fallen from around 60% to 10% since 1960, it is cer­tainly because rail traffic has fallen by 37%, but also and above all because total demand has increased 3.6 times over the peri­od, driv­en by an approx­im­ately ten­fold increase in road traffic.

This has releg­ated rail freight to its main area of rel­ev­ance: mass trans­port, gen­er­ally over long dis­tances and for large volumes, for which road trans­port is becom­ing less effi­cient and more expens­ive. This is reflec­ted in the dynam­ism of com­bined road-rail trans­port in recent years, with the open­ing of sev­er­al rail high­ways, allow­ing semi-trail­ers to cross France on adap­ted trains⁶.

France is also a poor per­former com­pared to its European neigh­bours, show­ing the room for man­oeuvre that exists in France. The mod­al share of rail is almost twice as high on aver­age in the EU or in neigh­bour­ing Ger­many (both at 18%). And the decline in rail traffic in France over the last few dec­ades con­trasts with more dynam­ic devel­op­ments in oth­er European coun­tries⁷.

In a plan to revive rail freight, the most obvi­ous aim is to improve the sup­ply of rail freight. The 2021 plan is thus based on 72 meas­ures, grouped into three areas: mak­ing rail freight an attract­ive, reli­able, and com­pet­it­ive mode of trans­port; act­ing on all the growth poten­tial of rail freight; and sup­port­ing the mod­ern­isa­tion and devel­op­ment of the net­work⁸.

While essen­tial (and without even going into the details and pos­sible short­com­ings here⁹), this sup­port for rail is and will be insuf­fi­cient to achieve the object­ives, giv­en that too little account is taken of the fol­low­ing three elements.

The first ele­ment is to know what the evol­u­tion of total demand for freight trans­port will be by 2030, and thus what increase in rail traffic will be neces­sary to achieve a doub­ling of the mod­al share.

This pro­jec­tion is not clearly defined in the recov­ery plan, but the fig­ures men­tioned seem to fore­see an increase close to +10% in total demand by 2030. In such a con­text, rail traffic would have to increase by 120% to double its mod­al share. Rail would thus absorb the increase in freight traffic, without really redu­cing road traffic.

On the con­trary, in a scen­ario of strong sobri­ety on an eco­nomy-wide scale, trans­port demand could be reduced by 20% by 2030¹⁰. In this case, it would be “suf­fi­cient” to increase rail traffic by 60% (an increase half that of the pre­vi­ous case!) to double the mod­al share of rail. And in this case, road trans­port traffic would fall by 30%, under the dual effect of the fall in total demand and the increase in the rail share.

The evol­u­tion of total demand [the sub­ject of a forth­com­ing art­icle, the last in the series] is there­fore fun­da­ment­al in the siz­ing of rail traffic to achieve the object­ive. Past exper­i­ence shows that the share of rail has evolved more as a res­ult of this evol­u­tion in total demand than in rail traffic. This evol­u­tion is also fun­da­ment­al to reduce road traffic and thus have a down­ward effect on emis­sions, which is in line with the fol­low­ing point.

Anoth­er short­com­ing of this object­ive of doub­ling the mod­al share of rail is an impli­cit assump­tion that is not clearly made. If the share of rail increases by 9% to 18%, this will be at the expense of road trans­port, whose share will have to fall by 9%¹¹. To go even fur­ther, to reduce emis­sions, the object­ive is not to increase rail freight, but to reduce road traffic.

How­ever, the object­ive is nev­er presen­ted in this form, and policies are not ori­ented in this dir­ec­tion. For example, neither this plan nor oth­er policies on freight trans­port have provided for major changes in road infra­struc­ture char­ging (fol­low­ing the aban­don­ment of the eco­tax in 2013–2014), the end of the par­tial reim­burse­ment of energy taxes for road trans­port, the reduc­tion in the speed of heavy goods vehicles or even mod­al shift oblig­a­tions¹².

Today, the pre­dom­in­ance of road trans­port can nev­er­the­less be explained by undeni­able advant­ages com­pared to rail: “Roads offer flex­ib­il­ity, speed, reli­ab­il­ity, low prices, and avail­ab­il­ity of capa­city”, as the pres­id­ent of the Freight Trans­port Users’ Asso­ci­ation¹³ sum­mar­ises. In such a con­text, it is quite illus­ory to be able to reduce the share of road trans­port by 9% only by invest­ing in rail, and without dis­cour­aging the use of road transport.

In view of its ambi­tion, doub­ling the share of rail trans­port must finally be part of a wider evol­u­tion of the eco­nomy and logist­ics. First of all, it is a ques­tion of mak­ing land-use plan­ning policies con­sist­ent, while motor­way pro­jects are still under­way and logist­ics ware­houses con­tin­ue to be built on the out­skirts of towns without being con­nec­ted to the rail­ways. This main­tains and even strengthens the cur­rent depend­ence on road trans­port. The pos­sib­il­it­ies of shift­ing to rail will also depend on changes in the types of goods trans­por­ted and over what dis­tances. This raises ques­tions about indus­tri­al policy, the trans­ition of the agri-food or con­struc­tion sec­tors, which account for a large pro­por­tion of freight traffic in France¹⁴.

Finally, in view of the con­straints inher­ent in rail, the logist­ics organ­isa­tion must also change to make more use of the train. In par­tic­u­lar, it is a ques­tion of loosen­ing time con­straints, avoid­ing just-in-time and tight logist­ics chains, and instead man­aging stocks in order to mas­sify trans­port flows. This is, for example, con­trary to the cur­rent trend towards the growth of e‑commerce and rap­id deliv­ery, which are struc­tur­ally unfa­vour­able to rail and for which there is a lack of reg­u­la­tion¹⁵.

The mod­al shift object­ives have cer­tainly been too ambi­tious in rela­tion to the trans­form­a­tion efforts required to achieve them and the iner­tia that exists in freight trans­port. How­ever, break­throughs are neces­sary to achieve the decar­bon­isa­tion object­ives, jus­ti­fy­ing ambi­tious mod­al shift object­ives. Pub­lic policies have been and still are far from com­mit­ting to strong shifts, both because of insuf­fi­cient sup­port for rail trans­port, in terms of invest­ment or sup­port for activ­ity. But also, and above all, because the sup­ply (or sup­port) policy for rail is insuf­fi­cient to ser­i­ously chal­lenge the cur­rent hege­mony of road trans­port¹⁸. Yet it is almost exclus­ively with this bias that mod­al shift policy is still con­sidered in France, des­pite the fail­ures of past policies.