European Transport Commissioner Violeta Bulc has decided to devote 2018 to multimodal transport and, as part of the various initiatives prepared on this subject, has had a study drawn up comparing the social and environmental costs of the various modes of transport (road, rail, sea and air) with the tax burden on these. As was to be expected, road transport has been shown to generate the highest external costs, followed by waterborne transport and rail transport, with a difference between diesel and electric traction.
Since the tax burden is not distributed equally evenly across the different modes of transport, it was decided to revise the 1992 Combined Transport Directive with the Proposal for a Directive COM(2017)648, in order to further increase the internalization of external costs associated with less efficient modes of transport and thus balance the cost-benefit ratio for users and citizens.
Multimodal transport will therefore benefit from incentive and simplification measures for combined transport, which do not impose obligations on operators but rather aim to provide a favourable framework for more efficient modes of transport at European level. This clearly implies the need for action on the harmonization of authorization procedures, on common ICT tools for the management and traceability of shipments and on a further increase in the internalization of road transport costs. For example, the difficulty of tracking the load alone accounts for 3% of the increase in intermodal transport costs compared to all road costs, while 11% of the extra costs are due to the lack of Community harmonization of procedures and documents.