The €4.8 million European project known as Dryport is examining the critical role that dryports can play in maximising the capacity and efficiency of sea ports, while also shifting traffic off the roads and on to rail or inland waterway.
The Transport Research Institute and SEStran are the Scottish partners in a multi-national European consortium. The Dryport project is looking at the development, design and effective operation of dryports that are fully integrated with the freight handling systems of the sea port facilities they support. The project also studies monitoring carbon dioxide effects and the integration of dryports into the EU’s Motorways of the Sea concept.
In recent years, inland intermodal terminals have become increasingly important in the transport chain and different kinds of integration strategies have developed to control these linkages. This development has altered the role of ports in the transport chain and led to a number of responses from the logistics industry, as well as governments, as private initiatives and public policy have sought to manage these developments in order to achieve their goals. An emerging trend in recent literature has been how to manage public and private priorities so that modal shift can be achieved (the public aim) while at the same time stimulating private investment and development strategies on the basis of profit-seeking competition.
There exists a growing literature considering the increasing importance of intermodalism, both as a policy issue regarding modal shift, and from the point of view of the increasing role of the terminal in the supply chain. This development in academic study can be seen to lead to the recent prominence of ideas such as dry ports. First the terminal rather than the port became the primary focus of study, and then the land-side activities of the port came under closer scrutiny, leading to the inevitable focus on inland terminals.
Dryports are intermodal freight transport hubs in the hinterland that represent extensions of gateway ports, and can contribute to an increasingly integrated freight network, leading to increased modal shift of freight from road to rail and sea. The overall aim is to achieve economies of scale by bundling freight flows on high capacity links to optimal locations for further distribution. While some debate continues over the terminology of inland intermodal terminals, the aim of this conference is not to prioritise one term over another but to welcome discussion utilising existing terms to highlight actual behaviour of actors in the transport chain. Therefore the focus of this conference is the relation of inland terminals (whether classed as dry ports, inland ports or inland container depots) to ports, encompassing issues of integration, collaboration, competition and associated strategies of hinterland access.
Research on inland terminals has increased over the last decade, and builds on wider research activity in related areas such as intermodality, hinterland development and terminal design and operation. All of these themes are being explored in current research and leading researchers in these fields will present the latest research on how the dry port concept has been used to advance these areas of knowledge.