Rail-Road Interconnectivity in the Alpine Freight Transport. Bottlenecks and Policies from an Austrian-Italian Perspective

Trans-Alpine freight transport suffers because of severe road congestion due to
under-capacity of roads and causes considerable environmental damages in the
transit countries, particularly in Austria and Switzerland, but also in Italy. The
obvious strategy of shifting trans-Alpine flows from road to rail is hampered by
several factors such as Jack of coordination among the various national railway
companies, lack of provision of competitive services (e.g., blocktrains, etc.), and
insufficient efforts to increase and promote combined transport. One of the key
problems is the disintegrated policy approach which does not conceive road and rail
as complementary modes of transport, but still as competitive ones. Using the five
dimensions - hardware, software, orgware (institutions), tinware, and the
environment - as a checklist the current paper makes a modest attempt to identify
areas of major concern for road and rail. The paper looks more specifically at the
case of combined road/rail freight transport as part of a single, virtual mobility
network for trans-Alpine freight transport. (authors' abstract)