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.