Reliability may not have the same value or relevance for different parties intervening along the transit chain. For government authorities, it may mean having the certainty that all relevant rules are fully applied. For customs, this may mean that fiscal risk, resulting from diversion to national markets, is minimized or fully covered through guarantee schemes. For agencies dealing with sanitary risks, certainty may mean the country remains safe from possible hazards to animal or vegetal contamination from goods in transit. For providers of transport and trade support services operating along a transit route, predictability may mean foreseeable volumes of freight allowing for investment and business development. For transport planners, infrastructure service providers and terminal operators, predictability may mean ensuring the best use of infrastructures and equipment and correctly size their development. For traders, predictability means transit times, including carriage and pre- and posttransport stages, and the logistics chain as a whole are safe and reliable in terms of quality and time; it also means the goods are in the hands of qualified operators and will reach their destination in good condition. For traders, the low reliability of transit supply chains is more worrisome than the average transit time. For instance,
retail operators such as local supermarkets must maintain several months’ inventory in landlocked developing countries instead of a few weeks in developed markets
(World Bank, 2013). This way, together with cost effectiveness and speed, reliability constitutes a primary objective to be pursued for the supply chain of transit services linking seaports and landlocked countries. As mentioned before, while the multiplicity of actors in the chain and their vested and sometimes conflicting interests remain a
main cause of uncertainty, there are ways of turning silo-minded players into sharing a systemic collective understanding.