For some countries with good access to sea via long coastlines, short sea shipping can
be an alternative to land-oriented transports. The figures for the Netherlands show
that the amount of tonnes carried by this mode is comparable to road and rail freight
tonnages. For the UK, the short sea shipping accounts for about 27% of the road and
rail freight tonnages. For Germany, less than 10% of the land transportation tonnage
is transported via short sea shipping. This is plausible due to Germany’s much shorter
coastline compared to the Netherlands, the UK, Italy or Spain.
In terms of a functional definition, transportation systems are defined as a transfer in
place. Therefore transport volumes cannot be the only criteria of a transportation
system’s performance. For this reason the additional KPI transport performance, which
is measured by the tonne-kilometres per year, represents a combination of the
amount of goods transported and the distance over which the goods were moved. A
value of 150 billion tonne-kilometres might reflect a performance of 1 billion tonnes
over an average distance of 150 km, as well as 500 million tonnes over 300 km
distance.
The KPI tonne-kilometres is the classic figure for comparison and statement of
transport performance. The graph looks similar to the previous one, which depicted
the tonnes moved: high figures for some of the largest economies lead the sorted
graph and are followed by the smaller Member States, which do not reach an absolute
amount near that of the large economies.