The Rotterdam Port Debate is organised every year before Christmas by Dutch daily Nieuwsblad Transport. At this year’s edition, most attendees agreed that the cause of ongoing hinterland difficulties is not barge, rail or trucking modes, but chronic congestion at the seaport terminals.

Against the assumption that lower seaborne container volumes would ease the situation, barge and truck dispatch still face much disruption. Outspoken criticism came from Theresia Hacksteiner, director of the European Barge Union (EBU). “Although it’s a supply chain problem, inland container shipping has to foot the bill; we can’t influence the situation as we have no leverage” [the deepsea carrier also pays for the barge quayside move]. “Barge operators have to pay a premium for a deepsea terminal quayside slot, so the carriers should adhere to their windows, too.”

Marc Beerlandt, Managing Director of MSC’s Antwerp agency, noted that average deepsea berth waiting time per call is still about five days. Both Hacksteiner and the Dutch barge operators’ organisation, CBRB, told WorldCargo News that an inland barge today still regularly experiences a few days of delay on its Maasvlakte “hopping,” which usually includes at least four terminals.

For a 500 TEU-600 TEU barge, this causes thousands of euros of loss per day. Adding to this, there is the occasional extra cost of dropping whole batches of containers at a wayport [Upper] Rhine terminal, to counter the barge’s schedule disruption. The extra cost of trucking to the consignee, compared to that from the original Rhine B/L port, has to be paid FAO by the barge operator.

Deepsea terminals’ truck dispatch also faced criticism. Haulage companies and their organisation denounced how the terminals deal with their increasing use of time slots. “When we fail to meet an AM slot, it may take until five in the afternoon for the truck to be handled,” one major haulier said. “Time slots may optimise the terminals’ own processes, but entail inefficiency further down in the chain,” the representative of the container hauliers’ association AZV argued.

Deepsea terminals’ productivity is too low to prevent congestion, argued Bart Kuipers, a port economist with Rotterdam Erasmus University. He partly blames this on the eagerness to accommodate transhipment containers (which constitute about 30% of the total Rotterdam box volume). “This makes the stack too full, at the expense of export containers, which generate more income for the port.”

Kuipers also mentioned trunk line Asia double calls, whereby Rotterdam is first and last call, which he considered is ‘killing’ terminal productivity. “You shouldn’t want to facilitate everything that comes your way.”

Professor Theo Notteboom, a shipping lecturer at Antwerp and Ghent universities, stated that consolidation of hinterland flows is the big challenge. He also questioned the hinterland strategy of the ARA (Antwerp-Aarhus) range ports. “They are still poorly represented in destinations such as Southern Germany, Austria, Hungary and further east.

They might better focus on reinforcing their natural hinterland destinations and in making these flows more sustainable. Already, the north-west European ports handle twice as many hinterland containers as the southern European ports.”