The global market for conditioned transport – predominantly conducted in refrigerated containers (‘reefers’) – grows rapidly. Due to the energy usage for continuous cargo cooling, the climate impact of cold logistics chains is substantial and still increasing.
In addressing climate concerns, governments have committed themselves to a ‘modal shift’ of freight transport from road to more sustainable modes such as rail transport. Concerns including road congestion and shortages in the trucking sector provide an additional impetus for a modal shift. The perishables sector, however, is almost entirely reliant on trucking. The authors address the question what is necessary for rail transportation of reefer containers to become a viable option to stakeholders in the cold chain.
This study surveys the existing options for a modal shift of perishables transport to rail. A major finding is that there is no established option yet to connect reefers to an energy supply from the catenary: most existing options rely on some form of diesel-electric generator to power the reefers. Furthermore, the authors conducted interviews with a wide range of cold chain stakeholders on their considerations regarding modal shift. Disadvantages of rail transport include the absence of a ‘plug and play’ option to power reefer containers, and the perception the current rail services do not offer the desired speed, reliability, and flexibility. While the authors also observed that new rail logistics concepts are viewed favorably, options besides trucking are simply not considered in current decision-making. Hence, a modal shift also requires a ‘mental shift’ within the sector.@en

Driven by global climate concerns, seaports have formulated sustainability goals, which also require sustainability gains in the fast growing temperature-controlled logistics market-increasing energy efficiency, reducing waste, and streamlining logistics processes. This, however, requires cooperation and buy-in from a wide range of stakeholders. To explore the barriers and facilitators of such a transition, we map the interests and attitudes of cold chain actors in the Port of Rotterdam regarding sustainability issues in reefer transportation and cold chains. We identify a limited number of broadly shared perspectives using Q-methodology-a survey-based method to study subjective viewpoints (originating from psychology) that has been used only rarely in the freight transport field. The analysis yields four 'dominant' perspectives that together account for 46% of the variation among stakeholder viewpoints. We label these perspectives "sustainability as part of strategy", "short term constraints", "optimistic about technology, limited role for policy", and "long run willingness under risk avoidance." These perspectives are characterized by multiple factors, including the evaluation of organizational capabilities, expectations from policymakers and technology, and the time horizon stakeholder organizations consider regarding sustainability concerns. From the findings, we derive recommendations for managers and policy makers to facilitate stakeholder dialogue and possibly convergence and coalition building.@en

Port choice decisions are often considered to be based on unambiguous choice criteria. The authors examine how port users' evaluation of these criteria can differ and how this may affect actors' incentive structure and decision making, and ultimately port performance. Apart from ports' physical characteristics, the paper considers port policy and freight market conditions as components of actors' incentive structures. As port users interact, each actor's decision making has consequences for the incentives offered to others – with an important role for strategic behavior. The aggregate of port users' decisions affects a port's throughput, cargo composition, and value added, and has implications for handling efficiency. This paper combines these insights within an overarching framework linking port characteristics, policy, and freight market conditions to port user choice behavior and the consequences for ports. The paper explores various facets of this framework using the case of how the Port of Rotterdam competes along the Hamburg–Le Havre range, drawing on port throughput data on various levels of detail and in-depth interviews with a representative selection of port stakeholders. It shows that there is a downside to ports being particularly attractive to carriers, in that the port that offers the most incentives to carriers disproportionately attracts relatively low-value activities: inefficient calls and a large share of empty containers, along with a strong import/export imbalance. Interview findings contextualize the findings from the data and elaborate further on the mechanisms underpinning these observations. Most importantly, the attractiveness of a port for carriers does not always translate into attractiveness for shippers. The challenge for port policy is to balance the port's positioning toward its different categories of users and achieve a congruent value proposition for all port users.@en