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Eurocrats' war against trucks thwarted by shippers' clear preference for road over rail

Shifting freight from road to rail has long been the cause of the state bureaucracies and the goal of environmental lobbies worldwide, and no more so than in the European Union.

What amounts to a war against trucks and trucking, is a campaign championed by health and safety lobbies and encouraged and funded to promote policies the bureaucracy is pre-disposed to carry out for reasons of its own.

Because health and safety statistics that would justify such a war are hard to come by these days with everyone being healthier and living longer than ever before, what's left is environmentalism - saving the planet from dire predictions of global warming. While these never come true in any palpable way, they are hard to contradict because proof reside safely in the unproveable future.

Unfortunately for the Eurocrats, European shippers simply prefer trucks to trains - because they get the freight to where it wants to go, particularly in tightly packed consumer-rich western Europe where the money is.

Europe: A continent becoming united on being free from the clutches of the European Union

To understand England's antipathy to the European Union, it is important to see its role from the 1684 Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War when all agreed that one nation's law should run no further than its own borders.

This has been greatly undermined since, not only by the EU, but by jurisdictions more powerful than their neighbours. One recalls the Montreal Police ticketing a motorist for going through a red light in a neighbouring municipality, but not ordering him to pay the fine to the local traffic courts, but to the larger City of Montreal which would spend the proceeds of the fine. From the micro to the macro one can see the 1989 case of General Manuel Noriega, a head of state, who was arrested by US forces in Panama to answer US domestic drug charges in Florida. Such extra-territoriality of courts has since become common place.

But such concerns are a mere fraction of the complaint of the 52 per cent in the UK who voted to leave the EU common market in 2016, which by stealth has been morphing into a federal state, a united states of Europe. The disappointed 48 per cent who voted remain, rather like the children in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, knew of no time before the EU and are terrified without it, believing all the hell-bound scarifying predictions Eurocrats make to keep Britain in.

Europe's commendable scepticism: Is digitisation useful or the rebirth of a new Y2K racket?

Urging European carriers maintain their commendable scepticism in the face of the sellers of digitisation in shipping, Hamburg's DS Multibulk operations manager Panos Patsadas asks whether such software is a useful tool or a racket rather like the Y2K fear mongering of 20 years ago from which there was no negative impact on those who ignored fear mongering compurter alarmists.

Mr Patsadas notes with satisfaction that shipowners and managers Greece, Norway, Denmark, Germany have been slow to buy into the hype and urges them to stay steady on that course.

Said Mr Patsadas: "I have been quietly observing for months now the on-going debate about the digitisation of shipping and reading time after time how this is the future. Be it voyage estimate software, complete integrated software to link operations with chartering and accounting, software to match supply and demand of vessels and cargoes, or even blockchain to tighten cybersecurity. A lot of hype, but where is it all coming from, and is it really disruptive to the model?"

Rotterdam deploys smart port thinking to extract all it can from the 'Blue Banana'

ROTTERDAM, like Hong Kong, was once the world's biggest container port, but now focuses on being the world's smartest, its container chief Hans Nagtegaal told the Hong Kong Shipping Gazette during a recent visit.

On Europe's northern range, he said, Rotterdam (annual throughput 12.3 million TEU in 2017) faces fierce competition from neighbouring harbours certainly from nearby Antwerp (10.03 million TEU).

But not only does the Port of Rotterdam see its comparative advantage as being smart, it also appreciates its unique geographical position.

That, says Hans Nagtegaal head of containers at Port of Rotterdam Authority, includes not having draft restrictions, especially at its new Maasvlakte 2 mega terminal facility.

Mr Nagtegaal also points out Rotterdam's other natural advantage of being at the mouth of the River Mass, which is the name of the Rhine as it leaves Germany and enters Holland for the sea.

 

Europe Trade Specialists

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