BERLIN (dpa-AFX) – The federal government’s long-term traffic forecast for freight transport by road and rail is, from the point of view of several railway and transport associations, “too road-fixated” and “remote from reality”. “Nobody can imagine that road freight traffic will increase by half of today’s level by 2051,” said Peter Westenberger, managing director of the freight railways association, on Wednesday in Berlin. That will fail if only because of the serious lack of truck drivers.
The federal government presented the long-term forecast for traffic in Germany at the beginning of March. It assumes that road freight traffic will grow by around 54 percent by 2051. Goods transport by rail is therefore only expected to increase by around a third in the same period.
The Pro-Rail Alliance and Die Güterbahnen associations, the Association of German Transport Companies (VDV) and the Association of Freight Wagon Keepers in Germany consider the underlying assumptions to be unrealistic. In the case of toll rates and CO2 prices in particular, the study assumes that the increases in road traffic are too small. In addition, it does not sufficiently take into account possible increases in efficiency on the rails, for example through the digitalization.
If the forecast were to come true, the rail share of total freight transport would not increase, but would even drop by a few percentage points by 2051. The Federal Government intends to increase this share from around 19 percent at present to 25 percent by 2030. The forecast means saying goodbye to this goal, said the chief executive of the Pro-Rail Alliance, Dirk Flege.
He criticized the fact that Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing (FDP) was now aligning his transport policy too closely with the forecasts. “None of his predecessors was in such a hurry to make politics with his forecasts,” said Flege. Among other things, Wissing justified the accelerated expansion of the motorway he was driving with the traffic forecast. After all, the truck will remain the dominant means of transport in the long term./maa/DP/mis