Rail-Road Interconnectivity in the Alpine Freight Transport.Bottlenecks and Policies from an Austrian-Italian Perspective

Trans-Alpine freight transport suffers because of severe road congestion due to under-capacity of roads and causes considerable environmental damages in the transit countries, particularly in Austria and Switzerland, but also in Italy. The obvious strategy of shifting trans-Alpine flows from road to rail is hampered by several factors such as Jack of coordination among the various national railway companies, lack of provision of competitive services (e.g., blocktrains, etc.), and insufficient efforts to increase and promote combined transport. One of the key problems is the disintegrated policy approach which does not conceive road and rail as complementary modes of transport, but still as competitive ones. Using the five dimensions - hardware, software, orgware (institutions), tinware, and the environment - as a checklist the current paper makes a modest attempt to identify areas of major concern for road and rail. The paper looks more specifically at the case of combined road/rail freight transport as part of a single, virtual mobility network for trans-Alpine freight transport. (authors' abstract)