Europe’s Freight Moves By Road & New Rules Will Make It Clean
EU stiffens road vehicle emissions guidance, bringing heavy trucks into focus
A while ago, I spent some time assembling statistics on major geographies’ split of domestic freight tonnage across different modes: road, rail, and water. I was surprised to find that road freight was so much more dominant in Europe than rail compared to other major geographies. I think of Europe as a rail-centric group of nations, but clearly that’s more aligned with passenger travel than freight movement.
Other aspects to briefly call out are that China has about 600,000 electric trucks running on its roads, so it’s quite a bit further down the road of decarbonizing road freight than the rest of the world. Further, about three-quarters of its rail and all new rail is fully electrified, while North America is at 0% and Europe is barely moving the needle from 60% and could be doing more, but it’s a less significant wedge as well. On the point of water, China’s domestic inland and short sea shipping is still a major transportation mode, and they have already started electrifying it, with several multi-hundred container…
