In the coming years, Western Europe is likely to experience a perceptible imbalance in the market for road haulage services. With no or only weak growth in demand for services, the volume of which depends on the dynamics and structure of the development of trade exchange between EU member states, the primary source of the shortage will be the declining supply of hauliers services.
Since the middle of the third decade of the 21st century, the number of small and micro carriers entering the international road transport freight market has been declining across Europe. This is due to two main reasons. Firstly, the profitability of providing road transport freight services between Western European countries is gradually deteriorating. The lack of growth in industrial production and trade of consumer goods volumes has resulted in lower freight rates in the market from 2022 onwards. At the same time, the costs of driver staff and operating rolling stock are rising. Falling fuel prices alleviate tensions, but lower fuel acquisition costs do not compensate for the increase in other costs and profit margins are reduced. Secondly, year on year, there is an increasing shortage of drivers who are prepared to do long-distance driving without the ability to return regularly to their permanent home. Since the 1990s, the driver shortage has been felt by hauliers in Western Europe. Since 2022, when a large number of Ukrainians left the EU labour market, the driver shortage has also been increasingly felt by hauliers in Central Europe. Nowadays, in all EU countries, local drivers avoid working for carriers that send them to perform tasks abroad for more than seven days.
According to Polish road hauliers, who in the past two decades have achieved a share of more than 20% in carrying out ‘cross-trade’ transport operations on Western European roads, there are now almost exclusively drivers from non-EU countries in the cabs of trucks travelling on the main routes across the continent. This is a circumstance that brings about the dependence of the European logistics system on the geopolitical situation. If there are abrupt socio-economic changes in the countries of the former USSR, a significant proportion of this cadre may withdraw from the work carried out on Western European motorways.
Since the 1990s, imports of road transport services have been increasing in Western Europe. It is a substitute for the services that were performed in previous decades by Belgian, French, Dutch and German hauliers. The main exporters of services are hauliers registered in Poland, as well as in Lithuania, Romania and Spain. If the willingness of these carriers to provide ‘cross-trade’ services declines, shippers in Western Europe will feel the disruption of trans-European supply chains strongly.
A shortage scenario for road haulage services in Europe is likely. It is desirable to initiate a debate involving shippers, logistics operators and road hauliers on how to mitigate the risk of a decline in the supply of services provided by hauliers from Central Europe, including Poland. The intensifying trend of worsening results reported by hauliers reduces their propensity to reinvest modest profits and discourages new entrepreneurs from entering the road transport business. An additional strand of the debate should be the search for solutions that, in an era of digital and climate-energy transformation, would allow to increase the productivity of the human and material potential of road transport. When analysing the prospects for change in European land transport, it should be borne in mind that intermodal transport is not a valid alternative to the services of road hauliers. While rail transport of maritime containers to and from ports accounts for a significant proportion of the trade with partners on other continents, the transport of semi-trailers or containers overland remains a niche solution, regarded by shippers as an underperforming logistics service.
Leave a Reply