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FRANcE


ISSUE 4 2010 Hard road ahead for French truckers


France is on the move again after the recent strikes, but the road haulage industry is having a rough ride, and not just because of the nationwide disruption that severely disrupted affected the distribution business. The blockade of oil depots led to shortages of diesel in many parts of the country and a consequent rise in pump prices where fuel could be found. Neil Madden reports.


The fuel price rise was not as sharp as had been feared, and many of the larger operators were able to keeping going on supplies stockpiled at their own depots, but for the trucking industry the extra operating costs resulting from the strikes and blockades were perhaps more painful. Daniel Benard, managing director of Normandy- based Buffard Logistique, said


restricted access to Port of Le Havre and the neighbouring logistics area had been costing his company an average of four additional hours working time each day. On top of this, weekend stoppages by crane operators at the container terminal meant waiting times of up to six hours for the company’s vehicles on Mondays and Tuesdays. Another firm, Transports


Mendy, reckoned it had lost the equivalent of one’s day work per week during the strikes and go slows as its manufacturing customers could not load or discharge cargoes. All this took place against


the backdrop of a proposed ‘ecotax’ on trucks, supposedly to encourage freight traffic onto alternative transport modes. The tax would be levied on


kilometres driven and could affect as many as 850,000 lorries, of which some 600,000 are likely to be French-registered. Having originally been scheduled for 2011, the government has now delayed introduction for a second time, until end-2012, due to technical reasons, said Transport minister Jean-Louis Borloo. The government wants a


more technically-sophisticated solution than the LKW Maut imposed in Germany in 2006. It has asked bidders to come up with a satellite-based charging system that will cover motorways not currently equipped with toll booths as well as major secondary roads. Ironically, one of the four consortia bidding to operate the technology and collect the tax includes the state-


owned rail operator SNCF. It has linked up with Autostrade, the Italian motorway toll operator. Borloo insists applying the tax


on the basis of kilometres driven is fairest because it will apply to all vehicles traversing the country regardless of country of origin. But this has not appeased French trucking associations who still maintain that their members will be hit first and foremost.


Renaissance men: waterways stage a comeback


If road hauliers seem uncertain about the future, their inland waterway colleagues are looking decidedly more confident. In the first nine months of the year, river freight in tonne-km was up 9.7% compared with the same period last year, reaching a volume of 45 million tonnes, according to the waterways authority Voies Navigables de France (VNF). Container traffic increased by 9.6%, notably along the French section of the river Rhine. France’s rivers and canals are undergoing a renaissance, with generally rising levels of traffic and significant investment in infrastructure and terminal facilities. In September a new container terminal was opened in Evry (south east of Paris) by Port of Paris and Terminaux de Seine (TDS), a joint venture between Le Havre stevedore and forwarder SHGT and river shipping line SCAT. The new terminal has a capacity of 10,000 TEU a year, and is situated close to the large


logistics hubs to the east of Paris. Regular container lines call at Evry from Le Havre: SNTC with two calls a week and the new Logiyonne service from Gron, to the south east of the capital. On the river Rhine, Strasbourg


is the second largest inland port in the country. Earlier this year the state-owned North Container Terminal took delivery of a new gantry crane to cope with the rising numbers of containers. Meanwhile plans are still in place to develop a new container terminal at Lauterbourg, 60km north of Strasbourg, and close to the German industrial city of Karlsruhe. The new terminal will be the first of the port’s container facilities to be run by a private stevedoring firm. Strasbourg has looked at the success of the privately-owned and run container facilities on the German side of the Rhine, such as in Duisburg and Gemersheim, and decided to follow suit. A call for tenders was due to be made this year. Port of Strasbourg director-general Didier Dieudonné said this had


been delayed until sometime in 2011 while the effects of the economic downturn are worked through, but he emphasised that infrastructure work is still going ahead and bids from private operators will be invited before long. Not far from Strasbourg, the city


and port of Metz is investigating a container shuttle service in conjunction with neighbouring Trier (Germany) to ply the river Moselle. This tributary of the Rhine already carries a substantial amount of bulk traffic, particularly grains from Northern France’s large agricultural sector, but is


hardly a player when it comes to containers. At a conference in October,


Jacques Kopf, of the Moselle region Chamber of Commerce, which runs the ports on the French section of the river, pointed out that a number of big shippers have operations in the region on either the French or German sides, such as Michelin, Dunlop, brewer Bitburger and mineral water company Gerolsteiner. An economic study commissioned by the regions reckoned that local industry alone could generate 170,000teu of import and export containers.


ByBox says hello to France


In-night delivery operator ByBox is making inroads into the French market, especially in the greater Paris Ile de France region, says general manager for Europe, Johnny Kusters. “We now have a network of 102 boxes in France,” he explains. “And while it’s not as mature a market as the UK, it’s growing and now our second-largest in Europe.” Around another 50 locations should be added to the network by the end of 2011. Whereas there is an element of business to consumer (B2C) business


in the UK, B2B markets such as service engineers taking delivery of parts is currently the main staple for ByBox in France. ByBox can save companies money in several ways. Pre-8am delivery (or pre-7am in the Paris region) can save on expensive same-day courier services but there are also savings in more hidden costs such as reduced inventory. The sophisticated IT system also makes it possible to handle


returned parts and other inventory in a much more effective way – for instance, the engineer can not only return a part to base through the ByBox but can also give information on whether or not it has to be repaired or where it needs to go to.


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