Intermodality as a critical factor for the goods transport development

The rebalancing between the various transport modalities is a strategic target of primary importance: in Italy and in Europe, in view of a continuous increase of mobility’s demand, continues also to increase the road transport with its high environmental, economical and social cost linked to the pollution, to the traffic, to the accidents, to the productive and distributive system’s penalty. The intense changes which for quite a time regard the goods sector, induced by the international transformation processes and overall by the markets opening, demand a strong strategic and organizational adjustment of the whole transport system, so to increase the country’s competitiveness through a more efficient and rational goods transport organization. In view of the optimization of the logistic physical flows, has a particular importance the intermodality, as a factor of the rationalization and integration of the goods transport and of the competitiveness of the Country-System in the services to the goods market. Intermodality was in the past the object of a violent discussion between the experts about its correct definition until, in the 1999, the European Conference of the Transport Ministers, the European Committee and the Economical Committee for Europe of the United Nations defined the Intermodal Transport as the goods transfer within a same load unity or within the same road vehicle by utilizing one or more transport manners and without the goods manipulation. Interesting, particularly in the Italian reality, the definition of combined transport, as a particular intermodal transport, in which the greater part of the route is made by railway, navigable way or by sea way, in which the initial and terminal routes, the more possible short, are made by road. The necessity of intermodal and logistic infrastructures, able to answer to the production’s requirements, has stimulated, in the last years, a series of public and private interventions. Such interventions have been promoted in coincidence with same policy’s choices adopted by public Administrations, corresponding to the markets exigencies, but sometime disjointed from them.