Rail-Road Integration for Freight Transportation along Djibouti Corridor
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2015-03
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Modern transport and freight distribution system all over the world are tending towards the
adoption of best practices those are reliable, timely and cost effective. Multimodal transport
between road and rail, also known as combined transport, has received a large interest in recent
years as part of a possible solution for a sustainable and efficient transport system. Hence, this
study focuses on the model development and analyse the model validation of the potentials of
integrated rail-road freight transportation of Ethiopia from Djibouti port to Addis Ababa and
other major cities. Much of the primary data is obtained through the administration of a
questionnaire specifically designed to gather information on the cost involved, distanced
covered, area coverage, amount of tonnage during import and export, problems during loading
and unloading and time taken to deliver cargoes to consignees. The respondents that are selected
systematically for this study are traffic officers of major transport companies. Secondary data
sources were obtained from the interviews of major transport companies operation, technical and
marketing managers such as from Trans Ethiopia PLC, Ethiopian Railway Corporation,
Ethiopian Shipping Lines and Logistics Enterprise and from Ministry of Transport.
The data set are combined with the model development and validation to create the full model of
the transport system used to answer the research questions; and contains the system size,
transport demand, infrastructure and geographical data (rail network, road network, terminals,
demand points, etc.), equipment (trucks, trains, etc.), costs data, environmental data, time
windows, etc. The data are analyzed using Geometric Mean analysis.
The findings of this paper reveal that integrating rail-road for hinterland bound goods would be
potentially save 42.67% freight costs and time of transportation than that of using unimodal
transportation i.e. road transportation. Furthermore, the emission of greenhouse gases can be
minimized with 218.42% when freight transportation is done by road-rail integrations. The
implications of these findings are that integrated road and rail modes of transport for porthinterland
freight distribution would make the nation’s transportation system to be faster, more
cost-effective and less emission.
Description
Keywords
Freight Transportation, Djibouti Corridor, Rail-Road