Minus in cargo traffic on Austrian Danube
Cargo traffic on the Austrian part of the Danube showed a downtrend in 2008. According to calculations of the Statistics Austria 11.21 million tons of goods have been transported, which is 7.4 per cent or 897,829 tons less than in 2007. The number of loaded transportations carried out on Austrian territory declined by 4.9 per cent to 11,471. The transport performance (product of transport volumes multiplied with the route distance) amounted to 11.8 billion ton kilometres, which is 6.3 per cent below the figure of the previous year. The national transport performance amounted to 2.4 billion ton kilometres (minus 9.2%). Statistics Austria recorded a positive development of transborder dispatch, where all goods types showed further growth and hence tonnage soared up by 40 per cent to 2.16 million tons. Transborder receipt, which had a growth rate of 30.1 per cent in 2007, showed a transport volume of 5.73 million tons in 2008, which is 8.5 per cent below the level of the previous year. This is mostly due to declines in transport of “agricultural- and forestry products and living animals“ and of „ores and metal scrap“. Inland traffic forwarded 502,228 tons of goods on the waterway, which is 48.3 per cent less. The main reason therefore is the lack in dredging (minus 272,594 tons in the group „mineral raw materials or products and building materials“). Moreover less oil products were forwarded in the reporting year. Transit traffic showed a 15.5%-decline to 2.81 million tons, which affected mainly the goods group „food and feed stuff“. Quelle: Österreichische Verkehrszeitung |