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Inland Terminal Concepts
Published in Petros A. Ioannou, Intelligent Freight Transportation, 2008
In the American literature the term inland port has a broad meaning. In a recent study investigating the various inland port schemes,1 an inland port is defined as a site located away from traditional land, air, and coastal borders with the vision to facilitate and process international trade through strategic investments in multimodal transportation assets by promoting value-added services as goods move through the supply chain. In the same study, four basic terminal types were identified: trade and transportation center inland ports, inland waterway ports, maritime feeder inland ports, and air cargo ports. On the contrary, in Europe the term inland port is related (almost exclusively) to the inland waterways network. According to the official terminology,2 inland ports form part of the trans-European network for the interconnection between the waterways and other modes of transport. Terminals serving rail–road and rail–rail transshipments and offering temporary storage of unitized units (containers, swap bodies, semitrailers) are noted as combined transport terminals. The term intermodal terminal is wider as it includes railway, inland waterway, and deep-/short-sea transshipment installations for unitized units. The terms freight village, logistic center/platform/park, transport center, city logistic center, urban distribution center, and so on are used to denote sites specially organized for carrying out logistics activities.3 When such services are offered in sites outside, but organizationally linked to ports, the terms port logistic activity zone, hinterland terminals, and dry port are used.
The development modes of inland ports: theoretical models and the Chinese cases
Published in Maritime Policy & Management, 2021
Shiyuan Zheng, Qiang Zhang, Wouter Beelaerts van Blokland, Rudy R. Negenborn
The government-driven mode describes a situation where governments deeply participate in the development process of an inland port by comprehensive means such as direct investments, the incentive policies and the administrative devolution. The main reason why governments adopt this approach is that an inland port can function as a logistics hub to facilitate the domestic and/or international trade and materialize regional economic agglomerations. A distinct characteristic of government-driven mode is the interactive relationship between the central government and local governments. Local governments need to ask for preferential policies that can only be granted by the central government, such as export tax rebate and special customs supervision. Conversely, the central government needs local governments to implement national strategies and steer the development of local economy. The competition among local governments in China is fierce. Therefore, the relationship between the central government and local governments, to a certain extent, is unequal. Moreover, the governments support the development of inland ports mainly because the social logistics costs of inland cities can be reduced if the well-developed inland ports can provide the good logistics services. Moreover, the transportation industry that is related to inland ports can absorb a lot of social labor, which also meets the governments’ objectives and benefits.
The relations between dry port characteristics and regional port-hinterland settings: findings for a global sample of dry ports
Published in Maritime Policy & Management, 2019
Lam Canh Nguyen, Theo Notteboom
There is no consensus on the terminology used for inland nodes worldwide. Various terms have been used in different situation as mentioned by Notteboom and Rodrigue (2009) and Cullinane, Bergqvist, and Wilmsmeier (2012). Although sharing the similarity of integrating an off-dock terminal on site, such terms were developed differently due to temporal and spatial dimensions (Notteboom et al. 2017). In the United States, inland port is the popular term used for inland locations situated along rail-based or road-based land bridge corridors. The same term is also used in Europe but more in the context of river ports with inland waterway access. In many countries in Asia and Africa, the term ICD (inland container depot or inland clearance depot) is commonly found at off-dock terminals, although many of them have gone beyond the sole functions of a container depot and customs clearance point. Other related terms, such as interporti in Italy, plateformes logistiques in France, Güterverkehrszentrum (GVZ) in Germany, freight village and logistics park, all refer to the main functions of value added logistics activities in such locations. The term dry port is getting more popular worldwide but its definition is still controversial. Recently, UNESCAP (2013a, 2013b) gave very broad definitions of the term dry port to refer to any inland location providing services similar to the ones offered by seaports, except for transhipment from/to sea-going ships. Economic Commission for Europe (2001) narrowed the use of the term to inland terminals with a direct link to one or more seaports. Roso, Woxenius, and Lumsden (2009) used the term dry port to describe a more advanced concept: a dry port should be intermodal and ideally connect to one or more seaports using high capacity traffic modes, such as rail transport or barges. In this research, we include all dry ports under different terminologies but limit ourselves to container terminals only. In the next section, we carry out a descriptive analysis to see which terminologies are most commonly used.