SmartPort Community Lunch meeting, Tuesday 18 November at 12.00 in Mandeville (T) Building T03-42

On November 18th Klara Paardenkoper from Rotterdam Mainport University of Applied Sciences, will give the following presentation:

The Port of Rotterdam and the maritime container
The rise and fall of Rotterdam’s hinterland
(1966-2010)

Container transport from and to Rotterdam has received a lot of attention in literature, there has been, however, little focus on hinterland transport. Research on transport flows between ports and their hinterlands is relevant for three reasons. Firstly, goods transshipped at a port need to find their way to the hinterland, that is why the quality of hinterland connections is a major factor in port competition. Secondly, it is important to know which hinterland area is served by which port; which are the captive and contested hinterland areas of competing ports. Thirdly, the kind of activities that generates transport flows is important to consider. Hinterland transport flows are generated by logistic or production processes. Logistic processes in hinterland transport are volatile, while production based flows are more geographically fixed. This presentation explores the transport flows between the port of Rotterdam and its container hinterland in the context of port competition in the Hamburg - Le Havre range in the period 1966-2010. It shows how the hinterland of the port expanded between 1966 and the middle of the 1990s and shrunk from then on. Furthermore, it explains the role of rail container transport in this process. The presentation is based on the PhD thesis: The Port of Rotterdam and the maritime container The Rise and fall of Rotterdam's hinterland (1966-2010), Erasmus University, Rotterdam, 13 June 2014.