The French Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development, Transport and Housing summarized two decades of French road transport. Over the past dozen or so years, the French have fallen from the second position in Europe to the fifth.
The French resort has analyzed the road transport of goods in 1996-2016. Trucks, according to the summary, still carry out the majority of transports by the Seine. The French transport industry has been hit hard by the economic crisis in 2008 and has never returned to its previous level. To a large extent, this is due to strong competition from abroad.
Fall from the Top
At the beginning of this century, the transport industry in France flourished. In 2001, the French transported a total of 206 870 million tonne-kilometers, ranking just behind the European leader, Germany (288 964 million tonne-kilometers). For comparison, Poland’s transport level in the year in which she joined the European Union (2004) amounted to102,807 million tonne-kilometers. In 2016, the French dropped to the 5th place in the ranking, below Germany (315 774 million tonne-kilometers), Poland (290 749 million tonne-kilometers), Spain (216 997 million tonne-kilometers) and Great Britain (176 678 million tonne-kilometers).
The most important drops were recorded by French carriers after 2008 (-20.8%), and they have not returned to their pre-crisis results so far. The activity of the overall European transport decreased in this period by 10.5 percent, which is almost half less than in France.
Road transport carried out by the French
| 1999 | 2001 | 2005 | 2007 | 2009 | 2011 | 2015 | 2016 | |
| Millions of tonne-kilometers |
204 713 |
206 870 |
205 284 |
219 212 |
173 621 |
185 685 |
153 580 |
155 843 |
| Thousands of tons |
1896 840 |
1991 474 |
2059 715 |
2258 028 |
1939 431 |
2090 616 |
1796 755 |
1727 611 |
Data source: Eurostat
Strong Competition from the East
As we read in the Ministry’s report, in 2016 the amounts of transport carried out by French carriers decreased by 13.6 percent in comparison with the previous twenty years. The largest decreases were recorded in international transport (as much as 73.4%). At the end of the 1990s, the share of international transport in all transports performed by the French was 24.3 percent. In 2016, only 7.5 percent. In addition to the economic crisis, competition from abroad contributed to such a large drop.
The Ministry also points to the increase in cabotage transport carried out in France by foreign carriers. The share of cabotage in transport carried out on the French territory increases year by year and currently amounts to 6.3 percent (for comparison, in Austria it is 5.8%, in Germany 5.9%, in Belgium 6.5%).