Maritime Trade and Transport - HWWI

areas. Its location on the Elbe, however, also means that navigation in the port of Hamburg
is affected by the tides. Only ships with a maximum draft of 12.5 m can call on the port of
Hamburg regardless of the tides. Rotterdam, in contrast, is a deepwater port with a navigable
channel of 22.5 meters, which can be navigated by giant vessels with more than 10,000 TEU,
independent of the tides, which is not (yet) possible in Hamburg.
Apart from the geographical location, numerous other factors relating to the site (see
Fig. 30) influence the competitive position of a port and thus the volume of cargo handled in
that port. Key factors here are the infrastructure, suprastructure and costs that are relevant to
cargo handling.
A critical site-related factor which is highly significant for the competitiveness of all ports
and their economic development are the infrastructure links from the port to the hinterland
areas, by pipeline, rail, waterways, road and air. Seaports are intermodal transport junctions
in international and domestic trade, and goods are transported from the port to their final
destination by various means. Good logistics for the hinterland areas are a prerequisite for en -
suring that no bottlenecks arise, preventing traffic jams and thus keeping the time and cost
for transporting the goods between the port and the final destinations as low as possible.
The local load volume (the share of cargo being handled that will stay in the area or is
generated in the area) is also relevant for the development of ports. A high local load has a stabilizing
effect on the handling figures, since companies based in the region generally make
regular use of the same port to receive and ship their goods. The local load volumes of port
locations vary appreciably, as shown by the comparison between the planned JadeWeserPort
(see Box 3) and the port of Hamburg. The Hamburg port has a comparably high local load.
Approximately 30% of the merchandise handled via the Hamburg port come from or are
heading for a destination in the Hamburg metropolitan region. 51 The JadeWeserPort, on the
other hand, is being planned as a pure transshipment port for containers. It will have a comparably
low local load volume, as it is located in an economically underdeveloped region.
Depending on the biogeographic and infrastructural situation of a port, the modal split
may differ considerably in regard to the shipping of cargo onward to its final destinations.
This results in differing costs for further transporting goods to their selling markets in hinterland
areas, due to the differing characteristics of road, rail, water and pipelines as modes of
transport. Road traffic is clearly dominant in linking ports to hinterland areas, whereby the
overloading of certain roads is becoming more and more of a bottleneck. In many cases, due
to its very limited flexibility, rail traffic does not constitute a serious alternative to road traffic.
Freight trains often have to wait on side tracks during the day because the conveyance of
passengers takes precedence in many places and the distances in Europe are too great for a
freight train to reach its destination during the night. Another disadvantage of transporting
goods by rail is that the EU countries and their neighbors still have different power systems,
51 See Eckhardt (2006).
52 Berenberg Bank · HWWI: Strategy 2030 · No. 4