Mainly on the Elbe River - Central Europe

- Canal located by river plains forms in some areas “barricades” for certain areas suitable
for establishing polders. It will prevent higher water levels in polders from flooding the
important infrastructure by the waterway.
The D-O-E channel will enable transport of oversized load, which are currently transported with
difficulties by road transport. Futhermore, transport of bulk materials will be easier. Possibility to
use more effective transport mode also results in cost savings. The server http://www.d-o-l.cz/
presents potential savings of 15-60 EUR per a ton of transported substrate (for a distance 500-
2.000 km).
Construction of the channel would lead to linking Poland and the Czech Republic with the
important waterway route from Amsterdam to Constanta, establishing direct waterway connection
among the important port of Hamburg and the countries in Central and Southern Europe,
improving connection of the North and South Europe and connecting polish port of Szczecin on
the Danube river.
The significance of the waterway consists in the fact that it would be an alternative for natural
gas (liquid) transport to the important disposal sites in the Hodonín region, especially in a case of a
crisis in the Ukraine-Russia relationship like the one in 2009.
4.5 PROGNOSIS FOR DEVELOPMENT OF TRANSPORT FLOWS
A long-term prognosis on human activities is problematic since there are many hardly
predictable influences. The mortgage crisis in the USA is a typical example, which was not
expected by any prognoses from the year 2006 and before and which spread into a global
economic crisis still causing considerable insecurity. Problem with transport prognoses (volumes
expressed in tons and performances in tone-kilometers) commonly occurs due to the fact that it is
focused on one transport field (the problem is called usurpation of passengers and load). To avoid
this error, construction of the overall prognosis of commodity flows in the EU was carried
out in the first stage, regardless to the transport mode.
Chart 33 - Variants of GDP development in the EU (in %)
The alternatives of the GDP development in the EU
monitored years 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020
the optimictic alternative 96,2 100,0 100,2 98,0 98,4 99,2 101,0 103,4 107,0 112,0 117,0 122,2 127,2 131,5 134,6
the middle alternative 96,2 100,0 100,1 97,8 97,7 98,2 99,3 100,6 102,9 106,3 109,8 113,7 117,4 120,6 122,8
the pessimistic alternative 96,2 100,0 100,1 97,5 96,9 97,1 97,6 97,8 98,7 100,5 102,6 105,1 107,6 109,6 111,0
Source: CityPlan, spol. s r.o.
A feasibility study for “Improvement of Conditions for the River Transport in Central Europe (mainly on the Elbe
River)“ realized within the ChemLog project 156