Mainly on the Elbe River - Central Europe

6 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
The transport of chemicals includes loading, overloading, unloading and cleaning.
The chemicals may be transported by air, railway, road, water (sea, inland waterways) or through
pipelines. Comparing individual transport modes (excluding the air transport not relevant for this
project), waterway transport offers great benefits, such as high transport capacity (in contrast with
limited capacity of road transport), lack of congestions, no fix schedules unlike the railway
transport, safety (in terms of transport accidents), environmental friendly operation, low costs for
long-distance transport. On the contrary, its disadvantages are the limited network of waterways
and dependency on weather conditions, which is relevant for the Czech Republic, or the Elbe
waterway on its territory.
The main reason for the unsatisfactory conditions of the waterway transport on the Elbe river is
the ecological and economic concern despite its proven environment delicacy. In west European
countries with well-developed network of inland waterways, support of the water transport is
obvious. Although the CR waterway transport represents only a small part of the industry
compared to these countries, it is still the least utilized transport mode within the state with
negligible importance. The Elbe waterway represents an important link between the CR and major
international ports. It has an irreplaceable role in generating competitive environment for
commodity transport, limiting the monopoly position of the railway transport in the Elbe corridor.
The importance of water transport is underestimated, which is apparent from the following list of
construction works on rivers in CR:
• 1902-1918 (16 years) 10 navigable locks (navigable locks Hadík and Vraňany were
terminated between 1948 – 1989)
• 1918-1939 (21 years) 13 navigable locks + 14 chamber locks along the Baťa
channel (1934 -1938)
• 1939-1945 (6 years) 4 navigable locks
• 1945-1948 (3 years) 2 navigable locks
• 1948-1989 (41 years) 10 navigable locks
• 1989-2009 (20 years) 1 navigable lock incompleted (Hněvkovice)
Every inland port without a direct access to the sea is handicapped compared to sea ports. This
affects the GDP, where the difference fluctuates between 1 – 5 %. In this respect, the Elbe
waterway should be the contrary example. The CR is the only continental country in Europe
(with the exception of microstates), which does not have access to the western European
waterway network and sea ports on navigable rivers. Parallel can be found in Switzerland - its
A feasibility study for “Improvement of Conditions for the River Transport in Central Europe (mainly on the Elbe
River)“ realized within the ChemLog project 188