Traditionally, road freight has dominated the UK transportation
industry. However, according to industry experts, sea freight
offers significant advantages over road transport. They
believe that these advantages will gradually erode the
industry's reliance on the roads forcing it to re-evaluate the
benefits of moving goods by water
In the UK, around 2 billion tonnes of freight is transported
annually. However, of this amount only 7% is transported by
water whilst the majority is moved by road. Sea freight is
frequently more efficient when it comes to transporting heavy
cargo over longer distances. Therefore, with regards to
tonne-kilometres, sea freight makes up around 26% of all cargo
transported in the UK. In fact more than 130 million tonnes of
cargo is moved by sea in the UK on an annual basis.
In recent years sea freight has been gaining favour in the
UK transportation industry over road freight for a number of
reasons.
First, the issue of road congestion has lead to questions about
noise and preservation of the environment with regards to road
freight. After all, road freight causes high levels of both
noise and chemical pollution. Sea freight on the other hand is
perceived to be relatively environmentally friendly and does not
pose the same noise problems as road freight.
More importantly however, is the fact that sea freight in the
UK is much safer than road freight. According to official
statistics, although there have been a number of improvements in
road safety levels over the last few decades, sea transportation
still has much lower death rates from accidents than road
transport. Indeed, in the UK, nearly all passenger transport
deaths occur on roads rather than on water.
Given that sea freight is significantly more environmentally
friendly than road freight, that issues of road congestion will
become more not less relevant and that water transport is much
safer than road transport, the sea freight industry in the UK is
likely to become increasingly important over the next few years.
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