Ro-ro and lo-lo alternatives between Mediterranean countries: Factors affecting the service choice

A relevant portion of the scientific literature on Short Sea Shipping (SSS) focuses on the competition of SSS against land transport. In the field of competition, great importance assumes the presence of international programmes that define land and maritime corridors as the TEN-T. The SSS market is defined by two main services: roll on–roll off (ro–ro) and lift on–lift off (lo–lo) services, differing in the typology of loading/unloading of units of load to/from the ships. The paper analyses the competition inside the maritime SSS market, comparing ro-ro vs lo-lo. A discrete choice model, simulating the split between ro–ro and lo–lo services of freight flow exchanged by sea between some Mediterranean countries has been developed, updating old values, previously calibrated, by means of a new dataset. New data, regarding freight flows exchanged by sea between Italy and some MENA countries, transported by lo–lo and ro–ro services, were obtained from EUROSTAT (year 2019). The paper presents the advancement of a research line whose general objective is the evaluation of geographic factors affecting the maritime services in (closed) sea basins. The proposed analysis could support the decisions of maritime transport operators (e.g. shipping lines, carriers, …), who operate with unitised cargos. It could be also suitable to support the analysis of market penetration of the analysed maritime services in other sea basins, such as the Baltic or the Northern ones in Europe. At the end, it could contribute to provide quantitative support to transport planning activities in progress at Euro-Mediterranean level.