Freight transport 2022: road up to 24.9%, maritime leads

In 2022, road freight transport represented 24.9% of all freight transport performance (in tonne-kilometres) in the EU as it went up by 0.4 percentage points (pp) when compared to 2021.

Maritime transport still accounted for the largest share of freight transport at 67.8%, but went down from 68.2% in 2021. Rail transport saw a slight increase from 5.4% in 2021 to 5.5% in 2022, while inland waterway slightly decreased from 1.8% in 2021 to 1.6% in 2022. Air transport (0.2%) remained the same in 2022 when compared with the previous year.

This information comes from data on the modal split of freight transport published by Eurostat today. This article presents a handful of findings from the more detailed Statistics Explained article.

Compared with 2012, the only increase in share by transport mode was road transport, which went up by 2.9 pp with a gradual increase over this period. Meanwhile, decreases were noted in maritime transport (-2.1 pp), inland waterway (-0.6 pp), and rail transport (-0.2 pp). The air transport share remained the same.

Source dataset: tran_hv_ms_frmod

Maritime is the main transport mode in 15 EU countries

Out of 22 EU members with a coastline, in 2022, maritime was the main mode of freight transport for 15 of them and accounted for more than 70% of freight transport in 10 countries. The countries with more than 95% share of maritime transport were Portugal (98.1%), Cyprus (97.2%), and Greece (96.4%).

At the same time, the highest shares of road transport were registered in Luxembourg (85.0%), Czechia (77.3%), and Hungary and Poland (both 69.0%).