The Seine and the Grand Paris for freight

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Le programme de recherche FLUIDE bénéficie du soutien de l’ANR- Villes Durables

The Seine and the “Grand Paris” for freight

Antoine Frémont Université Paris Est

Unité Systèmes Productifs, Logistique, Organisation des Transports, Travail (SPLOTT) IFSTTAR

antoine.fremont@ifsttar.fr

Cartographie : Françoise Bahoken Université Paris Est

Unité Systèmes Productifs, Logistique, Organisation des Transports, Travail (SPLOTT) IFSTTAR

francoise.bahoken@ifsttar.fr

ñ These four pages summarize a paper submitted for publication in the journal

L’Espace géographique.

To cite this paper, please use the following reference:

FREMONT. A., (2011) La Seine et le Grand Paris des marchandises, 4 pages, Programme de recherche FLUIDE, Agence Nationale de la Recherche, Université Paris Est, Unité Systèmes Productifs, Logistique, Organisation des Transports, Travail.

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Introduction

Can the river play a role in the “Grand Paris” for freight? Before tackling this question, we need to describe the disconnection between the river and the metropolis with regard to freight transport in order to identify credible ways of reconnecting them.

The “Grand Paris” for freight is completely dominated by road

In 20061, the traffic flows generated by Ile-de-France amounted to 296 million tonnes. The road accounted for 84% of this traffic, a figure which rises to 90% in the case of freight travelling between Ile-de-France and the rest of the country (DREIF, 2007).

The logistical organization of the Paris metropolis is disconnected from the river and completely structured by road transport, as shown by the changes that have taken place in the location of warehouses in Ile-de-France. This change has been identified at municipal level on the basis of the building permits listed in the SITADEL database managed by MEEDEM (Ministry of the Environment, Energy, Sustainable Development and the Sea) (Figure 1). The aggregate results over 5-year periods since 1980 clearly show the spatial dynamic.

Warehouses are being built further and further from Paris. In the 1980s the inner suburbs still provided a favoured location. An outward spread then occurred, involving the Départements of the outer suburbs (Table 1) and leading to a change in “logistics routes”. In the 1980s, two routes (west south-west/east north-east) were located on either side of Paris, one to the north the other to the south, essentially along the A86 motorway which was under construction at the time. The northern route passed through Paris’s old industrial suburb with warehouses reaching out towards Roissy Airport. To the north-west, Cergy continued to gain in importance, in particular as a result of the nearby logistics park at Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône, taking advantage of the Francilienne orbital motorway which provided accessibility to Roissy. A major development took place in the 1990s. The route shifted to the east to run north-south along the Francilienne from Roissy to Evry/Corbeil-Essonnes.

The map of the logistics facilities in Ile-de-France in 2009 (Figure 2) shows the existence of a north-east/south-west route running from the A1 in the north to the A6 and the A10 in the south along the A86 and the Francilienne, the latter becoming the prime location for new warehouses.

1 Due to problems with rail statistics since the deregulation of the rail market in France, it is difficult to obtain more recent comprehensive freight data for Ile-de-France.

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This change is explained by the interaction between three scales. At the European and national scale, the Francilienne is part of the European route between Northern and Southern Europe. Ile-de-France is also a vital crossroads at national level. At this scale, agglomeration effects are extremely important. As a consequence, Ile-de-France accounts for 25% of all French warehousing capacity. The north-south corridor of the Francilienne is used by shippers and/or carriers to respond to the needs of the very large local market and redistribute freight to national and European markets.

At the scale of the metropolis, the location of warehouses along the Francilienne and the city’s radial motorways illustrates the tendency for logistics activities to move outwards. It also perpetuates a dichotomy between the west and the east, which is also social in nature. The west of the Parisian metropolis is a logistical desert, which is extremely detrimental to the Port of Le Havre whose principal market becomes temporally more distant.

At the local level, agglomeration effects are once again at work. The majority of warehouses are located at the intersection between the north-south route (the Francilienne) and the motorways which radiate from Paris towards the provinces. These locational practices are explained by the desire to obtain maximum accessibility at all scales, both to serve the local supermarket and a factory at the other end of France. As a result, 75% of the warehousing space is in five major zones, and the new towns play an important role (Table 2). Logistics is contributing to the development of new centres in the periphery which gives the metropolis its polycentric nature.

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Figure 1. The location of new warehouses in Ile-de-France (1980-2009)

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Waterways and ports: from a niche role to the possibility of reconnecting with metropolitan logistics

The dominance of the road for freight transport is such that waterways can only play a marginal role in Ile-de-France. In 2006, waterways transported 16 million tonnes of freight, i.e. 6% of all the region's traffic. Today it occupies an important niche, that of the transport of bulk products. Construction materials, agricultural products, ores and waste, oil products and solid fuels account for more than 90% of the goods transported by the waterways. Water transport exports cereal production to the port of Rouen, and imports energy products from Le Havre, but above all it carries construction materials from Haute-Normandie, Picardie and the Ile-de-France Region itself. The complementarity with road transport is obvious. Waterways are used for the longest part of the journey and trucks are used for the last few kilometres in order to deliver to worksites. The very large number of ports increases the possibilities for loading and unloading, even within or very close to the city of Paris and the different sites

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genuinely complement each other (Paffoni, 2011). For example, in the west of Paris, the port of Issy-les-Moulineaux handles almost a million tonnes per year.

The Seine plays a vital role in this niche market. 40% of the traffic passing through the sites owned by Ports de Paris has its origin or destination in Haute-Normandie, and 46% in the Ile-de-France region itself. Picardie and Bourgogne are far behind, each with slightly over 3% of the traffic. It is true that for Bourgogne and Picardie, the gauges are very much narrower. The Seine is an enclosed basin.

Ports de Paris also own important logistical sites. These contain a million square metres of warehouses, i.e. almost 6% of the total warehouse area in Ile-de-France. 30% of this warehouse space is in the port of Gennevilliers. Gennevilliers and Bonneuil, was created in the 1920s and is proving to be a godsend. They provide spaces for parcel delivery services, distribution and car firms in the centre of the conurbation and allow Ports de Paris to live from the income generated by renting out warehouses. As one would expect, most of the traffic at these ports is by road.

Apart from this important niche role, the challenge is to reconnect the river to metropolitan logistics. At a large scale, the Seine provides Ile-de-France with a nearby maritime opening via the ports of Rouen and Le Havre, which complement each other with regard to the nature of the traffic they handle. This river route, which has no gauge or capacity constraints until the bridges of Paris, provides exceptional consolidation as we have seen in the case of container traffic, in spite of the short distance. The future Seine Northern-Europe canal will provide access to the Seine basin. While it is true that it opens up the possibility of a “river motorway” between Antwerp and the Paris region, it also provides the Rhine-based freight forwarders and bargemen with the opportunity to take an interest in and enter the French market, using their know-how to revitalize waterborne transport on the Seine which is currently in the hands of a small number of companies which are engaged in rent-seeking, to the advantage of the ports of Le Havre and Rouen whose proximity to the Paris region is obvious.

Reconnection on a more local scale, that of the urban area, requires limited number (one or two) very large terminals in Ile-de-France. These major terminals would play a national and European role as they would be connected to European freight routes by the dense network of rail and waterway routes. They would be able to redistribute freight at international, regional and local levels, down to the urban distribution scale via secondary terminals. The rebalancing of the supply of logistics services would require the creation of one such major terminal in the west. This is the Achères project. A second major terminal could be created in

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the east, south-east of the conurbation not far from the Francilienne, probably in the Evry/Sénart area. Paradoxically, in order to respond to road sprawl, it is necessary for road-rail terminals to move further out from the centre.

The sites of Gennevilliers and Bonneuil must be kept in order to play a more regional and urban role with good connections to the higher level terminals. With regard to services on the last few kilometres, in dense urban areas, the initiatives taken by Ports de Paris could lead to the development of "urban river logistics" which would not be restricted to transporting construction materials but also serve the mass retail sector.

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FLUIDE : A sustainable transport solution: French river cities and their ports.

A comparative study of Paris, Lyon, Lille and Strasbourg with international

comparisons.

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The urban areas of Paris, Lyon, Lille and Strasbourg each have at least one river port. Can these ports provide a sustainable transport solution to bring freight into their urban areas, as part of the chain that extends from major international flows to urban distribution?