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The market share of trucks in European freight transport is still growing. Avoiding road congestion and other environmental reasons makes a modal shift towards barge, train and pipes necessary. This shift entails much more than the substitution of truck kilometres by train or ship kilometres.
First, trains and ships do not usually provide door‐to‐door transport services. A transhipment of freight is necessary to create intermodal logistic chains.
Second, transhipment usually entails high costs and loss of time. There are, however, encouraging developments: strategically located multimodal terminals can efficiently tranship freight from one mode to another, operating 24 h a day. This transhipment can be implemented in an automated, robotized manner. Such technological innovations provide terminals with a promising future.
Third, freight flows may be too thin to guarantee a satisfactory loading efficiency. The solution can be found by rearranging logistic chains to bundle freight and achieve thicker freight flows.
This contribution describes — from a Dutch perspective — current problems of multi‐modality in European freight transport and some promising developments concerning terminals and networks. A technological and organizational breakthrough towards multimodality in freight transport is anticipated. This implies a change in the spatial configuration of freight flows and multimodal terminals along with the optimal choice of a combination of modes. This paper indicates an optimalization problem on a European scale, aiming at the minimization of private costs and a reduction of environmental costs.