Mixed bag of results for French road haulage developments last year

摘要

Road haulage in France increased by 3.7% on average last year, as the perusal of statistics published recently by the transport ministry reveals. This corresponds to a transport performance of 219.2 billion tonne kilometres (tkm). Domestic traffic, which rose by 4.7%, was a notch above international operations, though the latter also managed to grow by 3.2%. The general improvement was even better than that registered in 2006, when an average of + 3% and approximately 200 billion tkm were recorded. But the ministry pointed out that the increases occurred primarily in the first three quarters last year, whilst developments in the fourth quarter took a distinct turn for the worse. The transportation of finished industrial goods (+5.6%) and of construction material (+5.4%) improved at above average rates. The disparity in international flows is striking, with import volumes rising by 5.5%, whilst export quantities declined by 5.8%.