Freight economy - Transportation system

Transportation is both a specific activity, whose characteristics justify its own approach, and an activity mixed with others. On the one hand, transport is an industrial activity whose techniques, working conditions (particularly the itinerant nature of many workstations) and use of enormous collective equipment (most of the infrastructure) set it apart from other activities. Professional cultures are particularly pronounced: a sailor is not a railway worker or a truck driver, and neither are they the same as an office or factory worker... On the other hand, transport is necessarily applied to a product originating from and destined for another economic activity: freight transport is never an end in itself, but rather an integral part of the production and distribution chain.

The term logistics, with its multiple meanings depending on the context in which it is used, expresses the intimate technical and organizational interdependence that links transport to other production activities. An indication of this intimate relationship, and of the difficulties it raises, is the fact that only part of transport operations are delegated to specialized companies belonging to the transport sector. A large proportion of transport operations remain internal to agricultural, industrial or service companies, which prefer to use their own resources and ensure that transport meets the needs of their main activity, that of the branch to which they belong.

Moreover, while most freight transport production is carried out by private or public companies, subject to the rules of the market and competition, the role of the State is powerful and multifaceted, whether in terms of infrastructure, technical and safety regulations, taxation, social regulations or economic regulation.

The central operating mechanism of the freight transport market is particularly delicate because, since it concerns a service (a production operation, a process analyzed in [AG 8 005] ) and not a product, its equilibrium should ideally be perfect, at all times and in all places. The market therefore more often than not operates in a state of disequilibrium, and in particular of more or less chronic overcapacity, the only way to escape the opposite risk of undercapacity, of bottlenecks impeding the fluidity of economic circuits.

In addition, we need to take into account the external effects of transport on the environment, i.e. the effects on agents not directly involved in commercial...