© Museum Plantin-Moretus
Momentum for modal shift for retail
‘W
e need to focus fully on logistics real estate at multi-modal transport hubs,’ says Antoon Van Coillie, CEO of Blue Line Logistics, an innovative player in inland navigation. Cross docks on the edge of cities enable goods to be easily transferred from a barge to, for example, cargo bikes or small zero-emission vans.
28
CEUSTERS l Industry: logistics
Belgium, with the port of Antwerp as a driving force, is one of the most attractive logistics hubs in Europe. Today lorry drivers are currently spending 44 hours per year sitting in traffic jams. Despite major infrastructure work, no immediate improvement is in sight. According to the Federal Planning Office, the volume of freight traffic will increase by 27 percent over the next twenty years. That means even more gridlock on the roads. So why are we not looking for alternatives? Rail, and our rivers and canals, for example. Belgium has 1076 kilometres of navigable waterways. And across Europe as a whole, there are 25,000 kilometres of navigable waterways connecting the main industrial centres. The major players in the logistics and transport sector are increasingly making the connection that they need to consider complementarity between modes. A sustainable and intelligent mix of transport in which freight is no longer transported solely by road but also by rail or via inland waterways.
Cheap, sustainable and on time Inland navigation is on the rise, Flanders is catching up fast. Never before so much freight has been transported via rivers and canals in Belgium. In the
© Museum Brouwershuis
Gilbert van Schoonbeke international planning prize Antwerp would have been completely different if not for Gilbert van Schoonbeke (1519-1556). In his short life, he started the idea of making streets in straight lines, built homes and public buildings, and expanded the area of the city and the port. His influence on the cityscape can hardly be overestimated. The Stadswaag, the Vrijdagmarkt and the Nieuwstad (Het Eilandje) owe their existence to Antwerp’s ‘first town planner’. The city is celebrating Van Schoonbeke with exhibitions, tours, concerts and a coffee table book. Modern-day real estate professionals too are rallying behind the Van Schoonbeke Year with a planning prize, highlighting ‘the lasting accomplishments that we thank to the “meliorator” from Antwerp, whose fame reached as far as Florence’. The instigators will honour a high-quality inner city project implemented within a radius of 1000 kilometres of Antwerp. Jury members include the city architect Christian Rapp and landscape architect Bas Smet. The award ceremony for the “Gilbert Van Schoonbeke planning prize” will take place in Antwerp, at the end of 2019. The winner will be awarded prize money of EUR 10,000.
Q2/2018 alone, Belgian barges transported over 52 million tonnes of goods on the inland waterways. That is an increase of over 5 percent compared with the same period in the previous year. This success can also be seen in the logistics real estate sector. A market analysis by CEUSTERS shows that more businesses are looking for a warehouse near a waterway. CEUSTERS is encouraging this trend and considers it as a possible solution for the growing traffic jams on our motorways. ‘It is good that Belgian inland navigation is experiencing this advance. Especially since the traffic jams are not getting any shorter, nor is there any decline in home deliveries of parcels. Moreover, inland navigation is cheaper, more energy efficient and more punctual than road transport. Undoubtedly it is one of the solutions to the growing
