Investigation of the optimal position of maritime transportation in multimodal transportation for Turkey

Turkey with its potential to play a central role in global and local perspectives is at a strategic location. It is a transit country in the region with its large vehicle fleet and the volume of the highway. The mostly utilized mode of transportation is the highway transportation, which has the highest unit transportation costs. Dependency to road transportation also leads to some problems. In order to overcome these problems, create a more sustainable transportation system and minimize the negative environmental impacts of road transportation, utilization of other modes of transportation in proper routes and development of multimodal transportation solutions will be beneficial. The factors such as high cost, negative impacts on environment, the excess of the losses arising from traffic accidents in highway transportation, require an increased emphasis on railway transportation which will be a more sustainable transportation mode in the future. In our country, the developments on this issue have gained momentum in recent years, railway investments have been increased. It is seen that other developed countries also attach great value to the railways. Maritime transportation has become an indicator of economic development and prosperity throughout the history. Maritime transportation enables to improve the trade relations at a high level, as well as provide all types of goods in a safe, environmentally friendly, on-site, timely and correctly. All kinds of positive developments in the field of maritime transportation will allow the long-term performance of the overall transportation system, will provide the most advanced benefit to other sectors and end users. This can be achieved with the precautions by high quality maritime transportation an even, having high quality transportation service in all modes of transportation. This study is important due to determination of the optimal role of sea transportation by a careful examination of Turkey's freight transportation by road, rail , maritime transportation and the advantages of each modes and their integration. In Part 2 of the study, transportation modes and advantages have been investigated in the study. Then, in Part 3, the history of Turkey in highway, railway and maritime transportation and also transportation statistics have been researched and evaluated in detail. The physical extent of transportation modes and particulars of existing fleet and vehicles have been presented. It is concluded that maritime transportation, which is the most economic mode, has been preferred less in the national shipping. In Part 4, the current transportation infrastructure of our country have been submitted with comparisons to other countries. In Part 5 of the study, technical and economic modeling has been conducted considering the internal and external costs. The alteration of transportation cost subject to the parameters that effect cost such as route length, fullness ratio, vehicle speed, fuel price escalations have been investigated in detail by applying the economic model to unimodal and multimodal transportation in Part 6 and Part 7. The advantaged route lengths and the optimal position of maritime transportation in our country have been determined. The increase in fuel prices lead to result for the choice of maritime transportation. Moreover, in Part 8, the optimization of the capacity and number of vessels for maritime transportation in Turkey have been done by considering different vessel tonnages. The alteration in unit transportation cost in the cases of having same DWT and different DWT vessels in the fleet have also been studied. In depressed market and high fuel prices conditions, maritime companies adopt to slow steaming applications in order to reduce their costs. Due to the decrease in fuel prices sourced by slow-steaming, the unit transportation costs will also be decreased. In this context, in Part 9, speed optimization has been done for various tonnaged vessels for maritime transportation. Optimum speed is defined as the speed that maintains minimum cost. Considering changes in fuel costs, which includes the most important part of transportation cost, changes on the optimum speed depending on the escalation in fuel prices have been shown. Economic model has been implemented in the framework of the existing distribution of transportation in our country and scenario analysis by selecting three routes in Part 10. Selected routes are Istanbul-Van, Istanbul-Erzurum and Istanbul-Gaziantep, as it has been seen that it is highly utilized from highway transportation for freight transportation in these routes as in the country. The savings for monthly, annually and unit costs and also the optimum transportation mode have been determined in the cases of shifting the dominance of highway transportation to railway, multimodal maritime-highway and multimodal maritime-railway modes where applicaple. The study has been concluded with the evaluations in Part 11 and results and sugesstions in Part 12. This thesis is an enlightening study for the researchers in the fields of logistics and costs since it consists of a comprehensive investigation and analysis for unimodal and multimodal freight transportation in our country. Economic model is at a level that can be applied to all routes. The study is naturally limited to available data, and in the result of recording the daily, weekly, monthly and annual cargo movements comprehensively and evaluating the records will ensure a detailed investigation in the future.