site.btaEurostat: Maritime Transport with Largest Share in All Freight Transport in Bulgaria in 2022

In 2022, road freight transport represented 24.9% of all freight transport performance (in tonne-kilometres) in the EU as it went up by 0.4 percentage points (pp) when compared to 2021, according to Eurostat data on Tuesday.

Maritime transport still accounted for the largest share of freight transport at 67.8%, but went down from 68.2% in 2021. Rail transport saw a slight increase from 5.4% in 2021 to 5.5% in 2022, while inland waterway slightly decreased from 1.8% in 2021 to 1.6% in 2022. Air transport (0.2%) remained the same in 2022 when compared with the previous year.

Out of 22 EU members with a coastline, in 2022, maritime was the main mode of freight transport for 15 of them and accounted for more than 70% of freight transport in 10 countries. The countries with more than 95% share of maritime transport were Portugal (98.1%), Cyprus (97.2%), and Greece (96.4%).

In Bulgaria, in 2022, maritime transport accounted for 50.4% of total freight transport.

Meanwhile, the countries with the highest share of road freight transport among the EU countries were Luxembourg (85%), the Czech Republic (77.3%), followed by Hungary and Poland (69% each). In Bulgaria, the share of road freight transport was 29.5%.

Freight transport by inland waterways accounted for 8.1% of total freight transport in Bulgaria in 2022, while the share of air freight transport was 0.8%.

Lithuania was the EU country with the highest share of rail freight transport (37.2 per cent) in total freight transport in 2022.

In Bulgaria, rail freight transport accounted for 11.2% of total freight transport.

In the 10 years between 2012 and 2022, only the share of road freight transport (+2.9 percentage points) increased in the European Union.