The public licenses are decreasing, the ones for transports in own account are increasing
Even though they are a lot fewer than the ones for public transport, the own account transports licenses are increasing. This shows that during crisis times, the Romanians choose internal solutions.
"Comparing the transport licenses, we find out that we have a decrease of 6.8% compared with the level of 2008 of the merchandise transport licenses, part of these hauliers being found in the category of own account transports, after they decided to act only to cover their own needs", showed Florian Coman, deputy genera manager of the Romanian Road Authority (RRA), who presented the situation of the transport market within the conference organized by Ziua Cargo. He underlined the fact that the merchandise transport has 80% of the total number of the transport licenses, 7% goes to own account transport and 13% to the passenger transports. "If we would believe the declarations of some federations or owners' associations regarding the fiscal evasion in passenger transport and taxi activities, there is a probability that the turnovers would be similar", said the deputy general manager of RRA.
The leasing is suffering
Regarding the structure of the fleets, Florian Coman underlined the small percentage (2.9%) of the vehicles between 7.5 and 12 t that have a direct connection to the infrastructure works ordered by the local, municipal or district authorities. "What should be the conclusion? That these works are done with vehicles bigger than 12 t, while the limit of weight on the district roads is much lower", said he.
He also mentioned that the number of leased vehicles decreased drastically, while the decreasing is not as important in the case of the vehicles owned by transporters or rented. "The ownership of the vehicles is double compared with the leasing and 4 times bigger than the rented vehicles. Regarding the manufacturing year, we could be worried, because 30% of the vehicles that now are in the 10-15 years category will pass to the category over 15 years at the end of this year or at the beginning of 2011. And this will happen while they aren't investing any longer in new vehicles, buy or lease. The consequences will show in pollution, road safety and the operational costs of the ownership", said the deputy general manager of RRA.
Inflation of drivers and designated persons. But...
The situation of the designated persons is equally interesting. "If you study the problem, you find out that, even though there is a high number of designated person certificates owners, there are a couple of hundreds of transport operators that still don't have a designated person or are over the period of 60 days when they could have changed the designated person. Also, we have 98,316 owners of tachograph cards, but if we count the number of certificates for merchandise or passenger transport, we have an inflation of drivers. I often participated, together with my coworkers, in examination sessions and the answers were that they want other specializations because they want to be able to find work easier, both in case of drivers and designated persons. One more observation: even though the number of merchandise and passenger companies totalizes 35,000, the control cards for the tachographs are only 5,607. The conclusion is that 28,000 operators don't check their activity from the point of view of the driving and rest times", concluded the deputy general manager of RRA.
Digital Tachograph Cards
Drivers 98,316
Workshops 829
Transport operators 5,607
Control 685
Access to profession
Drivers
- Merchandise transport 45,504
- Passenger transport 27,969
- Outsized transport 28,300
- Dangerous goods transport 42,503
- Taxi 35,200
Designated persons 44,010
- Merchandise transport 35,310
- Passenger transport 8,700
Safety counselors 6,203
Alexandru STOIAN
alexandru.stoian@ziuacargo.ro
Publicat in revista Ziua Cargo din June 2010
