TRANSPORT Management 87

As usual, I am sharing with you here a few things that have recently caught my attention. Please feel free to react to them and to send me your thoughts, impressions, ideas, etc. in response. A step in the right direction? A pilot project on the use of ecocombis in Wallonia will be launched in a few months (read also Jean Vincent's opinion on this) . Is that good news? " With a mini-test like in Flanders, where only two ecocombis are driving around, we can only achieve very limited results ", Philippe Degraef, director of Febetra, rightly noted. The home stretch. When you read these lines, the introduction of the kilometre charge - unless we are surprised at the last minute, which is always possible in this complex dossier - will only be a matter of days. Three operators will be ready to compete with each other: Satellic, the operator that designed the system, the French Axxès which should be ready by 1 April and the Italian Telepass which will take its first steps a few months later. The transport companies can thus let the competition play out. Will the vans pull the chestnuts out of the fire? It is of course still too early to estimate, but to a certain extent there could be a “van shifting”: according to some – such as Traxio, the federation of car dealers – the sale of light commercial vehicles will increase to the detriment of lorries. The latter will have to pay a kilometre charge, while this does not apply to light commercial vehicles. But I would not like to conclude without first drawing your attention to the “structural makeover” that your favourite magazine has received. There are new sections such as the “Duel” (with two opposing opinions), the “Carte Blanche” (an external opinion on trends in transport) and the “Panorama” which – mainly through photos – lets you discover an unusual facet of the world of transport in the broad sense of the word. And in our next edition, you will find even more surprises!