In the next years and decades the European Union faces the following challenges in the freight sector :

• ensure and increase economic growth and
• deal with an increase of freight transport demand
  

while at the same time

• reduce environmental emissions (mainly CO₂),
• reduce dependency on fossil energy,
• reduce accidents and
• avoid congestion and other negative impacts on the environment and population.

A lot of different stakeholder groups have created their proposals to achieve sustainable freight transport. Most of them address only part of the problem or focus on only one aspect of a solution. Following these advices leads to sub optimisation and less efficient solutions. A holistic approach is needed integrating all aspects of the problem (infrastructure, vehicles, fuels, interoperability etc.) and all types of criteria in the solution (research, technologies, policies and pricing).

FREIGHTVISION will therefore

• Develop a long-term vision and a robust and adaptive action plan both for transport and technology policy for sustainable long-distance freight transport,
• which are supported as much as possible by the relevant stakeholders.

In order to develop a vision and an action plan the following tasks will be performed: analyzing transport policy, technology development, and mega trends with regard to long-distance freight transport; integrating them into forecasts, developing scenarios how to reach a desirable future and defining for this the vision and action plan. (see Figure below)