These provisional port statistics for 2005 show that:

• Total freight traffic rose by 8.5 million tonnes (Mt) to 581.6 Mt in 2005, 1.5 per cent up on 2004;
• Inwards traffic rose by 9.7 Mt to 352.1 Mt, whilst outwards traffic fell by 1.2 Mt to 229.4 Mt;
• Freight traffic through the 52 major UK ports totalled 565.8 Mt, up 7.6 Mt on 2004. This represented 97 per cent of total UK port freight traffic in 2005;
• Grimsby and Immingham maintained its position as the UK’s leading port in 2005 with 58.1 Mt (0.4 Mt up on 2004), followed by Tees and Hartlepool with 55.8 Mt (up 2.0 Mt) and London with 53.8 Mt (up 0.6 Mt);

The top ten ports in 2005, in terms of tonnage, were as follows:

Tags: uk, ports, port statistics, europe, navigation, shipping, london, liverpool, freight traffic

This suspended rail system allegedly has many practical uses for the masses that must commute in cities flooded with cars from the urban sprawl.

To better understand the use of a FlyWay, the SwedeTrack people have provided some background insight:

SwedeTrack has in detail studied how a good transportation system for people and for goods should function, and what attributes it should have, in order to be of optimal use in an urban environmenet.

The cheapest and quickest way to produce a functioning system is by further development of the “SIPEM” system developed by Siemens in Germany. We at SwedeTrack have chosen to call this complete system of ours for “FLYWAY”

Since Siemens has chosen to no longer promote its own system, SwedeTrack has developed this by itself. Thus, FLYWAY is a genuinely Swedish project.

The details that distinguish “FLYWAY”® from other existing and proposed systems are:

• the beamcars can be equipped with lifts
• the beamcars can be equipped with swiveling functions
• the system is designed for scheduled transports, individual transports and transportation of goods, intermixed
• the system has computer-controlled functions that allow the size and complexity of the network to grow indefinitely
• the system uses addressing functions based on that of the Internet

Since February 2004, SwedeTrack System Inc. is a public company and offers shares (Swedish only) to interested parties.

The inventors of this engaging urban transportation system have also caught our attention with this statement: “To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.” — in our view, when two distinct ideas meet for the first time, they inevitably give way to a third idea which is, by its very nature, something new.

On a lighter note, the term “FlyWay” is presented as a registered trademark but our search at the USPTO yielded no relevant results. Perhaps it’s registered in Sweden.

Tags: sweden, swedish flyway, swedetrack, suspended rail, mass transit, alternative transport, europe