In 2023, about two-thirds (67.4%) of all goods handled within the EU, in terms of quantity of the loads for the distance traveled by the shipments, were transported by sea, while 25.3% of the total tonne-kilometres were transported by road, 5.5% on rail, 1.6% on inland waterways and 0.2% by rail aerial. This was announced today by Eurostat, specifying that, compared to the 2013, road transport was the only way to of transport to record an increasing share, with an increase of 2.8 percentage points over ten years, while over the period the share of maritime transport decreased by 2.0 points percentages, that of inland waterways by 0.6 points and that of rail transport by 0.2 points.

The European Union's statistics institute explained that in the 2023 for 15 of the 22 nations with EU maritime access Sea transport was the main mode of transport of goods and in ten countries accounted for more than 70% of the Transport. Over 95% of goods were transported via in Portugal (98.2%), Cyprus (96.5%) and Greece (96.4%), while More than 70% of all goods were transported by road in Luxembourg (84.5%), the Czech Republic (77.7%) and Hungary (70.7%). In addition, high shares of rail freight transport were recorded in Lithuania (31.7%), Slovakia (30.1%), Austria (29.1%) and Slovenia (27.1%). Romania recorded the highest share high levels of goods transported along its inland waterways (18.9%), followed by the Netherlands (11.7%) and Bulgaria (8.7%). The Air transport accounted for at least 1% of freight transport overall only in seven countries, with Romania (1.6%), Luxembourg (1.5%), Hungary (1.3%) and Lithuania (1.3%) totalled the higher altitudes.