Port, airport and connections

How busy is the port of Trieste, and how does it compare with its neighbours? And how easy is the city to reach by air and by rail? These questions bear on a warehouse in the port’s hinterland as much as on a hotel in the city centre.

Here are the traffic figures for Trieste and Monfalcone, from the statistics of the Port Network Authority, next to those for Koper and Rijeka, from their own sources; passengers at Trieste Airport; freight trains at the ports; and direct links by rail and by air.

Tonnes in Trieste are largely liquid bulk, mostly oil landed for the pipeline. To gauge the rest of the port’s traffic, look at containers and semi-trailers.

Containers are counted in TEU, the twenty-foot equivalent unit. A large part of the movements is ship-to-ship transhipment, which never reaches the hinterland: a fall or a rise in TEU does not by itself tell you how much cargo passes through the city.

Freight trains are those handled at the ports; direct passenger trains are those read from the official timetable for a few dates this autumn.

For a warehouse or an industrial building, the questions these figures raise are practical ones: how much of the traffic actually stops in the region, and by what mode it moves on. That is why the rail figures sit next to the tonnes.

• Koper’s ro-ro units are cars and cannot be compared with Trieste’s lorries and semi-trailers.
• The neighbouring ports publish using their own methods: comparisons hold for orders of magnitude.
• The latest year of some series is provisional, and data for the current year are partial: the period is stated alongside.
• There are no direct flights from Trieste Airport to Munich or Vienna, and no direct trains between Trieste and Ljubljana.