Founded in January 2023, the Initiative for Large-Scale and Heavy Transport (VI GST) serves as a joint platform for more than 20 associations representing the shipping and transportation industries, offering effective solutions for a transparent, reliable, and practical process for the approval and execution of GST.

GST are key to a successful energy transition

The poor state of maintenance of the transportation infrastructure, as well as the resulting slow and difficult-to-plan approval processes for GST, are currently hindering many important public and private projects. This has serious consequences, for example, with regard to the urgently needed expansion of renewable energy: For example, transporting wind turbines from the production site to the installation site poses an enormous logistical challenge given the dimensions and weight of the individual turbine components—because before transport, all roads, curves, bridges, and other potential bottlenecks must be inspected, and the necessary permits obtained. To ensure that the goal of installing six new wind turbines daily—necessary to meet expansion targets—is achieved, approximately 60,000 GSTs are required annually in this sector alone, due to the size and weight of the necessary components.

A Competitive Economy and a Prosperous Society

However, the importance of GST for the economy and society extends far beyond energy supply (including power poles, transformers, and wind turbines). In addition to transporting machinery in plant construction and agriculture, as well as for production facilities of all kinds, GST is also essential for

• infrastructure development and mobility (e.g., in bridge and civil engineering, for locks, train stations, and rail vehicles)
• residential and commercial construction (including construction machinery, metal, and reinforced concrete components)
• communications technology (including radio and telephone towers, satellite systems)
• public health and services (including hospitals, logistics centers, and warehouses)
• education, culture, and research (including museums, events, works of art, and research facilities)

of crucial importance. Since GSTs are indispensable not only for numerous economic sectors but also for basic social services, it is all the more important that transportation infrastructure be upgraded and that the lengthy and cumbersome application and approval processes be optimized and expedited.

A robust and permeable infrastructure is of vital importance for GST

The transport of excessively heavy and/or oversized cargo on public roads is subject to a highly complicated and federally complex permitting process. The ultimate goal is to protect the transportation infrastructure, ensure the flow of traffic, and minimize potential hazards associated with such exceptional transports.

The destination of a GST may be a production site, a construction site, an end user, or a port from which the cargo embarks on an international journey. Due to longer distances and steadily increasing infrastructure bottlenecks on the roads, many heavy-haul shipments are now also being transferred to inland waterways or rail—which do not require GST permits—for the main leg of the journey. Since multimodal loading points are often difficult to reach by road, and rail lines and inland waterway facilities are also increasingly dilapidated, the smooth multimodal handling of GSTs is equally challenging.

Logistics companies must therefore sometimes navigate significant detours to transport heavy and oversized cargo. The result is transport routes that are difficult to calculate and unnecessarily long, sometimes delayed deliveries, and significantly rising transport and permit costs. Not least for this reason, the accessibility of production facilities as well as loading and unloading sites is increasingly becoming a fundamental location issue.

Massive damage to Germany as a business location is already being felt

Apart from the medium- to long-term overall damage to Germany as a business and industrial hub, the highly complex application and permitting procedures for oversized cargo result in immediate annual losses of several hundred million euros across all sectors. The consequences of this bureaucratic jungle can be illustrated using examples from individual economic sectors:

• In logistics, the extremely high burden of approval processes (duration, multiple applications, rescheduling) results in opportunity costs that are, in some cases, very high and, above all, unpredictable. The results are order cancellations, delays, a heavy burden on the workforce, damage to the company’s national and international reputation, and the looming withdrawal of freight forwarders from the GST sub-segment
• In agriculture, the lack of flexibility in transporting large, wide, and heavy agricultural machinery, combined with high dependence on weather conditions, leads to problems during harvest—especially since failure to present all necessary permits poses significant liability risks
• The German economy’s high export and import ratio necessitates numerous road and port feeder transport services, particularly in the machinery and plant engineering sectors, with many production sites located in rural areas of central and southern Germany. The short-notice delivery of machinery, equipment, or spare parts via GST is effectively impossible, resulting in damage and repair work that lead to downtime and production losses.
• In the construction sector, the lack of transport permits for GST leads to significant delays in the start of construction, downtime during assembly, and delays in the delivery of machinery and cranes, meaning that deadlines cannot be met and, overall, fewer projects can be completed

The VI GST Presents a Reform Program for GST

The Association for Large-Scale and Heavy Transport (VI GST) has identified the most significant GST problem areas in a position paper and developed appropriate solutions. The BDI is represented on the VI GST board.

Many proposed solutions—particularly those involving the renovation and new construction of bridges, roads, and multimodal interfaces—will only have an impact in the long term. However, much can already be achieved and resolved quickly in the short term through consistent reduction of red tape, sensible and practical regulations, a higher degree of digitization, and the political will to make incremental improvements.

Since the requirements placed on GST vary greatly depending on the economic sector, approval criteria should first and foremost be created that are more practical and tailored to the specific niche of the shippers.

Other key demands of the VI GST include:

• Adequately funding, maintaining, expanding, and making more effective use of transportation infrastructure
• Foster greater acceptance and establish appropriate regulations for the implementation of GST
• Examining multimodal transport and creating transport hubs to make the best possible use of the strengths of the individual modes of transport
• Gradually adapting administrative regulations and transport escort requirements under the principle of “safety with a sense of proportion”
• Shortening, expediting, and standardizing the processing time for permits, as well as making their costs predictable
• Revise and consistently digitize the federally organized procedural management system for large-scale and heavy transports (VEMAGS)