by David Dzagania | Exclusive for AzerNEWS Transport corridors are increasingly discussed in the language of large numbers: five million tonnes, ten million, fifteen million. Maps are drawn, agreements are signed, new names enter the political vocabulary, and expected cargo volumes are sometimes announced long before the first commercial shipment has tested whether the route actually works. My years in transport logistics taught me to begin from a different point: is there a real cargo that has an economic reason to use this route?
That simple question remains, in my view, one of the best tests of whether we are looking at a genuine commercial corridor or merely at infrastructure with strategic potential. A case from my own professional experience still shapes the way I look at the transport geography of the Caucasus today. In 2016, we were working on the transportation of polymer products, including polypropylene, from Iran to the Ukrainian market.
The cargo originated in the Tabriz area, while the client already had an established logistics scheme relying on the Turkish direction and Turkish ports for onward movement toward Ukraine. Our task was not geopolitical and had nothing to do with proving that one country was preferable to another. It was a normal commercial problem: redesign the chain, calculate the full cost and determine whether a more efficient solution existed.
On the map, the Turkish option appeared logical. It was geographically shorter and operationally familiar. Yet when we calculated the entire chain, including waiting time and the costs generated by bottlenecks along the existing route, the result changed.
We developed a Georgian solution in which cargo moved from Tabriz toward Georgia, transloading took place in Tbilisi, and the shipment then continued toward Ukraine. The route involved more kilometres and an additional logistics operation, but the total transportation cost was still approximately 35–40% lower than under the previous Turkish-port scheme. That difference is important because it shows what maps often fail to capture.
Distance is only one component of logistics economics. Waiting time, border performance, transit charges, administrative restrictions, carrier availability, customs procedures, transloading, insurance, backhaul possibilities and predictability can easily outweigh several hundred kilometres of additional road. In our case, the geographically shorter option contained a bottleneck whose cost accumulated not only in money but also in time.
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