Container sea ports and network connections within the Gulf of Finland

The world was revolutionised by container transport during the late 1950s, but technology started to play a key role in Northern Europe during the end of the 1980s. Rarely research has concerned about small spoke countries, which is our interest in this work. We analyse the longitudinal development of the first tier connections from and to Estonian, and Russian St. Petersburg container sea ports – these are also compared to most recent situation in Finland. Research shows that amount of connections have not increased during the longer period of time, but volumes have shown significant improvement. Most important container connections are available for a very small number of Northern European hubs in the studied sea ports offering critical opportunities for future development. Overall connections from Estonia are limited to Northern Europe, but are very good for nearby neighbours, as is the case with Finland. However, St. Petersburg container sea port has interesting direct long-distance connections to the Americas. The St. Petersburg container sea port has developed as an important part of Baltic Sea Region container transportation network, and its neighbours need to take this into account (e.g., arrangement of empty containers/low fared exports).