The paper deals to the need of a new approach for the inland water transport. There is a great contradiction between the European official documents related to the inland water transport and the practice. The analysis was focused on evaluating the present status of this type of transport and its future goals in the context of the new challenges to the EU28. The first intermediate conclusion of the analysis is that the great economic disparities between the Member States led to great disparities related to inland water fleet and infrastructure. As the result, the economic importance of this type of transport decreased in the EU28. A distinct part of the paper is dedicated to the inland water transport in Romania and focused especially on the Danube sector. This chapter points out the real economic, logistic and environmental challenges for Romania regarding the transport on Danube. A great challenge for the analysis in this paper was the difficulty to find official statistical data related to inland water transport across the EU28. The main conclusion of the paper is that the inland water transport will be not able to recover and develop on short and medium terms.