Determining the Importance of Factors for Transport Modes in Freight Transportation

The road transportation has been overly used in freight transportation for decades, and it has undesirable effects on the environment. Nowadays, with the ever-increasing awareness of environmental issues which is mainly caused by road freight transportation, intermodal transport is thus promoted in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But, even though many policies promoting the use of intermodal transport have been proposed, they have less impact to trigger shippers to shift mode from road transport to intermodal transport. The main reason might be that the real requirements of shippers towards transport mode are not well understood, hence this research is to investigate freight transport mode choice from their perspectives. The requirements for transport modes are abstracted into a set of factors, and knowing the perceived importance assigned to each factor is helpful to understand what should be improved in intermodal transport. In this research, the literature review regarding freight transportation mode is done aiming to generate an exhaustive list of decisive factors, and these factors are transport cost, door-to-door travel time, on-time reliability, flexibility, frequency, and reduction of CO2-emission. However, apart from these six factors, characteristics of the freight itself do play a role as a premise in freight transport mode choice, and factors are possibly perceived differently regarding different types of freights, therefore, four type of freights are chosen, which are freights from manufacturing industry, agriculture industry, perishable food industry, and chemical industry. Best-Worst method which is a Multiple Criteria Decision Making method is chosen to conduct data analysis, and online questionnaires are sent to the respondents which are divided into three groups: practitioners, industry experts, and professors. And, since this research mainly focus on two regions: Europe and the United States, all respondents are chosen from these two regions. The results of data analysis indicate an overall ranking of all factors, where transport cost is viewed as the most important, closely followed by on-time reliability, and reduction of CO2- emission is viewed as the least important. Moreover, through the comparison of the general perception of factors regarding four types of freights, it can be seen that one or more factors are perceived differently based on four types of freights. Besides, different groups of respondents do perceive specific factor differently, and perceptions of practitioners and professors differ a lot. Since these two types of comparison analysis have not been done in the previous literature, so this research is the first study to provide a perspective for understanding factors from the perceptions of different types of respondents and in terms of different types of freights. Besides, by including reduction of CO2-emission, this research provides an overview of this ever-increasing important factor.Technology, Policy and ManagementMaster Technology, Policy and Managemen