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transport, it could be divided into collaborative type
and connecting type. Collaborative multimodal
refers to the process that enterprises which own two
or more modes of transport take over the goods and
ship them to the designated delivery premises, in
accordance with the unified regulations or
agreement. Connecting multimodal refers to the
process that the multimodal transport operators
organize enterprises which own two or more modes
of transport to take over the goods and ship them to
the designated delivery premises. At present,
Collaborative multimodal is still the main operation
form of multimodal transport. Under this kind of
operation form, each carrier needs to complete the
actual transportation task as well as convergence and
organization of related freight. Then they need to
take risks or distribute benefits under the relevant
contracts or agreements.
1.3 Transport in High Seas as the Main
Mode
According to different combination of transport
modes, there exist different multimodal transport
forms, such as, road and railway transport, sea and
railway transport and high seas transport, etc. The
practical situation showed that the high seas
intermodal transport is still the main mode of
transport in China. Limited by the railway
management system and capability, combined
transport associated with the railway transport in
China has shown a declining trend. Particularly, the
enormous potential of sea-rail transport is difficult to
be found and transport of containers from ports to
inland area could only rely on the road, which made
the efficiency dissatisfied. In developed countries,
the rail transport share of total port container
throughput is usually 20% to 40%, while the figure
is only 1.5% in China in 2007.
Road and railway transport in the land crossings
played an important role, but it is constricted by the
railway container transport management system
either. Some other transport means (such as air and
railway transport, air and water transport) has also
made some developments in recent years, but
generally speaking, those developments is
comparatively very small.
1.4 Continental Bridge Transport as
the Characteristics
China has a natural advantage on Continental Bridge
transport, and three land bridges supply lines we
have are able to maintain a volume about 1 million
TEUs per year. Short distance and accelerated speed
of operation has not only greatly reduced the
transport time, but also saved the transportation cost
about 20% to 30%. The huge advantage has greatly
increased the throughput of the land crossings.
However, considering the needs of transit
declaration in many countries, in addition to the
different rail standard in European, advantage of
Continental Bridge transport could be greatly
reduced.
2 PROBLEMS FACED BY
CHINA’S INTERNATIONAL
MULTIMODAL TRANSPORT
2.1 Unintegrated Management System
Directly Reduces the Efficiency of
International Multimodal
Transport (IMT)
Multimodal transport involves cooperation and
integration of different kinds of transportation. It’s
essential to design the management system in an
overall perspective in order to take the advantages of
multimodal transport. However, now China still
adopts single-modal management system, leading to
a lack of coordination and cooperation between
different departments, poor integration among
infrastructures, unreasonable work division of
transport methods as well as blind competitions on
sources of same goods. A lack of information
sharing also results in negative influence such as
multimodal transport’s complex process,
complicated procedures and low efficiency.
2.2 Inadequate Railway
Transportation Capacity is the Key
Element Strangling the
Development of Ship-with-train
Transportation
In the total national-wide requirement for train, only
35% of them can be met. All over the nation, each
day there are 280,000 to 290,000 railway carriages
that are need by different places but the maximum
loading capacity of our railway department is only
about 100,000 carriages. The lack of transportation
capacity has seriously impeded the development of
ship-with-train transportation. With the continuously
promotion of our Socialist market economic system,
the old planning management system without
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