The 20th and 21st joint COTA International Conference of Transportation Professionals (CICTP 2020-21)

China Railway Express (CR Express) is born to deepen the economic cooperation with countries along the “Silk Road and Economic Belt”. Increasing the market share of CR Express requires a better understanding about the transport demand for export containers and shippers’ choice preference. The aims of this study are threefold: first, this paper measures the current and future volume of export containers by coefficient method; second, a two-stage survey is conducted in three major cities of Zhejiang, to collect shippers’ preference data. Multinomial Logit Model and Mixed Logit Model are applied to analyze the decisive variables which influence the shippers’ choice behavior significantly. Finally, future market share of CR Express based on the reduction of time and cost are calculated, and development countermeasures are discussed. The current volume of export containers is huge, while the market share of CR Express is below 1%. Estimation results show that in addition to travel time and freight cost, value and weight of commodity also affect shippers’ choice behavior significantly, while reliability isn’t one of the decisive factors considered by shippers. Forecast results of market share implies that cost reduction brings more increase of market share than time reduction at the same level, and the increase is more than twice when cost is reduced by 20% compared with 10%.

CR Express, Export Container, Coefficient Model, Mixed Logit Model, Market Share