Freight Mode Choice Behavior Model Incorporating Spatial Characteristics

One important reason for the low share of railway transportation in the freight market is that railway service providers fail to accurately grasp shippers' mode choice behavior and thus cannot provide competitive freight service. Based on the 116 shippers' behavior data from adaptive experiments, this paper constructs a multinomial Logit model and a mixed Logit model incorporating time, cost, cargo characteristics and choice inertia, which also introduces the interaction between spatial characteristics and time to reveal the effects of time on utility under different spatial characteristics. The results show that, in addition to transportation time and cost, the density of cargo, choice inertia and shippers' characteristics affect the freight mode choice behavior significantly. Because of the differences in distance, cargo type (value) and economic development level, the freight values of time with the same origin region but different destination regions are significantly different. The values were the highest in Eastern China and Southern China and the lowest in Central and Northern regions. Copyright © 2021 by Science Press.