The Application of Policy Leverage in Promoting the Sustainable Development of Intermodal Freight Transport

China Academy of Transportation Sciences, Research Centre of Comprehensive transportation, 100029 Beijing, China

Abstract

With the rapid growth of transportation, environmental issues emerges. In order to achieve the society healthy development objective, transportation needs to develop sustainably. This paper proposes that intermodalism is crucial and efficient to transportation sustainability. The traditional intermodal transportation only considers about cost, time and reliability in choosing transportation mode and routes. First, this paper proposes the methodology of sustainable intermodal freight transport, which consider not only temporal and distance attributes, but also cost, energy, and emissions attributes, including emissions of carbon dioxide(CO₂), particulate matter(PM₁₀), sulfur oxides(SO_x), volatile organic compounds(VOC_s), and oxides of nitrogen(NO_x). Then, this paper indicates that public policies is very important for sustainable transportation, because of the market failure in some cases. At last, the paper propose some policies that will help us a lot to achieve sustainable freight transport. The main policies include mode subsidies, infrastructure investment, economic incentives and technology improvement.