Evaluating the Rail-Based Multimodal Freight Transportation after HSR Entry in Yangtze River Delta Economics Zone

In recent years, China keeps working on restructuring the country’s multimodal transport and highly develops the high-speed rail (HSR) infrastructure to improve transport efficiency. As the economic engine of China, the Yangtze River Delta region keeps leading the HSR development and the transporting modal transformation within the whole country. The fast development of HSR on the one hand highly improves passengers’ travel efficiency and, on the other hand, releases the capacity of conventional rail infrastructures to support regional multimodal freight transport. This study applies a three-level AHP structure and constructs a comprehensive index to evaluate the development of a rail-based multimodal freight transport network including railway, rail-water, and rail-road. The comprehensive index contains 14 quantitative and 8 qualitative indexes, covering the rail-based infrastructures, multimodal transport capability, freight transport performance, and transport sustainability. The comprehensive index is then applied to analyze the rail-based multimodal freight transport for the Yangtze River Delta region. The operational data of 59 freight stations and more than 200 railway links of the Yangtze River Delta were recorded. About 172 valid questionnaires were collected to score the qualitative indexes, and all the quantitative indexes are scored based on the real-life freight data. The results reveal the impacts of HSR development on rail freight transportation and show that Zhejiang has led rail freight transportation while Shanghai mainly leads the waterway freight transportation. Meanwhile, Anhui performs very well on road-rail transportation and Jiangsu has made a great improvement on water-rail transportation.