Towards green port-hinterland transportation: Coordinating railway and road infrastructure in Shandong Province, China

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Highlights

  • The impacts of economic structural changes in the hinterland on a port’s throughput are explored.

  • Long-term CO2 emissions from port-hinterland freight transport are estimated.

  • Hybrid econometric and system dynamic modeling is applied to estimate transport emissions.

  • The effects of railway and road infrastructure development on reducing emissions are examined.

  • Policy implications for the development of port-hinterland transport infrastructure are provided.

Abstract

Port-hinterland transport is a freight transport mode that links ports and inland destinations and contributes to a large portion of the total CO2 emissions from the entire port-related logistic chain. Infrastructure development is conducive to reducing transport emissions. However, decision making regarding the development of port-hinterland transport infrastructures is complicated because port throughputs for different types of cargo change with economic structural changes (ESCs) in the port’s hinterland. Therefore, this study develops a hybrid econometric and system dynamic model to explore the impact of ESCs in the hinterland on a port’s throughput and to formulate suitable infrastructure decisions to reduce CO2 emissions from port-hinterland transport. The hybrid model is applied to the Qingdao port and its hinterland transport in Shandong Province, China. The results show that long-term CO2 emissions from port-hinterland transport will increase significantly because Shandong’s ESCs will lead to a notable increase in the freight volume of containers, despite a concurrent decrease in the freight volume of iron ore. To reduce port-hinterland transport emissions under ESCs, facilitating railway transport for containers prioritizes over other options. The results also reveal that whether the ESCs are considered will lead to different infrastructure decisions, and whether life-cycle emissions of infrastructure are considered may lead to different priorities of infrastructure options. The findings indicate that holistic view and collaboration among government entities and transport-related stakeholders should be emphasized in the decision making of transport infrastructure development.

Introduction

After experiencing rapid economic growth in the past three decades, China’s economy has undergone a major structural change and reform towards service-oriented and higher-value-added industrial profiles (Luukkanen et al., 2015, Zhang et al., 2017). As China’s third largest provincial economy, the gross domestic product (GDP) of Shandong Province in 2018 was 1.12 trillion dollars (Shandong Provincial Bureau of Statistics, 2019). However, Shandong’s economy is dominated by state-owned enterprises and traditional heavy industries, which have shown a remarkable slowing-down growth trend during the last decade (China National Bureau of Statistics, 2019). It is estimated that in the next few years, the GDP of Shandong will be surpassed by that of Zhejiang Province, whose population is almost half that of Shandong. As a result, the Shandong provincial government issued an important long-term industrial plan in 2018, aiming to realize industrial transformation and upgrading and enhance the kinetic energy between the old and new industries (Shandong Provincial Government, 2018).

With this in mind, as a coastal province, Shandong’s port-related activities play a crucial role in its economic growth. Considering the whole port-related logistic chain, port-hinterland transport serves as an essential link connecting ports and hinterlands (Chen et al., 2018). An efficient port-hinterland transport system is conducive to port efficiency improvement, economic growth, and hinterland industrial upgrades in the long term (Bergqvist and Egels-Zandén, 2012, Shan et al., 2014). The major port and the largest city in Shandong is Qingdao, which has the eighth largest port worldwide in terms of throughput (Informa PLC, 2020). In 2018, the container throughput of Qingdao port was nearly 20 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs), and the total throughput reached 543 million tons (Shandong Provincial Bureau of Statistics, 2019). Faced with the large freight volume in the hinterland, the development of an efficient port-hinterland transport system has become an urgent task to support the economic reform of Shandong.

On the other hand, climate change concerns have significantly affected decision making across multiple sectors, especially the transportation sector, which is a major source of global energy consumption and CO2 emissions (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2014). The increasing environmental awareness also creates new challenges for the development and management of port-hinterland transport systems (Bergqvist and Egels-Zandén, 2012). Considering both the infrastructural support for freight demand and mitigation of climate change, the Shandong provincial government emphasized “[accelerating] the construction of port-hinterland transport infrastructures” and “[achieving] the coordination between road and railway transport and formulate a green port-hinterland transport system” in its long-term industrial plan (Shandong Provincial Government, 2018).

Despite the urgent need to a green port-hinterland transport system in Shandong, the relevant authorities should make decisions carefully for two reasons. First, transport infrastructure construction often incurs high expenditures, while government budgets are often limited. Improper decisions not only risk invalid investment but also can aggravate the existing inefficiencies and increase transport emissions (Liu et al., 2019). Second, port activities are closely related to the economy in the hinterland (Deng et al., 2013). Economic structural changes (ESCs) in the hinterland will cause changes in the freight types and volumes of port-hinterland transport. As different types of cargo favor different transport modes, ESCs ultimately influence the demand for the capacity of different transport modes. Therefore, the development of port-hinterland transport infrastructures should take into account ESCs in the hinterland.

We conduct this study in view of both the urgency and complexity in the decision making for the development of port-hinterland transport infrastructures. This study aims to predict the impact of ESCs in Shandong on the throughput of the Qingdao port and to formulate appropriate infrastructure decisions to reduce CO2 emissions from freight port-hinterland transport, given ESCs in the hinterland. The contributions of this study are twofold. First, this study takes into account the influences of ESCs in the hinterland on freight demand and, further, on CO2 emissions from port-hinterland transport of freight. Previous studies have focused on the estimation of emissions from freight transport processes, while freight demand is commonly considered to be a fixed exogenous constant or predefined value. Second, this study develops a hybrid approach that combines econometric estimation and system-dynamic projection. This approach examines the holistic effects of both the ESCs in the hinterland and transport infrastructure development on port-hinterland transport emissions. The results provide insights into the decision making of transport infrastructure development in response to ESCs in the hinterland.

The remainder of this article is organized as follows. Section 2 summarizes the related literature. Section 3 proposes the hybrid approach and explains both the overall framework and the constituent models. Section 4 applies the hybrid model to the Qingdao port and its hinterland transport in Shandong Province. The influences of ESCs in Shandong on the throughput of the Qingdao port are estimated, and the effects of infrastructure development on CO2 emissions from port-hinterland transport are analyzed. Section 5 provides policy implications for the development of port-hinterland transport infrastructures. Section 6 presents the conclusions and directions for future work.

Section snippets

Port-hinterland transport

Ports are considered a strategic economic endowment and are able to connect global and local markets favoring globalization due to their crucial role as nodal infrastructure (Bottasso et al., 2014). Previous studies have explored the relationship between ports and hinterland. Both Shan et al., 2014, Deng et al., 2013 found a positive effect of port-related activities on the development of inland regional economy based on the investigation of major port cities in China. Yang et al. (2019) found

Study scope

Based on the objective of this study, the scope of port, hinterland, and freight is defined as follows. The port in this study refers to the Qingdao port, the major port in Shandong (as shown in Fig. 1). The hinterland of the Qingdao port covers the entire Shandong Province and some parts of middle and western China.

However, this study considers only the hinterland within Shandong for two main reasons. First, the freight volume outside Shandong (primarily the containers, which are transported

Model validation

The proposed SD model was validated by following the classic validation procedure proposed by Barlas (1996). This validation procedure includes a series of tests, including direct structure tests, structure-oriented behavior tests, and behavior pattern tests. See Appendix A3 for the validation procedure and the results of these tests. In this section, we only show the results of the behavior pattern tests, in which the values estimated by both the ARDL models and the SD model are compared to

Holistic view in the decision making of infrastructure development

The results show that the CO2 emissions from port-hinterland transport depend on not only the development of transport infrastructure but also economic perspectives in the hinterland. The results indicate that holistic view is one of the essential factors in the decision making of infrastructure development for green port-hinterland transport. Specifically, holistic view is substantialized in the following three aspects.

First, decision making in the development of port-hinterland transport

Conclusion and future work

The development of transport infrastructures is crucial for creating environmentally friendly port-hinterland transport systems. Since port activities are closely related to the economy in the hinterland, ESCs in the hinterland will cause significant uncertainty in the decision making of port-hinterland transport infrastructure development. This study develops a hybrid econometric and system-dynamic model to predict the impact of ESCs on port throughput and to formulate suitable infrastructure

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

This research is supported by the Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation, China (ZR2019MG008 and ZR2017MG012), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71772106, 72071006 and 61603011), the Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of the Ministry of Education of China (17YJCZH198), and Chongqing Science and Technology Commission (cstc2019jscx-msxmX0189). Dr. Pei Liu acknowledges the financial support from the Young Scholars Program of Shandong University, Weihai.

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