Behaviors of containerized freight shipments

Recently recovered international trade status and initiated plans to increase capacities of maritime network facilities around the U.S. encouraged local governments and economic parties to attract international trading partners, especially in Asia where exports 60% or more of container freights to the U.S. Under the economic and facility condition changes, identifying attributes affecting port choice is important in policy and decision-making processes to attract more containerized freights from the Asian trading partner countries and to improve the sustainability of international trade flow into the U.S. This research, therefore, considers a port choice model into the U.S. at a disaggregate level. Model estimation results suggest that alternative ports show different attributes that can affect the probability of being chosen by shipments from the Asian countries. However, different trends were observed by alternative ports.