A Study on International Multimodal Transport Networks from Korea to Central Asia: Focus on Secondhand Vehicles

ABSTRACTCurrently, high-income countries use multimodal transportation to export large quantities of secondhand vehicles to low-income countries. Secondhand vehicle export has shown its highest growth in recent years, especially in Korea. The problem of transporting secondhand vehicles from Korea to Central Asia is becoming an important issue, but few researchers are interested in it. The objective of this research is to determine the optimal transport network for exporting secondhand vehicles from Korea to Central Asian countries by combining experts’ opinions and real data from existing transport networks. The fuzzy Delphi method was applied to obtain factors to evaluate alternative multimodal transport networks for moving secondhand vehicles from Korea to Central Asian countries by judgment from experts. The analysis shows that among the five factors (total cost, total time, reliability, security, and transportation capability), total cost is the most considerable factor, followed by reliability, transportation capability, total time, and security. Additionally, in the mainly three multimodal transport networks, the sea+Trans-China Railway route is ranked first, followed by the sea+Trans-Siberian Railway and sea+truck routes.