A Model on Container Port Competition: An Application for the West European Container Hub-Ports

The worldwide network of container transport services, both on land and at sea, is becoming increasingly fine-meshed. The growth in the number of intermodal transfer points on the land side, at the sea–land interface in the seaports and at the connecting points of liner services in transhipment ports leads to an increasing number of routing options for a container flow between two regions somewhere on the globe. This increase complicates forecasting the container throughput of a port in the traditional way by linking it directly to a specific hinterland area. In the approach presented here, a port is considered as a nodal point in a network of container routings, where the routings using a certain port add up to the port's container throughput. The model presented here is intended to explain the market share of the port's routings for each of the traffic zones or regions that comprise a port's potential hinterland. Explanatory variables include transport cost, transit time, frequency of service and indicators of quality of service. A logit model is used to quantify the routing choice and to derive from that a demand function to be used for port traffic forecasting and for the economic and financial evaluation of container port projects. The authors had the opportunity to calibrate logit models in the framework of the evaluation of the Maasvlakte-2 container port expansion project in the port of Rotterdam.