Design of the State Choice Experiment
The primary objective of the SCE are to capture data enabling us to improve our
understanding of how shippers purchase freight transport services in Australia,
with a focus on competition between road, rail and short sea shipping along
three key corridors: Perth–Melbourne, Melbourne–Brisbane and Brisbane–
Townsville. These three corridors represent distinct origin–destination pairs for
headhaul and backhaul services, involving different physical and temporal
characteristics, costs and levels-of-service, the mixes of which could impact
relative intermodal competitiveness considerably. Furthermore, the research
has two specific policy-centred objectives. First, the research examines the
potential competitiveness of the introduction of short sea shipping services
(including the distinction between Australian-flag and foreign-flag vessels),
which would likely involve unique relative benefits across the six origin–
destination pairs in the study. Second, the research aims to evaluate the
potential impacts of different degrees of carbon taxes, which would cause
changes in the relative costs of each mode through a relatively larger impact on
road transport, with its higher level of carbon emissions.
To achieve these objectives, we tested background questions and choice
menus both to represent shippers’ decision-making settings and to capture
shippers’ preferences within our hypothetical mix of modal alternatives under
carbon pricing. The information and wording seeding the SCE was pre-tested
and piloted among industry stakeholders to enable the development of an
appropriate and effective survey instrument that helps to answer key policy
questions including the extent to which: (i) shippers are sensitive to trade-offs
between door-to-door price and level-of-service attributes such as transit time,
reliability (in terms of both on-time performance and significant delay) and frequency
of departure; (ii) constraints on delivery windows influence these sensitivities;
(iii) perishability of the cargo influences these sensitivities; (iv) intermodal
competitiveness varies across each origin–destination pair; and (v) preferences
for short sea shipping alternatives vary with respect to not only cost/level-ofservice
trade-offs, but also to whether the alternative is a domestic-flag or foreignflag
vessel.