国际多式联运与集装箱运输.doc

4.国际多式联运与集装箱运输
4.1 The Nature of Intermodalism
Competition between the modes has tended to produce a transport system that is segmented and un-integrated. Each mode has sought to exploit its own advantages in terms of cost, service, reliability and safety. Carriers try to retain business by maximizing the line-haul under their control. All the modes saw the other modes as competitors, and were viewed with suspicion and mistrust. The lack of integration between the modes was also accentuated by public policy that has frequently barred companies from owning firms in other modes (as in the United States before deregulation), or has placed a mode under direct state monopoly control (as in Europe). Modalism was also favored because of the difficulties of transferring goods from one mode to another, thereby incurring additional terminal costs and delays.
Intermodalism originated in maritime transportation, with the development of the container in the late 1960's and has since spread to integrate other modes. It is not surprising that the maritime sector should have been the first mode to pursue containerization. It was the mode most constrained by the time taken to load and unload the vessels. A conventional breakbulk cargo ship could spend as much time in a port as it did at sea. Containerization permits the mechanized handling of cargoes of diverse types and dimensions that are placed into boxes of standard sizes. In this way goods that might have taken days to be loaded or unloaded from a ship can now be handled in a matter of minutes.
First Containership, Ideal-X, 1956
On April 26th 1956, the Ideal-X left the Port of Newark, New Jersey to the Port Houston, Texas, which it called 5 days later. It carried 58 35-feet (8 feet wide by 8 feet high) containers, along with a regular load of 15,000 tons of bulk petroleum. The 35 feet unit represented at that time the standard truck size in the United States. This first containership was converted under the initiative of Malcom McLean (1914-2001), a trucking magnate who saw the tremendous potential of containerization, particularly in terms of loading and unloading costs. McLean calculated that in 1956 loading a medium-sized ship the conventional way was costing $5.83 a ton. Comparatively, loading the Ideal-X was costing less than $0.16 a ton. The economic advantages of such a mode of transportation thus became clear to the shipping industry. In 1960, McLean founded SeaLand, a major container shipping line, which was purchased in 1999 by Maersk, the world's largest container shipping company. The Ideal X carried containers until 1965, when it was scrapped.
Since the 1960s major efforts have been made to integrate separate transport systems through intermodalism, which took place is several stages. What initially began as improving the productivity of shipping evolved into an integrated supply chain management system across modes. This involves the use of at least two different modes in a trip from origin to destination through an intermodal transport chain. Intermodality enhances the economic performance of a transport chain by using modes in the most productive manner. Thus, the line-haul economies of rail may be exploited for long distances, with the efficiencies of trucks providing flexible local pick up and delivery. The key is that the entire trip is seen as a whole, rather than as a series of legs, each marked by an individual operation with separate sets of doc