Abstract: With the implementation of the “Belt & Road” initiative and CR express, the container transportation has blossomed in Northeast China, but there is still high carbon emissions. This paper summarizes the status quo of multimodal transport and low-carbon transport, and selects the container transport in the three northeastern provinces for empirical research. Firstly, the entropy weight-TOPSIS method is used to find the demand of the destination city. Then, by constructing the lowest cost multi-modal container optimization model, five related scenarios of rail transport, sea transport and port expansion are designed. Also, we use sensitivity analysis to study the impact of road unit price and carbon emissions on the whole. The results show that transshipment of seaborne and expanding the proportion of the railway is the key to low-carbon economy. The impact of handling costs on total costs is much greater than the impact of the corresponding carbon emissions; Ports in the same hinterland and adjacent areas need port consolidation to achieve port synergy. The railway transportation enterprises need to adopt a variety of price transport products to improve their competitiveness. Even if the intensity of road carbon emission is reduced by 50%, the single mode of transportation is still not as good as multimodal transport.

Key words: multimodal transport, low-carbon transport, empirical study