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The economy of Brazil has the potential to further develop its existing maritime cabotage services by promoting a modal shift from the road to the sea. The road represents the biggest share in the Brazilian transport matrix, but the larger waterborne participation represents lower logistics costs and greater environmental benefits. This paper investigates cabotage users' perception and priorities in integrating cabotage into their multimodal transport systems. It analyses the cabotage and transport choice body of literature, the outcome of which was applied to 326 potential domestic cabotage users through an email survey questionnaire made up of open and closed questions, which resulted in 30 answers suitable for analysis by univariate and multivariate statistical techniques. The 59 service attributes identified were grouped into 13 factors, which explained 89.6' of the modal choice. The conclusions show that cabotage users aim to enhance the integration of logistics between transport modes and to adopt modal shift strategies if better services could be provided, including a real-time information system, shorter transit times and freight offered on a door-to-door basis.

The development of domestic short sea shipping (SSS) (hereinafter cabotage) services along the Brazilian coast has drawn the attention of economic and political players since the early 1800s, when the Brazilian internal market was under development. In 1993, subject to the Port Modernization Act, the federal government adopted a new regulatory framework to provide cabotage services, which resulted in a non-competitive situation derived from capacity and operational restrictions. This situation is a tough challenge, particularly after 2003, when Brazil has witnessed an economic boom. Despite this, cabotage came to the forefront of the industry of research and development and numerous studies and papers of an industry and academic nature have been presented and published nationally. The paper consolidates the available information coherently, which is scattered among many documents, investigates the Brazilian cabotage market by mapping demand and supply and by analysing its strengths and weaknesses. The paper identifies that cabotage faces numerous weaknesses and presents a set of solutions, that can only be solved and implemented in the medium-long-term, respectively, which require high investments and regulatory changes. The paper suggests some economic and political changes to be performed at an industry and government levels.