To better guide the sustainable developing of freight transport aligning with environmental objectives it is of strategic importance to capture freight transportation characteristics more realistically. This paper characterizes freight transportation by using a complex network approach from multidimensional perspectives based on freight vehicle trips data. We first build two subnetworks from prefecture-level city-scale and county-level city-scale. Subsequently, network analysis indices based on complex network theory were applied to examine the topological structure and complexity of the freight transportation networks. Furthermore, the community detection method is introduced to reveal the networks’ clustering characteristics. The findings show that the prefecture-level city-scale network and the county-level city-scale network both have obvious small-world network characteristics, but the prefecture-level city-scale network has higher operating efficiency for goods movement. Additionally, the influence of the cross-border effect on the freight transportation network was verified. In terms of the community structure, the freight network shows distinct clustering features only at the county-level city-scale.
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