International multimodal transport of goods is developed on the basis of container transport, and it is an international freight transport organization form with the aim of achieving the best overall freight transport efficiency. Due to the rapid development of container transportation, multimodal transport has become one of the main modes of international cargo transportation. It breaks the traditional practice that the single modes of transportation such as sea, land and air are not connected with each other, but organically combines the single modes of transportation such as sea, rail, public and air to form a "transnational (regional) combined transportation mode", which is known as a revolution in the transportation industry.

Container transportation is widely used in multimodal transport because it is very convenient to transfer containers between different modes of transportation. Because of this, although container transportation does not necessarily consist of multimodal transport, multimodal transport does not necessarily use containers for shipment, but in practice people often confuse the two. If they are given the same meaning, the difference between them is that the former is a technical term and the latter is a legal term.

Continental bridge transportation is realized by container sea-land combined transport.