data150

This project is maintained by Jingwen-Yao94

Topic: transportation

Jingwen Yao

February 28th

Word count: 1754

Article 1

Khisty, C Jotin. Transportation in Developing Countries: Obvious Problems, Possible Solutions. Transportation Research Record No.1396, (1993): 44 http://onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/trr/1993/1396/1396-009.pdf

In this article, the author is seeking to bring people’s attention to one of chief tasks confronting governments in developing countries, which is transportation problems. The author first introduces the background and significance of transportation issue. First, transportation directly contributes to the economic growth and specialization associated with urban areas. More importantly, transportation facilities expand the options for work, education, health, and other amenities and directly affect the economic efficiency of cities and the well-being of their inhabitants. However, because of the limited amounted of resources developing countries owned, how to provide their citizens with minimal transportation facilities becomes a critical question to the government. Furthermore, as the rapidly development of urbanization in the world, the most reliable forecasts indicate that by the turn of the century almost half of humanity will live in urban centers. The rate of population growth is also larger as opposed to that in developed countries and this disparity seems to expand. As mentioned by the author, these figures suggest that developing countries must increase their capability to supply and effectively manage their urban infrastructure by at least 75 percent merely to maintain their current level of service, which, to say the least, is woefully inadequate. Along with the fact that despite ranging from 15 to 25 percent of some developing countries’ total expenditures is spent on transportation system, the current situation seems to get worse. Things could be even harder for the poor since even if transport were provided by the government, a large proportion of the poor would not be able to afford it. The poor can only afford to walk or bicycle. Based on these facts, the author underlines the necessity of providing facilities for nonmotorized travel and attention should be placed on projects that provide transportation directly to the urban poor. Because of the nature that resources are rare in those developing counties, some projects that can immediately improve conditions for the poor may be a good idea.

In my opinion, the lack of transportation could be a kind of unfreedom for people. Though it seemingly may not cause any direct loss to people, the possibility that people may be not able to get education, health care and the loss in economic growth cannot be ignored. Just as Amartya Sen mentioned in the book, transportation could also be a part of “human resource development” that should be considered even before the development in economics. What I think this article lack of is some more practical and reasonable solutions for the problem he raised.

Article 2

Zhu, Zhenjun, Zhu, Zhenjun, Li, Zhigang, Li, Zhigang, Chen, Hongsheng, Chen, Hongsheng, Liu, Ye, Liu, Ye, Zeng, Jun, and Zeng, Jun. “Subjective Well-being in China: How Much Does Commuting Matter?” Transportation (Dordrecht) 46.4 (2019): 1505-524. Web.

In this article, the authors first point out a problem in China’s current development process that it ignores vulnerable groups’ traffic need as the rapidly increasing urbanization and motorization. They offered vivid statistic evidence to prove that subjective well-being of residents could be influenced by commute time through the comparison between urban respondents’ daily average commuting time with rural respondents. The final result shows that the longer the commute time, the lower the subjective well-being. Furthermore, the subjective well-being of residents who choose to commute by walking or cycling is significantly lower than that of those who commute by other transportation modes.

By introducing the development problem currently in China, the authors show the audiences with valid fact that the cost related to traffic congestion in Beijing has reduced the municipal gross domestic product by 4-7 percent. Through using especially designed web-based and paper-based surveys, the authors argue that the commuting mode choice significant influence subjective well-being. I regard them as two types human development mentioned by Amartya Sen in his book Development as freedom. The former one considers development in a narrower way that cares about the economic growth or loss of one country while the latter one cares about personal satisfaction towards life, which may be a higher level of freedom. Improving in the problem of long commuting time will lead to not only a more efficient society with higher level of total output, but also a more satisfying country that provide the residence with more freedom. For the datasets the article uses, the authors obtain the data from the 2014 China Labor-Force Dynamics Survey which is a nation cross sectional survey covering 29 mainland provinces, with multistage clustering and a stratified probability sampling strategy. The databases include individual socioeconomic status, commuting situation, working conditions and other demographic information through a random sampling method from three levels—individual, neighborhood, and city. Finally, what can we actually learn from this problem that emerges during the process of development? The authors briefly mention three specific policy suggestions, like shortening the distance between employment and residence locations or avoiding mixing bike and car lanes. They may be useful in specific regions and what we should really learn from the problem is actually to take advantage of transportation modeling, which uses scientific method to plan the transportation system in order to not only save money for the government, but also provide all residents with high-quality transportation services.

Article 3

R. P. Biuk-Aghai, W. T. Kou and S. Fong, “Big data analytics for transportation: Problems and prospects for its application in China,” 2016 IEEE Region 10 Symposium (TENSYMP), Bali, Indonesia, 2016, pp. 173-178, doi: 10.1109/TENCONSpring.2016.7519399

The author points out the problem that transportation is influenced such as road traffic congestion. Governments always want to formulate effective road projects in order to improve traffic situations, which is hindered by the lack of empirical data of actual road conditions. Thus, when implementing transportation projects, the government may not be able to plan an effective policy since future traffic conditions are unknown and hard to predict. As a result, the road traffic authority faces the dilemma of having to choose between redevelopment of the whole transportation infrastructure and extending current road designs. The authors then further explain this problem use specific data in China over the past few years. Comparing the length of highways and the number of privately owned vehicles, the authors then calculate a congestion indicator as a ratio of these two normalized values, which shows that the road transportation network in China is increasingly suffering from overcrowding, leading to decreasing satisfaction among road users. To solve this problem, intelligent urban transportation technology such as road monitoring, speed cameras, automatic toll gates are used. According to statistics from the China Urban Intelligent Transportation market research report, the compound annual growth rate of urban intelligent transportation between 2008 and 2013 was 20.2 percent.

Although intelligent transportation technology is developing in China, there is little effort to use collected data for big data analytics. Moreover, software system and infrastructure are still not meeting with international big data standards. Currently, big data still belongs to new technology that governments may not be ready to spend large proportion of budgets on. And due to huge data volume captured from a very large network of traffic sensors in China, the initial spending must be high. But still, we need to keep develop that area for the benefits technology would bring to us and ensure a good return on investment.

Other than current situation in China, the authors also mention some technology used for data capture which may be a good direction for me to further explore on, include: GPS for capturing location data; video surveillance and image processing technology for capturing and recognizing car license plate data; traffic sensors for capturing traffic density and flow; ship sensors for capturing water quality data for navigable waterways; weather sensors for capturing current weather conditions; RFID sensors for capturing movement of RFID-tagged items in logistics; and various software technologies for processing the collected data. At the end, the authors also give some suggestions on future improvement.

Article 4

Wang, Yinhai., ProQuest, North America Chinese Overseas Transportation Association, Ha’erbin Gong Ye Da Xue, Transportation & Development Institute, and American Society of Civil Engineers. ICCTP 2009 Critical Issues in Transportation System Planning, Development, and Management : Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference of Chinese Transportation Professionals : August 5-9, Harbin, China / Edited by Yinhai Wang … [et Al.]. Reston, VA: American Society of Civil Engineers, 2009. Web.

This paper develops an optimization model in order to maximize the efficiency of bus rapid transit (BRT) system, which means maximize direct-through travelers on unit length of BRT route. To begin with, the authors introduce the basic principle of this system along with the rapid development of BRT since 1986. But there are still rooms for progress, like maximizing direct transit trip density, which is related to the direct transit demands and the length of the route. Traditional techniques may be difficult to solve this kind pf network optimization problems and what the authors trying to do in this paper is to introduce ant colony algorithm to solve the optimization model, which has been proved effectively in a numerical test in Dalian city, China.

As providing the audiences with a view on the development process of transit network planning, the authors also mention the significance of transit network design, especially in urban transportation planning. High quality transit service is considered as one of the most effective ways to bring people away from private car trips to all kinds of public transportation in metropolitan areas, which not only make the city less congested but also help to achieve the sustainable development goals. The development of model for bus rapid transit is trying to ‘provide access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for all.’ In 2019, only half of the world’s urban population had convenient access to public transport, defined as living within 500 meters’ walking distance from a low-capacity transport system (such as a bus stop). This fact emphasizes the necessity of developing transportation model. Other than the importance and benefits of BRT, the authors also introduce some interesting algorithms for the optimization. The ant colony optimization algorithm, for example, is a probabilistic technique for solving computational problems which can be reduced to finding good paths through graphs. It was first introduced by Dorigo and has been used to find the solutions for many difficult combinatorial optimization problems. Now, they deposit artificial pheromone on the graph in such a way that future ants can build better solutions. Due to positive feedback rule, the ACO possesses powerful ability in searching better solutions for combinatorial optimization problems. Using this algorithm, the authors overcome the existing problems that maximization of number of direct travelers may cause the bus routes in the network to be extremely long, whereas the latter limits the number of alternative routes and then damages the optimizing quality.

Reflection

In these four articles, I have briefly learned about the problems that countries are currently facing with and their significance to not only the economic growth of the country, but also to subjective well-being. There are many aspects can be improved, like the bid data analytics in transportation technology and bus rapid transit system. Beyond that, what I want to further explore in is how did people have improved the efficiency of transportation system over time and, in the future, what else can we do. After that, when looking back on the effort human beings have made, what benefits have the developed transportation bring to us.