Tag Archives: carpooling

Carpooling endorsed and legalised in Beijing

In January 2014, Beijing issued the carpooling regulation for small vehicles, a lawful endorsement which officially legalised carpooling in Beijing.

However, there are illegal taxicabs, which are often called “black car”, in almost every city in China. These black cars do not have legitimate operating licenses from the transportation management department, but they provide transport services and make a profit in return. There are several types of black cars, such as motorcycles, tricycles buses, and even ambulances. Therefore, the aforementioned regulation the Beijing government announced raises questions. In order to clarify the doubts, a report from People’s Daily provided answers1.

Illegal taxicab in China, Ai Chi-Han

How to distinguish legal carpooling from black cars?

Carpooling needs to be built on long term cooperation between the owner of the car and the passengers; in short, people involved in carpooling know each other. Since the goal of carpooling is to reduce carbon emissions and the number of vehicles on the roads, most carpooling will be performed during commuting time. The price of carpooling

should not be expensive either.

Who is responsible in case an accident happens?

For carpooling, the driver and passengers should have an agreement, so it is recommended that the issue of liability for any possible accident should be stated clearly and that the insurance related to the carpooling should be arranged previously.

How much does carpooling cost?

Normally, the cost of a private vehicle for carpooling is half the price of a taxi for the same distance. Passengers can therefore calculate the fee with reference to the taxi fee and divide it by the number of the passengers.

The goal of Beijing’s legalisation of carpooling is to ease traffic congestion and conserve energy. Since the new regulation may enable black cars to earn more unjust profits, the challenge ahead for Beijing, the first city legalising carpooling, is for the government to enforce strict laws and distinguish legal carpooling from black cars.

  1. Beijing chutai zhidao yijian guifan xiao keche he cheng xingwei, http://right.workercn.cn/157/201401/03/140103114024450.shtml, accessed 18 February, 2014 []

Chi-Han Ai

Ph.D. candidate of EHESS ( École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris) focusing on regional economic development in China and Taiwan.

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Carpooling in China

Carpool Campaign Gets Rolling in China’s Capital

Published July 31, 2013

China’s capital Beijing is one of the world’s most polluted cities. Many blame the frequent smog on the city’s more than five million vehicles. But, where some see cars as a source of pollution, others see a solution as well. VOA’s Bill Ide reports from the Chinese capital about efforts to make carpooling more common place.

Beijing NGO launches a charity program to encourage carpooling

Huilongguan, a large residential area on Beijing’s northern outskirts, is home to approximately 400,000 people, many of whom travel more than 12 km every day to work in the city’s downtown area.

Morning commuters squeeze into buses already at capacity. Subway cars are so crowded that riders can barely turn around. And private car owners have to contend with traffic congestion on the Badaling Highway.

Wang Yong, founder of the Shunfengche Charity Foundation (Shunfeng means “free ride” in Chinese), decided to change the situation by introducing carpooling to the community.

The foundation piloted carpooling in the Huilongguan area from June 17 to July 16. Now the program has been extended until September 20. Private car owners who provide rides to more than two passengers during the 7-9 a.m. rush hour period get their 5-yuan ($0.82) highway toll paid by the foundation.

Volunteers have been recruited to promote the program to car owners. They were also stationed at Huilongguan and nearby Xisanqi entrances to the Badaling Highway to issue toll vouchers for those carrying at least two passengers. Ten huge billboards have been erected along the highway to advertise the campaign.

Read the article on Beijing review.com http://www.bjreview.com.cn/nation/txt/2013-08/19/content_561148.htm (Accessed September 18, 2013)

  • Ride sharing can ease traffic, environment woes

Daily free ride sharing is urged in Beijing as the city is frequently engulfed by haze this spring and burdened by increasingly heavier traffic.

Initiated by charity big names Wang Yong and Deng Fei and CCTV broadcasters Lang Yongchun and Zhao Pu before this year’s Spring Festival, the campaign helped 9,678 people go home by pairing up with private car drivers as train tickets were hard to grab during the annual travel peak.

“We can do it not only for Spring Festival, but every day,” said Wang on Tuesday. Wang has been offering free rides to strangers in Beijing for years. “I hope such ‘people power’ will serve as an alternative way to tackle traffic jams and environmental pollution.”

The campaigners called on private car owners and passengers to share rides not only during festivals, but in daily commuting or even an occasional ride.

People can find their ride share partners through an app, an SMS service (send 66 to 1066958800) or an official website (www.shunfengche.org/). All the systems present personal information if people want to pair up and get insurance coverage for free after they reach an online agreement to travel together.

Read the article on China Daily http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2013-03/20/content_16324420.htm (Accessed September 18, 2013)

  • Beijing to legalize carpooling

The Beijing government is making new efforts to improve the city’s traffic by legalizing car-pooling among private car owners, Chinanews.com reports.

Car-pooling can reduce the number of cars on the road by 10 to 25 per cent, effectively releasing the traffic pressure in Beijing, according to Wang Yong who initiated a “hitch-hiking scheme” which offers car services during rush hours.

Jia Xinguang, standing director of the China Automobile Dealers Association says it also lays down problems and challenges for Beijing, such as passenger safety and differentiating between legal and illegal private cars.

Only directions for car-pooling are available at the moment. More details and guidelines are expected to be released by the end of the year.

Read the article on China.org.cn http://www.china.org.cn/china/2013-07/03/content_29309226.htm (Accessed September 18, 2013)

Jacqueline Nivard

Jacqueline Nivard, Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine

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Mobility crowdsourcing

Nianbo Liu, Yong Feng, Feng Wang, Bang Liu,and Jinchuan Tang1 (2013), Mobility Crowdsourcing: Toward Zero-Effort Carpooling on Individual Smartphone, International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 9 pages, http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/6152822

In current carpooling systems, drivers and passengers offer and search for their trips through available mediums, for example, accessing carpool website by smartphone, for finding a possible match of the journey. While efforts have been made to achieve fast matching for known trips, the need for accurate mobile tracking for individual users still remains a bottleneck. For example, drivers feel impatient to input their routes before Heavy traffic in Kunming, Gipouloux Françoisdriving, or centralized systems haves difficulties to track a large number of vehicles in real time. In this paper, we present the idea of Mobility Crowdsourcing (MobiCrowd), which leverages private smartphone to collect individual trips for carpooling, without any explicit effort on the part of users. Our scheme generates daily trips and mobility models for each user, and then makes carpooling zero-effort by enabling travel data to be crowdsourced instead of tracking vehicles or asking users to input their trips. With prior mobility knowledge, one user’s travel routes and positions for carpooling can be predicted according to the location of the time and other mobility context. Based on a realistic travel survey and simulation, we prove that our scheme can provide efficient and accurate position estimation for individual carpools. Introduction Nowadays, quick and easy transportation has been an essential part of modern society. Vehicles offer flexibility and mobility when it comes to our work-related and personal lives, enable rapid and timely delivery of goods, but can also cause traffic jams, carbon emissions, pollution, accidents, energy crisis issues, and other problems, inevitably. On the one hand, vehicle transportation plays a vital role in global economy; therefore, any efficiency improvement will yield great profits. On the other hand, the efficiency of vehicle transportation points out how we use vehicles and, also, the degree of expensive social costs. Although lots of institutions, resources, and research are dedicated to improving transportation efficiency, the waste of transportation capacities is still ubiquitous in current vehicle transportation.According to NHTS  from the US Department of Transportation, the average occupancy rate of personal vehicle trips is 1.6 persons per vehicle mile. Since a regular vehicle carries 5 persons in full occupancy, 68% of transportation capacities are wasted during personal trips. In US alone, this involves 204 million personal vehicles and causes a great deal of loss. Similarly, such inefficiency has also been observed in business transportation. Taxies, vans, trucks, and other vehicles are often running in low occupancy or utilization or are sometimes even unoccupied. The oversupply does not just come from wasted transportation capacities, but also comes from information opacity between supply and demand.Carpooling seems an effective method to achieve green and efficient transportation. Traditional carpools are neighbors or coworkers with similar routes, who can easily contact with each other for possible carpooling. Casual carpools, as impromptu carpools formed among strangers, can team up in public areas near HOV lanes, but it is severely limited in deployed roads [2]. Later carpool associations allow people to match their respective trips through the Internet, even if they are strangers. In the “dynamic carpooling” concept, casual carpooling is proposed, and many researchers try to achieve this aim through special designed systems. In such carpooling, drivers and passengers offer and search for their trips through available mediums, for example, accessing carpooling website by smartphone, for finding a possible match of the journey. However, these systems failed to provide convenient and flexible carpool services for common users. While efforts have been made to achieve fast matching for known trips, the need for accurate mobile tracking for individual users still remains a bottleneck in current carpooling systems. For example, drivers feel impatient to input their routes before driving, or centralized systems have difficulties to track a large number of vehicles and to acquire their real-time positions.Crowdsourcing has been evolving as a distributed problem solving and business production model in recent years, which was proposed to reduce production costs and make more efficient use of labor and resources with the aids of participators. An example of crowdsourcing tasks is seen in indoor localization, the system Zee makes the calibration zero-effort, by enabling WiFi fingerprint training data to be crowdsourced without any explicit effort on the part of users. In this paper, we present the idea of MobiCrowd, which leverages private smartphone to collect individual trips for carpooling, without any explicit effort on the part of users. Our scheme acquires location information from smartphone, generates daily trips and mobility models for each user, and then makes carpooling zero-effort by enabling travel data to be crowdsourced instead of tracking vehicles or asking users to input their trips. With prior mobility knowledge, a user’s travel routes and positions can be predicted according to the location of the time, and then possible carpooling can be arranged to fit the mobility context. Based on a realistic travel survey and simulation, we prove that our scheme can provide efficient and accurate position estimation for individual carpools.The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents a brief overview of related work. In Section 3, we explain the design of MobiCrowd step by step, including human mobility patterns, system overview, driving sensing, trajectory prediction, and position estimation. Section 4 evaluates our scheme via a survey and simulation, while Section 5 finally summarizes the paper.

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  1. The authors work in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, North Jianshe Road, Chengdu 611731,  China or in Yunnan Key Laboratory of Computer Technology Applications, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming 650500,  China []
  2. This paper is supported in part by the China NSF Grants (61103226, 60903158, 61170256, 61173172, and 61272526), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities Grants (ZYGX2010J074, ZYGX2011J102, and ZYGX2012J083). []

Jacqueline Nivard

Jacqueline Nivard, Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine

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