Feng Qiu

In order to provide a more cost-efficient and environmentally-friendly logistics service in economic activity of cities, an innovative urban logistics transport system based on the existing intensive public transit network is proposed. In comparison with current dedicated freight operating mode in the logistics industry, this new freight system could give goods a ride on the basis of transporting passenger flow and remarkably reduce the freight fleet of logistics enterprises. In this paper the structure of the public transit-based logistics transport system is preliminarily introduced and the service procedure of executing transport tasks is displayed. An urban transit-based freight system is designed for a chosen mid-size city of China, with regard to the characteristic of local logistics service, and the results indicate a considerable system benefit compared with the previous logistics system.

Recently more innovative booking techniques have been introduced into the taxi market, and they have profoundly reshaped the modern taxi service. In this paper, the actual influence of the telephone/online booking system on the taxi service performance is examined, based on the operational statistics of the taxi market in Suzhou City, China. Two taxi service modes, ordinary taxi service and the new dedicated taxi program which is derived from the booking system, have been compared. The feedback from taxi drivers and customers have been collected to disclose their perspectives on the taxi booking system. The results indicate that in current operation modes, the use of the telephone/online booking system could benefit passengers, but actually makes few differences to the taxi service providers.

In this paper, Google mapping techniques are applied to develop a cost-efficient scheduling system for flex-route transit, which currently is the most popular type of flexible transit services. It is different from previous flexible transit scheduling systems which have to rely on geographic information. Web-based techniques guarantee a smooth access for the scheduling system to obtain road network data from Google servers. Also, in this innovative scheduling system, web-based techniques enable client sides to be easily used and are well organized. As well, the access to real-time traffic reports could possibly provide a more accurate travel time estimate, which helps to construct reliable vehicle routing plans. The simulations, based on a newly designed flex-route service case, verify the feasibility of this web-based flex-route transit scheduling system. Additionally, the results indicate that, with the help of real-time traffic information, this promising scheduling technique could have better performance especially in congested service areas.