Beijing’s congestion is too cheap because there are too many cars on the Internet? Research shows that it is possible! Expert: Solving the congestion problem is not a "one stroke"
Red Star News, "Beijing is mainly caused by the congestion caused by the network car." Recently, in a media program, Cui Dongshu, Secretary General of the National Passenger Car Market Information Association, made a heated discussion.
Cui Dongshu said in this program, "At present, there may be 200,000 online car rides in 6 million cars in Beijing, running on the road for 15 hours a day, while private cars may be on the road for 2 hours a day. One online car ride is equivalent to eight private cars occupying the road. The operating cost of the network car is relatively low. Everything is expensive in Beijing but it is very cheap to take a taxi. " He believes that it is necessary to increase the cost of using the network car to reduce congestion.
A few days ago, Cheng Shidong, director of the Urban Transportation Center of the Comprehensive Transportation Institute of the National Development and Reform Commission, said in an interview with Red Star News that the traffic jam problem in Beijing is caused by many reasons, and solving the traffic jam problem in Beijing is not a "one stroke".
How big is the relationship between congestion in Beijing and online car rental? How can we alleviate the traffic congestion in a megacity like Beijing? Red Star journalists conducted in-depth interviews to try to answer this question.

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Is congestion caused by the network car? Studies have shown that it is possible
According to the Statistical Bulletin of Beijing’s National Economic and Social Development in 2022 published in March this year, by the end of 2022, the number of motor vehicles in Beijing was 7.128 million, an increase of 278,000 over the end of last year. There were 6.256 million civilian vehicles, an increase of 113,000. Among them, there were 5.326 million private cars, an increase of 114,000; There are 2.906 million cars in private cars.
Cui Dongshu gave a detailed analysis on the problem of traffic congestion caused by online car rental in the above media programs. He said that in the total number of existing cars in Beijing, there are nearly 200,000 online cars, and these cars travel for up to 15 hours a day, while private cars travel for less than 2 hours a day. Therefore, one network car is equal to the occupation of roads by eight private cars, and the operating cost of the network car is relatively low.
Previously, in a paper published in 2022 by Professor Jiang Yangsheng from the School of Transportation and Logistics of Southwest Jiaotong University, a traffic dynamics model was built to explore the interaction between online car-hailing and urban traffic congestion. The research results show that for road congestion, for every 1,000 online car-hailing vehicles, the road trip delay rate will increase by 1.59% on average throughout the day and by 2.04% on average during the peak period. This conclusion confirms the influence of the increment of network car on traffic congestion.
According to national business daily, Chen Yanyan, dean of the School of Urban Transportation, Beijing University of Technology, believes that it is not entirely reliable to predict traffic conditions only by models. The traffic conditions in different cities are different. For cities with heavy traffic pressure, the popularity of online car rental may increase the road burden, but in cities with relatively large road capacity, it may not have a significant impact. "So it can’t be simply said that the network car will definitely aggravate traffic congestion."
In recent years, the number of online car-related companies has increased rapidly. According to the statistics of the online car-related supervision information interaction system, as of February 28, 2023, a total of 303 online car-related platform companies in China have obtained business licenses, and a total of 5.177 million online car driver’s licenses have been issued in various places. The basic situation of the online car-hailing industry in October 2020 is the earliest statistical information that can be retrieved from the official website of the Ministry of Transport. During this period, there were 207 online car-hailing platforms, and the number of online car-hailing drivers’ licenses was less than half of the current data.
According to statistics, a total of 652 million orders were received in February this year, which is not much different from the 630 million orders in October 2020. Does this mean that while the scale of online car is still expanding, the market demand for online car is already saturated?
Jiang Yangsheng’s research also shows that the expansion of the fleet size of the network car will not only cause additional congestion, but also be detrimental to the operation and profitability of the network car itself.
On April 6th, Jinan Urban and Rural Transportation Bureau issued the Notice on Risk Warning of Jinan’s Online Booking Taxi Industry, which indicated that the transportation capacity of Jinan’s online car rental market was basically saturated. At present, the average daily order volume of Jinan’s online car rental bicycles is less than 10 orders. At the same time, the excessive number of network cars and too many market players have also adversely affected the safe production of the industry.

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After searching, Red Star journalists found that in recent years, Zhuhai, Guangdong, Xiamen, Fujian, Haikou, Hainan and other cities have successively issued risk warnings for the online car industry, reminding "caution when entering the business".
Regarding whether the network car is the main reason for Beijing’s congestion, Cheng Shidong said in an interview with Red Star News that "there are fewer roads and more cars" is certain, but the ownership and usage of cars are two different things. You can’t say that there is a traffic jam because there are many cars.
Why is there a traffic jam in Beijing?
According to the research, the root cause is the imbalance between traffic supply and demand.
Whether the network car will cause urban road congestion is not a new topic.
In 2016, the research group of Professor Yan Xuedong from the Institute of Transportation System Science and Engineering of Beijing Jiaotong University released the Analysis Report on Beijing Road Traffic Operation Based on Didi Big Data. The report pointed out that the road congestion in Beijing is mainly caused by travel demand, and the network car is not the direct cause of road congestion in Beijing.
This study holds that the root of Beijing’s traffic congestion problem is that the limited road resources can’t meet the growing demand for private cars in the whole world, and the core operation mode of online taxis is "internet plus sharing economy+sharing traffic", which has four characteristics that can effectively help big cities "control traffic congestion": taking economic laws as a lever to adjust the relationship between supply and demand in the traffic market; Taking information symmetry as the core, supply matches demand; Using big data as a means to realize full monitoring of the operation process; Take the shared traffic as the model to revitalize the stock of private car transport resources.
Cheng Shidong said that urban layout is the main reason that affects whether a city is congested or not. For example, if the city is well planned, the living facilities are perfect and public transportation is developed, there is little need to drive.
Scholars such as Lu Huapu, director of Tsinghua University Transportation Research Institute, published a paper in January, 2023, proposing to solve Beijing’s urban traffic problems "based on the public transportation-oriented development model". It is believed that the fundamental cause of traffic congestion is the imbalance between traffic supply and demand. Large-scale single-function urban land development has caused excessive purification of land use functions, serious separation of citizens’ work and residence, and large-scale long-distance "tidal" commuting traffic. In addition, the low sharing rate of public transportation and the imperfect terminal transportation system make the traffic congestion problem more and more serious.
According to this study, the public resources in the central city of Beijing are highly concentrated, and the employment density is high. The ratio of occupation to residence in the Second Ring Road is 2.27, while the surrounding new towns and large residential areas lack employment, living facilities and large public facilities are not perfect, resulting in insufficient coupling between residence and employment distribution.
The quantitative calculation results of this study also show that the traffic efficiency of Beijing is obviously lower than that of Tokyo, and the travel efficiency of Tokyo is more than 1.5 times that of Beijing. Moreover, Beijing’s public transport sharing rate is lower than that of foreign excellent cities, and the transfer problem is outstanding. The transfer distance between Beijing ground buses, between ground buses and rail transit, and between urban transportation and external transportation is long, and the degree of operation matching needs to be improved. The study mentioned that bike-sharing effectively got through the "last mile" at the end of the trip, but there are still some problems such as closed courtyards and some public places that are forbidden to pass and enter.

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How to solve the congestion in big cities such as Beijing?
Expert: Take multiple measures to maximize traffic efficiency.
According to the Report on Commuting Monitoring in Major Cities of China in 2022, in 2021, the proportion of extreme commuting in Beijing with a commuting time of 60 minutes or more was 30%, which was the city with the largest population of extreme commuting in China and the longest average commuting time in one way, reaching 48 minutes. In addition, Beijing’s commuting space radius (building a spatial ellipse covering 90% of the commuter population in the central city, with the radius of the major axis of the ellipse) is 41 kilometers, making it the city with the largest commuting space scale. Job-residence separation can be understood as the distance from the place of residence to the nearest place of employment, which is the theoretical minimum commuting distance. It is used to measure the matching degree and balance of urban job-residence space supply. This figure in Beijing is 6.6 kilometers, the longest among the cities surveyed in this report.
Lu Huapu and other experts and scholars suggested that measures should be taken to solve the traffic congestion in Beijing, including adjusting the urban structure and land use pattern, standardizing the traffic behavior of travelers, vigorously developing green transportation, giving priority to public transportation, integrating comprehensive transportation hubs, scientifically providing parking, vigorously developing intelligent transportation and refining traffic management.
According to the 2022 Monitoring Report on Road Network Density and Operation Status of Major Cities in China, which was jointly completed by the Urban Traffic Infrastructure Monitoring and Governance Laboratory of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development and China Urban Planning and Design Institute, by the fourth quarter of 2021, the average road density in Beijing was 5.8km/km2, which was lower than the average road density of 36 major cities in China. In 2016, the relevant policy documents of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council put forward the goal of "by 2020, the average road network density in urban built-up areas will increase to 8km/km2, and the road area ratio will reach 15%".
Cheng Shidong once said in an interview with the media that urban development in western countries has always been a small block with dense road networks, which will not be blocked by traffic capillaries as often happens in some cities of ours.
Regarding whether road construction can solve the traffic jam problem, Janette Sadik-Khan, the former transportation director of new york, said in an interview with People magazine that the solution to the traffic jam in big cities is to provide new modes of travel, not to build more roads.
"The road cannot be repaired indefinitely. In the case of limited road resources, it can only be an intensive mode of travel." Cheng Shidong said that the traffic jam problem in Beijing is caused by many reasons, and solving the traffic jam problem in Beijing is not a "one stroke".
Cheng Shidong suggested that citizens should try to choose green and intensive modes of travel such as public transportation in the morning and evening rush hours. This requires the government to strengthen the construction of rail and public transport system, promote the feasibility of green travel modes such as walking and cycling to reach the destination, and maximize efficiency.
Original title: Beijing congestion is too cheap because of too many online cars? Research shows that it is possible! Expert: Solving the congestion problem is not a "one stroke"
Editor: Li Zuoting
Editor: Zhou Shangdou
Audit: Feng Fei


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