Officials to compile new transportation survey
What is the most popular means of transport in Shanghai? How long is the average commute to work? And what is the future of the city's transportation system? All these questions and more are expected to be answered with a survey.
Shanghai will compile a transportation survey, hoping residents, companies and institutions participate, city transportation and statistics officials announced on Wednesday.
New issues such as low-altitude flights will be included in the survey, which will also involve foreign respondents.
The survey focuses on various modes of transportation in Shanghai and will cover five aspects: urban travel, inter-provincial travel, car ownership and use, cargo transportation, and traffic hot spots. Its scope will extend to other cities in the Yangtze River Delta region.
It will be carried out among locals, school students and hotel guests about their travels, while it will also choose traffic hubs for the questions over car use, cargo vehicles and rail transit connections.
Among them, a door-to-door survey for residents stands out as the most extensive part of the program. It covers all streets and towns in the city and will involve approximately 50,000 households. It will commence on October 14 and last one week.
The door-to-door survey will be conducted in two phases: the first for registration, and the second will be the formal survey. The enumerators will present their credentials when they visit respondents.
Residents and companies will not be asked private information, and most of the surveys will be carried out online via questionnaires.
"The comprehensive traffic survey conducted every five years coincides with the timeline for our five-year development plans. It provides crucial data," said He Li, chief of the comprehensive planning department of the Shanghai Transportation Commission.
"It also helps us evaluate the effectiveness of some major programs and plans we have carried out over the past five years."
Highlights of previous surveys:
The city has organized six comprehensive transportation surveys. The first was in 1986 while the last was in 2019. Since 2004, the survey has been done every five years.
According to the result of the survey done in 2019, average daily passenger trips reached over 57 million per day, marking a 3.3 percent increase compared with 2014. Non-commuting travel demands such as business and leisure travel grew even faster, with the volume of night-time and weekend travel increasing more than 15 percent.
And the average travel distance per person in the city increased significantly, but the average travel time remained stable. The average travel time for commuting in central areas was 42.5 minutes per trip, which was roughly the same as in 2014.
The survey also found that Shanghai is closely connected with the Yangtze River Delta region. In 2019, about 73 percent of Shanghai's outbound trips were to and from the Yangtze River Delta region.
In 2019, the average daily number of shared bicycles was 305,000. An average of 1 million trips were taken per day.
And in 2020, the passenger trips by online ride-hailing cars exceeded that of traditional taxis for the first time, accounting for 53 percent of the total.