The Star: July 13, 2017

16 Thursday July 13 2017
Latest Christchurch news at www. .kiwi
The Star
News
Stopping Chch from becoming a
Chinese traffic engineer Ming Bai has spent three
years in Christchurch studying how far people
commute and what authorities should invest if they
want to get people out of their cars. He spoke to
Gabrielle Stuart
MORE THAN 21 million people
live in Beijing – about 36 times
the population of Canterbury
packed into an area a third of the
size.
It is unofficially known as
the capital of traffic jams, and
has had 50-lane-wide superhighways
in gridlock.
Vehicles are believed to be responsible
for about 30 per cent of
the city’s smog and air pollution,
which a United States study estimated
kills about 4000 people in
China a day.
Traffic engineer Ming Bai’s
task was finding a solution to the
problem.
The Chinese Government had
committed to reducing emissions,
and Mr Bai was in a team
of people trying to figure out
how to do it: How to get people
out of their vehicles.
That was three years ago.
In 2014, he moved to Christchurch
to undertake a PhD at
Canterbury University.
His goal was to create a formula
to show what kind of transport
investment would be most
effective in getting people to use
cycleways or public transport.
While working on the Beijing
project, he had been frustrated
by the lack of information, he
said.
City planners had to decide
where to place things like train
systems, cycleways or bus routes,
and where they would be most
effective.
But they were often based on
the population of each area, or
used surveys which were unreliable
and expensive.
“If you want to build a
cycleway or public transport system,
you need to know the travel
amounts and that has nothing to
do with the city population. It’s
about how many people would
have to travel short distance
amounts, or long travel distance
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SOLUTIONS: Chinese traffic engineer Ming Bai has spent three years in Christchurch studying
how far people commute and how authorities can get people out of their cars.
amounts,” he said.
That depended on things like
people’s commuting distance,
how far the nearest shopping
centre was, and how many
retired or non-working people
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lived in the area.
He said he chose Christchurch
in which to do his research
because Canterbury University’s
engineering department was
world-renowned, and also because
the data collected here was
very detailed.
Statistics NZ has data from
commuter travel surveys, looking
at where people travel to and
from.
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