In May 2020, China Academy of Urban Planning and Design (CAUPD) released the 2020 Annual Commuting Monitoring Report for Major Cities in China, and the Commuting Monitoring Report for Major Cities in China - Commuting Time Consumption Supplement in December. The reports have gained widespread social buzz, with mainstream media such as People's Daily, Guangming.com, and Newsweek featuring them, and a report by First Financial reaching 530 million readers.

So how do you reduce your commute?

You can start with both commuting distance and commuting efficiency.

Although with the expansion of the city scale, the city radius becomes larger, there is a tendency to increase the commuting distance. However, from the perspective of the city's occupational and residential space, there is still more room for optimization.

First, we need to alleviate the problem of imbalance in work-life space. For example, Beijing's Tiantongyuan, Huilongguan and other large residential communities, due to the lack of sufficient jobs, generated a large number of long-distance commuting trips, the future is the focus of optimization. For the new new cities on the periphery of the city, it is also necessary to strengthen the relative balance of jobs and housing.

Secondly, it is necessary to alleviate the problem of job-housing mismatch. Within the city, from the point of view of the residential population and the number of jobs within the district, it is relatively balanced, but because of the reasons of housing prices and the mobility of housing, it is actually a mismatch, for example, people in Area A, live in Area C, resulting in an increase in the distance of commuting. In addition, there are people who do not need to commute occupy the living space of commuters.

In terms of transportation, there are several major modes of transportation: walking, biking, surface bus, rail, and cars.

(1) Walking and biking are generally to solve short-distance travel, travel time consumption will not be too long, the focus is to solve the problem of travel quality.

(2) There is still some potential for ground-level transit, especially in the main corridors of the city to set up bus lanes in the middle of the road and on the side of the road, for example, the bus lanes set up on the Beijing Jingtong Expressway are very effective.

(3) Rail transit is the main force to take on long distances, and is the focus of many megacities and mega-cities to improve commuting efficiency, and there are a lot of grasps here, such as increasing the number of rail express lines (crossings or duplexes, etc.), integration of four networks of rail transit or through the operation of the rail transit, optimization of the rail transit and bus transit, and optimization of rail transit with the slow-moving traffic, and so on.

(4)

(4) car traffic also needs to be considered, but not the focus. Cities cannot and should not provide enough space for cars, after all, compared to transit and slow-moving, cars take up too much space, in addition to environmental and other issues.

If we get more granular, we can also make full use of big data to mine the distribution of people and jobs with commute trips longer than 60 minutes, discover the causes of their problems, and target improvement measures.