Current transportation issues in Asian countries

Abstract

Transportation systems in Asian countries have been drastically developed since the past decades with their economic growth and increased population. However, most of Asian countries still have their own unique transportation problems. To this end, they have been devoting enormous efforts and cost to the improvement of transportation systems to provide more comfortable and safe movements, and consequently they acquired technical and practical know-how to improve a variety of traffic problems. On March 13 to 14, 2008, an international seminar was held at the University of Seoul, Korea to discuss current transportation issues in Asian countries and share accumulated knowledge and technologies. Various kinds of practical examples related to the improvement of traffic problems and even urban disaster were presented and discussed in the international seminar. This special issue is a collection of outstanding papers that were selected from all the papers presented at the international seminar. The first paper by Shi et al. demonstrates and validates the necessity of reforming Beijing to a Public Transit Oriented (PTO) city from the view of transportation equity. They develop a road spatial recourse analyzing model to describe how to distribute road spatial resources fairly to private cars, taxies, and buses. The results show the feasibility and creditability in applying PTO transportation structure in Beijing. The second paper by Kim and Shon identifies the effects of regulation changes in Seoul bus system. This study addresses the challenges newly faced after Seoul Bus Reform 2004 and proposes some strategies in order to ensure better bus operation. Especially, they propose the short-term strategies including (a) the development of more sophisticated standard cost model incorporating a route structure and/or the patronage change, (b) the introduction of yardstick regulation, and (c) extended incentives and penalties. The third paper by Yamada et al. reports the results of implementation of community flood risk communication which was proposed to enhance local disaster mitigation. They suggest participatory approaches, that enable to communicate flood information in two-way, to improve local disaster mitigation and secure social safety. Through a case study, flood risk communication was found to be effective for the enhancement of residents' awareness of both self- and mutual-help efforts in community based flood risk mitigation. The fourth paper by Lee et al. presents analytical results on how to prioritize investments for roadway development in the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Highway Network. They developed a new method using a two-step hierarchical Fuzzy multiple-attribute decision-making process to evaluate the prioritization of investment for road sections. For prioritization, a total of 32 roadway sections were evaluated with respect to economic and political aspects. The fifth paper by Lee et al. explains the complexity of traffic phenomena based on phase transitions among free-flow, synchronized flow, and moving jam phases, and on their complex nonlinear spatiotemporal features. The developed model explains and estimates traffic congestion in terms of speed breakdown, phase transition, and queue propagation. They have estimated the link, on and off-ramp volumes at every time interval by using traffic data collected from vehicle detection systems in Korea freeway sections. We hope that the papers in this special issue would serve as useful references for solving similar traffic problems in other countries and provide good insights to make transportation system more efficient and comfortable. Finally, we thank all the authors and reviewers for the publication of this special issue.