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Dr. Christoph Nedopil

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Christoph Nedopil supported the Sustainable Mobility Team at GIZ in China as Project Director of the Sino-German Cooperation of Low Carbon Transpor from late 2017 to early 2019.
Green Logistics

New era of urban freight in China: Workshop with 22 pilot cities on green urban delivery in Chengdu

China has been struggling to meet the growing demands of urban delivery. With urban population continuously growing at about 15 million people per year, 58.52% of Chinese citizens now live in cities (up from 36.22% in 2000). At the same time, consumption spending per capita in China has grown by 25% in just 3 years from RMB 18,487 (about EUR 2,370) in 2013 to 23,079RMB (about EUR 2,960) in 2016. A lot of this increased consumption spending has been driving the fast growth of e-commerce, which saw a 60% annual growth (CAGR) for the past 7 years. These developments have provided a boom for logistics companies in China, which saw their express deliveries rise from 9 billion shipments in 2013 to an estimated 40 billion in 2018. However, this development also provides many challenges to both the traffic in the cities as well as the environment. With numbers of both…

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Green Logistics

Singles Day in China, the biggest shopping festival in the world: a challenge for the environment

On 11 November 2018 Chinese e-commerce volume reached more than 27 billion EUR, on a single day by a single retailer – Alibaba. This is more than half of Germany’s overall e-tailing in one year, which is expected to be 53.6 bn EUR in 2018. Adding other online-shops to the statistics, the total sum spent in Chinese e-commerce on that one day will probably be about as much as Germany’s yearly e-commerce volume (JD.com sold about 20 bn EUR worth of goods). The so called Singles Day, or Double Eleven (Shuangshiyi, 双十一) or also „chop-off-your-hands-day“ (in order to stop shopping) happens on 11 November. The four 1s could be understood as singles, which is one of the stories of the origin of Singles Day. It has become  the biggest shopping event in the world., dwarfing its American equivalent – Cyber Monday – which reached sales of 6.59 bn USD (about…

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Urban Transport

Integrated Public Transport Services and Transit Alliances in China – A Case Study of the City of Foshan

Cities in China are continuing to suffer from heavy and often slow traffic. According to China Daily, Jinan, Beijing and Harbin are China’s three most congested cities. Jinan traffic, for example, only has an average speed of 21.12 km/h during rush hour. With increased commute times and greenhouse gas emissions, the external costs of traffic congestion are increasing. However, neither the provision of additional road infrastructure nor the development of new car technologies alone can overcome these challenges. Thus, in 2011, the Ministry of Transport (MoT) initiated the Transit Metropolis Programme. Its goal is to promote public transport in cities through better service, more complete infrastructures, efficient management and strong support from local governments. Within that framework, city governments and decision makers have become increasingly interested in how to establish accessible and affordable public transport services and how to create more livable cities. In support of these efforts, GIZ has…

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Electro Mobility

Delegation from the German State of Hesse in Beijing and Shenzhen – understanding the non-predictability of digitalization and mobility innovation

China’s rapid development in mobility and digitalization China is increasingly recognized as an innovation leader in mobility and digitalization. Companies in mobility services, like Didi or Meituan, in NEV vehicles, such as BYD or Foton, or in technology, like Huawei or Baidu, have sparked global interest in how China is creating an ecosystem to build the future in digitalization and in mobility. In order to better understand how Chinese and Germans can cooperate and learn from each other in mobility and digitalization, the German state of Hesse has sent a high-level delegation of businesspersons, scientists and policy makers led by Mathias Samson, State Secretary to the German Ministry of Economics, Energy, Transport and Regional Development, State of Hesse, to Beijing and Shenzhen from Sep 2 to Sep 7, 2018. The sustainable mobility team of GIZ China has supported and accompanied this trip. The delegation met with representatives from government (e.g.…

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Articles

The Evolution of Free-Floating Bike-Sharing in China

The evolution of free-floating bike-sharing in China Authors: Sebastian Ibold, Dr. Christoph Nedopil Review: Sandra Retzer, Tina Huang, Florian Ibold Since the explosive growth of free-floating bike-sharing in China starting in 2016, it has been described as one of the country’s hottest industries. China’s official state-run press agency Xinhua called it one of the “four great new inventions” in modern times (the other three being e-commerce, high-speed rail and mobile-payment). The bike-sharing industry was praised for providing a healthy lifestyle and a key to achieve more sustainable urban transport systems, with the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution significantly. The expectations put on free-floating bike-sharing were no less than reviving the “kingdom of bicycles”. But instead of a smooth bike-ride, the bike sharing industry in China has experienced nothing short of a roller-coaster ride: From 2016 onwards, a growing number of start-ups entered the bike-sharing market, resulting…

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Electro Mobility

High-amped electric power, autonomous concepts a lot of big screens vs. classic designs – our experience at Auto China 2018

The 2018 Beijing International Automotive Exhibition (also known as Auto China 2018) took place in Beijing from April 25 to May 4 under the motto “Steering to a New Era”. Over 1,200 exhibitors presented their newest gear, among them 1,022 vehicles and 105 world premiers. More than 40 global OEMs, such as BMW, VW, Daimler, Peugeot, Toyota, Tesla were present.. Next to the usual suspects, and almost more exciting, were the sheer amount of Chinese brands. Some had been around for years, such as BYD, FAW, Brilliance and Chery. Others such as the Chinese companies NIO and Byton, have received a lot of attention by getting large investments, establishing partnerships with battery manufacturers (like CATL) and IT companies (like Baidu).  But we also saw a lot of companies that had hardly been heard of before and that made their first appearance at Auto China 2018. Among them are brands such…

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Events

Supporting the cities of Shenzhen and Foshan to quantify traffic emissions and introduce transit alliances – a short report

GIZ in China has been working with the Chinese cities of Shenzhen and Foshan since 2012 on low-carbon transportation. From April 9 to 10, two GIZ experts (Dr. Christoph Nedopil and Shengyang Sun) and Benedikt Notter from INFRAS, a consultancy and engineering company based in Switzerland, travelled to Shenzhen to work with the Shenzhen Urban Transport Planning Center (SUTPC) on improving the accounting of greenhouse gases from road transportation in Shenzhen. In order to understand traffic flows, SUTPC currently collects about 750 million records of big data daily to monitor traffic flow (see also our interview with SUPTC about big data here). However, more information is necessary to quantify emissions from driving, which depend, amongst others, on the type of vehicle or whether a vehicle is stuck in a traffic jams or is driving at high-speeds. Thus, SUPTC has recorded about 7,000 hours of very detailed driving cycles from trucks…

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Urban Transport

Managing 750 million records of big data to optimize mobility in Shenzhen

Interview with Dr. Wu Yue. Dr. Wu Yue is the chief engineer of the intelligent transport division at the Shenzhen Urban Transport Planning Center (SUTPC). Dr. Wu Yue received his PhD from Tongji University in Shanghai in 1990. Before joining SUTPC 3 years ago, he had been working in Singapore as an intelligent transport engineer. GIZ：How would you describe your role and duties as chief engineer of SUTPC`s intelligence department? Dr. Wu: Generally, I am working as the technology director to guide the research directions of intelligent transport business (ITS), the adviser of important intelligent transport projects of the company, and also developing the partnership with cooperation in ITS supply chain. GIZ：You were working in Singapore in transport planning for more than a decade. What experiences from Singapore would you want to apply in Shenzhen? Dr. Wu: Singapore is an island of 4.8 million people with limited space. Sustainable transport…

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Urban Transport

The impressive development of Beijing`s and Shanghai`s subway system in comparison to Berlin and Munich

There is justified admiration for the scope and speed of China´s construction of its public transportation infrastructure as a form of green urban transportation. In this short article, we want to shed light on the development and status of public rail network in Beijing and Shanghai by comparing their subway infrastructure to the urban public rail infrastructure of the two German cities Berlin and Munich. On first glance, Beijing and Shanghai have over the past years strongly outperformed the two German cities when considering the growth and length of the subway network (see Figure 1). However, as this short article shows: despite the rapid growth from just one subway line with just a bit more than 40 km in length in the 1990s in both Chinese cities to today`s combined 1200 km, there is still need for further development which both cities are working hard on. Short history of the…

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