SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT

Q.1. Read the following case and answer the questions given at the end.

Passenger Interchange

In most major cities the amount of congestion on the roads is increasing. Some of this is due to commercial vehicles, but by far the majority is due to private cars.There are several ways of controlling the number of vehicles using certain areas. These include prohibition ofcars in pedestrian areas, restricted entry, limits onparking, traffic calming schemes, and so on. A relatively new approach has road-user charging, where cars pay afee to use a particular length of road, with the fee possibly changing with prevailing traffic conditions.

Generally, the most effective approach to reducing traific congestion is to improve public transport. These services must be attractive to people who judge them by a range of factors, such as the comfort of seating, amount of crowding, handling of luggage, availability offood, toilets, safety, facilities in waiting areas. availabilityof escalators and lifts, and so on. However, the dominant considerations are cost, time and reliability.

Buses are often the most flexible form of public transport, with the time for a journey consisting of four parts :

• joining time, which is the time needed to get to a bus stop

• waiting time, until the bus arrives

• journey time, to acnrallg do the travelling

• leaving time, to get from the bus to the final destination.

Transport policies can reduce these times by acombination of frequent services, well-planned routes, and bus priority schemes. Then convenient journeys andsubsidised travel make buses an attractive alternative.

One problem, however, is that people have to changebuses, or transfer between buses and other types of transport, including cars, planes, trains, ferries and trams.Then there are additional times for moving between onetype of transport and the next, and waiting for the nextpart of the service. These can be minimised by an integrated transport system with frequent, connecting services at ‘passenger interchanges’.

Passenger interchanges seem a good idea, but theyare not universally popular. Most people prefer a straight-through journey between two points, even if this is less frequent than an integrated service with interchanges. The reason is probably because there are more opportunities for things to go wrong, and experiences suggests that even starting a journey does not guarantee that it will successfully finish.

In practice, most major cities such as London and Paris have successful interchanges, and they are spreading into smaller towns, such as Montpellier in France. For theten years up to 2001, tbe population of Montpellier grewby more than 8.4 per cent, and it moved from being the 22nd largest town in France to the eighth largest. It has good transport links with the porti of Sete, an airport, inland waterways, main road networks and a fast rail linkto Paris. In 2001, public transport was enhanced with a 15 kilometre tramline connecting major sites in the towncentre with other transport links. At the same time, buses were rerouted to connect to the tram, cycling was encouraged for short distances, park-and-ride services were improved, and journeys were generally made easier, As a result, there lns been an increase in use of publlc transport, a reduction in the number of cars in the town centre, and improved air quality. When the tram opened in 2000, a third of the population tried it in the first weekend, and it carried a million people within seven weeks of opening. In 2005, a second tramline will add 19 kilometres to the routes.

Questions :

(a) Are the problems of moving people significantly different from the problems of moving goods or Services?

(b) What are the benefits of public transport over private transport ? Should public transport be encouraged and, if so, how ?

(c) What are the benefits of iniegrated public transport systems ?