Nissan-Beijing Traffic System to Help Ease World’s Worst Commute

September 9, 2013 Leave a comment

Nissan-Beijing Traffic System to Help Ease World’s Worst Commute

Beijing, once voted the city with the world’s most onerous commute, is getting help from an automaker to ease its traffic jams.

Nissan Motor Co. (7201) jointly developed a real-time traffic information system with the Chinese capital that provides motorists the fastest route to their destinations, based on road conditions provided by the city’s traffic information center. The suggested shortcuts are delivered through a dashboard-mounted device similar to a global positioning system.Projections by the company show a 10 percent increase in average vehicle speeds from using the system and a corresponding drop in energy consumption and carbon emissions if the same proportion of vehicles use the system, the Yokohama, Japan-based automaker said in a release today.

“We’re still exploring ways on how to commercialize the devices,” Tetsuo Hasegawa, Nissan’s global manager for environmental and safety technologies, said in a briefing in Beijing today.

China, the world’s biggest carbon emitter, is home to seven of the world’s 10 most polluted cities, according to a 2012 report by the Asian Development Bank. Air quality in Beijing reached hazardous levels for 20 days in January, according to U.S. Embassy readings, sparking public calls for government action.

The Chinese capital has capped the number of new vehicles in the city at 240,000 a year, a number that will be further reduced to ease pollution and traffic congestion, the official Xinhua News Agency reported this month, citing the Beijing Municipal Commission of Transport.

To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Tian Ying in Beijing at ytian@bloomberg.net

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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