Towards sustainable transport in Bangkok

High road congestion in developing countries leads to inefficient energy consumption and pollution, and dealing with such issues in cities like Bangkok is complex as per the underdeveloped transport infrastructure and typically poor and fragmented prior urban planning. In reviewing the literature, these problems are evidenced and discussed and have led to fewer passengers travelling through the public transport system in cities like Bangkok in Thailand as compared to those favoring private cars, which is a sub-optimal and unsustainable transport mode when compared to say, London in the UK. Developing country scenarios such as such requires a low-cost investment strategy. Thus, steps towards integrated passenger and goods transport services to improve public transport and logistics are presented in this paper. The strategy proposed aims to utilize the existing and emerging resources and technology synergy with improving transport system ICT frameworks to promote more innovative and sustainable transport. Research indicates that the factors that promote integrated passengers and goods transport schemes can be categorized as those which: 1) Require organizational cooperation efforts such as the cooperation between the public and private organizations (electric train and ride-hailing services), 2) Technology that could enable information sharing and technological solutions to tackle sustainability issues and synergy with the improvement of current transport systems, and 3) Infrastructure and resource sharing to utilize current resources such as electric trains and stations are assumed to act as a consolidation and distribution centers with the synergy of technology. Investigation of data in this research found that integrated passengers and goods transportation to public transport scheme will be best to apply during off-peak hours to promote resource utilization, as there is spare capacity for electric trains during that time. GPS taxi probe data records also indicate that commuters would seem to be adopting ride-hailing services in conjunction with electric trains for travel from the outer area of Bangkok, which lacks public transport accessibility, and that the density of demand is less than in the center of Bangkok. However, the usefulness of integrated passenger and goods transport services to public transport schemes will increase if travel and parcel delivery services can be integrated with services from both ride-hailing applications and the electric train system. We conclude with observations and future work, for example, that ride-hailing services may be overlooked because transport fares are currently too high when using ride-hailing together with electric trains, and ICT intervention to increase the efficiency of the former and journey management to reduce on-peak pressure of the latter may be beneficial.