What are the characteristics of traffic demand?

All aspects and links of modern human social activities are inseparable from the spatial displacement of people and things. Traffic demand comes from every corner of human life and social production. Part of this replacement is done by private individuals or production enterprises themselves, which does not form a transportation demand, but most of it needs public transportation. As an independent industrial sector, transportation industry cannot exist independently without it, so compared with the demand of other goods and services, transportation demand is extensive and universal.

2. Diversity

Freight service providers are faced with all kinds of goods. Because the weight, volume, shape, nature and packaging of goods are different, the requirements for transportation conditions are also different. In the transportation process, different technical measures must be taken. For example, liquid goods such as oil need to be transported by tanker or pipeline, fresh goods need to be transported by refrigerated truck, and chemicals, dangerous goods and long-term goods need special transportation conditions. For passenger demand, the requirements for service quality are also varied. Due to the difference of travel purpose, income level and self-composition, the quality requirements for transportation services are inevitably diverse. Therefore, traffic demand is not only a quantitative concept, but also a qualitative requirement. Safe, fast, convenient and comfortable, which meets the requirements of logistics efficiency and is the concrete embodiment of transportation quality. Transport service providers must adapt to multi-level transport quality requirements.

3. Derivatives

Traffic demand is generally derived demand. In economic life, if the demand of a commodity or service comes from the demand of another commodity or service, it is said that the demand of that commodity or service is derived. The demand for goods or services that causes derivative demand is called original demand. Derivation is an important feature of traffic demand. Obviously, the purpose of the shipper or passenger's request for displacement is often not the displacement itself, but to realize other needs in their production and life, and the completion of spatial displacement is only an indispensable link in the middle.

4. Spatial specificity

Traffic demand is a requirement for displacement, which is a directional displacement between two points designated by traffic consumers, that is to say, traffic demand has spatial specificity. This characteristic of transportation demand constitutes two elements of transportation demand, namely, flow direction and process.

Flow direction refers to the geographical direction of the spatial displacement of goods or passengers, that is, where they come from;

Process, also known as transportation distance, refers to the distance between the starting point and the end point of the spatial displacement of goods or passengers.

For the transportation of goods, the transportation demand is often unbalanced in direction, especially for some bulk goods such as coal, oil and ore. , with obvious flow direction, which is the main reason for the imbalance of cargo transportation direction.

5. Time specificity

The occurrence time of passenger and cargo transportation demand has certain regularity, such as the passenger demand around weekends and important festivals is obviously higher than other times, the peak time of urban traffic is commuting time, and the harvest season of vegetables and fruits is also the busy period of these goods transportation, which is reflected in the requirements of transportation demand, that is, the particularity of time. The imbalance of transportation demand in time causes the imbalance of transportation production in time.

Another meaning of time specificity is the requirement of transportation speed. Passenger and freight transport demand has a strong time limit, that is, transport consumers have their own specific requirements for the departure and arrival time of transport services.

From the perspective of cargo transportation demand, due to the ever-changing commodity market, shippers have different requirements for the start and end time, and the requirements for various cargo transportation speeds are very different; For passenger transport, everyone's travel purpose and requirements for travel time are also different. The time specificity of transportation demand leads to two elements of transportation demand: the flow time and speed of transportation demand.

Flow time refers to the requirement of traffic demand for the start and end time of spatial displacement;

Speed refers to the requirements of transportation consumers for transportation speed during the whole process of cargo displacement.

Transportation speed is directly proportional to transportation cost, so transportation service consumers must balance transportation speed and transportation cost, and realize the necessary displacement of people and things with the minimum cost and the fastest speed.

6. Partial substitutability

Generally speaking, different transportation needs cannot be substituted for each other. For example, the displacement of people obviously cannot replace the displacement of goods, the displacement from Beijing to Lanzhou cannot replace the displacement from Beijing to Guangzhou, and the transportation of cement cannot replace the transportation of fruits, because these are obviously different transportation needs. But in other cases, people can make alternative arrangements for some different material displacements. For example, the transportation of coal can be replaced by long-distance high-voltage transmission lines; In industrial production, when the origin of raw materials and the market of products are separated, people can choose between transporting raw materials or finished products or semi-finished products by determining the production location. This partial substitutability of transportation demand is the basis of location theory to solve the location problem and the basis of technical and economic analysis of major national economic projects. Some people can also be replaced by modern communication means in some cases.