The Harbin city transportation bureau recently issued its new policy "Guiding Opinions on the Digital Transformation of Urban Public Transport in Harbin" – the first in China's northernmost Heilongjiang province to undertake the digital transformation of the public transport industry.

Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang, has established the goal of using digitalization, networking and intelligence to improve its public transport capabilities.

It reportedly aims to tackle such current problems as the low levels of digital applications in public transport, insufficient network and information service support and the uneven intelligent connections of various public transport services. 

It was felt that the existing system in the city is unable to meet people's increasing demand for travel services – and the current public governance needs to adapt to the new development requirements of the times.

Some improvements, however, have been noted in Harbin in the wake of the latest digital transportation efforts.

So far, Harbin has built a traffic operations monitoring and dispatching command center. It has formed a comprehensive traffic monitoring and coordinated dispatching business system that includes a data center, a disaster recovery center, communications network, an intelligent command center hardware system and a transportation intelligent management platform software system. 

These cover various operational areas including buses, taxis, online taxi bookings, traffic law enforcement, emergency commands and public transport planning.

Meanwhile, Harbin has improved the city's operating vehicle monitoring equipment deployment, by installing 72,834 on-board intelligent monitoring units. These are said to have realized the real-time control of the city's 6,251 public buses, 4,684 online taxis, 14,380 offline taxis and 47,519 other transportation vehicles.