Shenzhen-Zhongshan Link to cut logistics costs considerably: enterprises

The logistics industry in Zhongshan City, a major manufacturing base in south China's Guangdong Province, is expecting considerable reduction of costs after the opening of the Shenzhen-Zhongshan link.

Shenzhen-Zhongshan link is a core transportation hub project in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. It consists of one underwater tunnel, two bridges and two artificial islands, making it one of the most challenging cross-sea cluster projects in the world.

The 24-km-long cross-sea link opened to traffic Sunday afternoon. The travel time between Shenzhen and Zhongshan will be reduced from two hours to approximately 30 minutes.

As a major manufacturing base in Guangdong involving products such as electronics, electric appliances and furniture, Zhongshan City has a huge logistics demand, with many truck drivers transporting relevant products to Shenzhen City over the years.

The drivers used to prepare a bed on their trucks, so that they can take breaks during the long hours of traveling between the two cities.

"One round trip takes at least over seven hours, so basically I spend very short time with my family," said a local driver named Cao Lixian.

Zhongshan's logistics demand has been expanding fast amid the rapid development of its manufacturing sector.

Freight platform data show that monthly freight orders between Zhongshan and Shenzhen have reached nearly 30,000, and each order delivery takes around four hours and costs around 450 yuan on average.

"It is estimated that for each freight order between Shenzhen and Zhongshan, the delivery time will decrease by around one hour and the cost will be reduced by around 20 percent on average (after the opening of the Shenzhen-Zhongshan link). We are handling more than 300,000 freight orders each day on average in the nine inland cities of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, and I believe that the logistics efficiency of the Greater Bay Area will see further overall improvement," said Wang Gong, marketing manager of an online freight platform in Zhongshan.

The Zhongshan-Kaiping Expressway, which is directly connected to the Shenzhen-Zhongshan link, also opened to traffic Sunday afternoon, which will facilitate transport for cities in western Guangdong Province.

"After opening of the two road sections, we will have more options, and I think our cost will be reduced by 20 to 30 percent," said Fei Yongjun, head of a logistics enterprise in Zhongshan.

The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, a city cluster, is one of the most open areas in China with economic vitality.

The Greater Bay Area is composed of nine cities in Guangdong Province, namely, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Foshan, Huizhou, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Jiangmen and Zhaoqing, and two special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao.

Shenzhen-Zhongshan Link to cut logistics costs considerably: enterprises

The China National Environmental Monitoring Center (CNEMC) has launched the establishment of a database of natural sounds within urban areas this year, aiming to help manage urban noise pollution by more accurately identifying and differentiating natural sounds from artificial noises.

China plans to build a unified national network for automatically monitoring acoustic environmental quality starting on January 1, 2025. The system will focus on monitoring urban man-made noises, but at the same time, it will also unavoidably include natural sounds from birds and insects, as well as the rustling of wind and rain. These natural sounds could affect the accuracy of noise assessments, so it is necessary to collect them in a database so as to better identify and classify different types of noise. By the Dianchi Lake in Kunming, southwest China's Yunnan Province, local environmental monitoring professionals used specific equipment to capture various sounds within a wetland park. They collected sounds from birds, insects, and frogs, along with natural noises like rain, thunder, and wind. These sounds could potentially influence the monitoring results of urban acoustic environmental quality.

They recorded sounds for at least two hours at each monitoring location. They then used specialized software to analyze these recordings, selecting the clearer and less disrupted natural sounds to upload them into the database.

"The natural sounds in this recording are relatively clear and distinct, and the background noise is relatively low, so it is valid. But look at the waveform of this recording, the bird or insect sounds are unclear, and the environmental noise is relatively loud. Based on these two criteria, this recording is invalid," said He Fanyu, an engineer at the Yunnan Ecological and Environment Monitoring Center.

Since the first quarter of this year, the CNEMC has organized local environmental monitoring stations to record natural sounds in urban areas of over 80 cities. As of now, more than 420,000 raw recordings have been made, with 80,000 of them being valid. By the end of the year, it is expected that 600,000 valid recordings will have been collected nationwide for the development of China's largest noise database.

"After the database is built, our next step is to train and test an intelligent sound recognition model. It will help us not only to check if noise levels exceed allowed limits but also to identify where the excess noise is coming from. For example, construction noise is temporary and highly variable, so it requires specific management, especially during nighttime," said Wang Yun, a senior engineer at the Physics Department of the CNEMC.

China developing natural sound database to better tackle urban noise pollution