The State Council approved an action plan, formulated by the National Development and Reform Commission, on June 21, to promote the integrated development of transportation and logistics industries and reduce the costs of social logistics.

The plan sets as targets building an open and sharing transportation system of logistics by 2018, with a “one waybill” transportation system and a railway system covering over 80 percent of China’s large ports and logistics parks.

And by 2020, China will see a batch of competitive transportation and logistics enterprises and a new system with standardized facilities, networked information, fair and orderly market, and safe and effective operations. By then, the coverage rate of urban and rural logistics distribution network will be raised by 10 percentage points.

It is crucial to turn railways into logistics hubs, such as ports, highway freight terminals, and logistic parks, said the circular, which also stressed the construction of urban beltways, and the effective connection of urban roads and highways in megacities to reduce cargo transport’s effect on urban transportation.

The plan urged the government to optimize the space for transportation hubs and logistics links, make efforts to build major roads for container transport by 2020, and drive the construction of railways and highways for passengers and freight, respectively, in the Yangtze River and Pearl River Delta regions.

The government should enhance the services of multi-purpose and international transportation and support industry associations to launch plans to promote the one waybill system, with one-stop transfer and delivery, and charges.

The plan also highlighted establishing well-supervised platforms of transportation and logistics, including management platforms and information sharing platforms.

The government should encourage social capital to participate in building a professional management platform for transportation information, logistics resources transactions, and bulk commodity transaction services. The management platform is expected to provide services such as information publishing, data analysis, and customer advisory.

An interactive online and offline highway port network and a standardized transportation model and intelligent distribution system should also be encouraged and promoted, said the circular.

In addition, related supervision should be strengthened for all platforms in order to create a good market environment for the integrated development of the transportation and logistics industry, the circular added.