Express delivery reaches rural areas by bus

Ma Sheng is a bus driver for the urban-rural bus company in Miluo city, central China's Hunan province.

Since September last year, his bus has had a batch of special "passengers" – express parcels that need to be delivered to villages.

Ma Sheng runs a 28-kilometer route that connects five villages. There are usually over ten passengers on the bus, along with dozens of packages of various sizes.

This bus has been carefully renovated. Two seats directly facing the rear door have been  replaced with a transparent container to store parcels.

"The container is placed at the door for easy access," explained Yang Shuai, party secretary and director of Miluo city's transportation bureau. This container is 3 cubic meters in size.

At 4:10 PM, the bus arrives in Xichang village, where Ma Jian, owner of Xichang Supermarket and parcel station manager, is waiting by the roadside. She gets on the bus, gets the parcels out, and arranges them on the station's shelves. "With the help of the buses, the delivery time to the village has been reduced, and villagers no longer have to pay an additional fee!" Ma Jian said.

In the past, due to the dispersed location of rural villages, express delivery was costly, and many courier companies would only deliver packages to the distribution centers in towns. "Later, some third-party delivery companies contracted the service from the town to the villages, allowing express delivery to reach the villages," Ma Jian said.

However, the villagers had to pay an additional fee for this service—each package delivered by the third-party company incurred a delivery fee ranging from 0.5 to 2 yuan. Also, third-party deliveries were not always timely, and it took two or three days to deliver a few parcels at times.

Miluo city has piloted in using rural bus services to transport express parcels since August 2022, merging rural passenger-cargo transportation with postal express delivery.

This initiative aims to make it easier for industrial products to reach rural areas and for agricultural products to enter cities. While addressing logistics and delivery challenges in rural areas, the practice promoted agricultural and rural development.

With the integration of passenger and cargo transportation, the delivery problem has been resolved.

There are three round daily trips between Miluo city and Xichang village, allowing express packages to "hitchhike" to the village within a day.

Urban-rural buses has simplified express delivery among villages. Yang Shuai stated that there were no further running costs except for installing the "container" on the bus.

Currently, all 30 urban-rural bus routes in the city have been fully engaged in passenger-parcel transportation, covering all 154 villages.

Source: People's Daily; trans-editing by Guo Yao