Exploring metro vibrancy and its relationship with built environment: a cross-city comparison using multi-source urban data

Recent urban transformations have led to critical reflections on the blighted urban infrastructures and called for re-stimulating vital urban places. Especially, the metro has been recognized as the backbone infrastructure for urban mobility and the associated economy agglomeration. To date, limited research has been devoted to investigating the relationship between metro vitality and built environment in mega-cities empirically. This paper presents a multisource urban data-driven approach to quantify the metro vibrancy and its association with the underlying built environment. Massive smart card data is processed to extract metro ridership, which denotes the vibrancy around the metro station in physical space. Social media check-ins are crawled to measure the vitality of metros in virtual spaces. Both physical and virtual vibrancy are integrated into a holistic metro vibrancy metric using an entropy-based weighting method. Certain built environment characteristics, including land use, transportation and buildings are modeled as independent variables. The significant influences of built environmental factors on the metro vibrancy are unraveled using the ordinary least square regression and the spatial lag model. With experiments conducted in Shenzhen, Singapore and London, this study comes up with a conclusion that spatial distributions of metro vibrancy metrics in three cities are spatially autocorrelated. The regression analysis suggests that in all the three cities, more affluent urban areas tend to have higher metro virbrancy, while the road density, land use and buildings tend to impact metro vibrancy in only one or two cities. These results demonstrate the relationship between the metro vibrancy and built environment is affected by complex urban contexts. These findings help us to understand metro vibrancy thus make proper policy to re-stimulate the important metro infrastructure in the future

Carbon Free Boston: Social equity report 2019

OVERVIEW: In January 2019, the Boston Green Ribbon Commission released its Carbon Free Boston: Summary Report, identifying potential options for the City of Boston to meet its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050. The report found that reaching carbon neutrality by 2050 requires three mutually-reinforcing strategies in key sectors: 1) deepen energy efficiency while reducing energy demand, 2) electrify activity to the fullest practical extent, and 3) use fuels and electricity that are 100 percent free of greenhouse gases (GHGs). The Summary Report detailed the ways in which these technical strategies will transform Boston’s physical infrastructure, including its buildings, energy supply, transportation, and waste management systems. The Summary Report also highlighted that it is how these strategies are designed and implemented that matter most in ensuring an effective and equitable transition to carbon neutrality. Equity concerns exist for every option the City has to reduce GHG emissions. The services provided by each sector are not experienced equally across Boston’s communities. Low-income families and families of color are more likely to live in residences that are in poor physical condition, leading to high utility bills, unsafe and unhealthy indoor environments, and high GHG emissions.1 Those same families face greater exposure to harmful outdoor air pollution compared to others. The access and reliability of public transportation is disproportionately worse in neighborhoods with large populations of people of color, and large swaths of vulnerable neighborhoods, from East Boston to Mattapan, do not have ready access to the city’s bike network. Income inequality is a growing national issue and is particularly acute in Boston, which consistently ranks among the highest US cities in regards to income disparities. With the release of Imagine Boston 2030, Mayor Walsh committed to make Boston more equitable, affordable, connected, and resilient. The Summary Report outlined the broad strokes of how action to reach carbon neutrality intersects with equity. A just transition to carbon neutrality improves environmental quality for all Bostonians, prioritizes socially vulnerable populations, seeks to redress current and past injustice, and creates economic and social opportunities for all. This Carbon Free Boston: Social Equity Report provides a deeper equity context for Carbon Free Boston as a whole, and for each strategy area, by demonstrating how inequitable and unjust the playing field is for socially vulnerable Bostonians and why equity must be integrated into policy design and implementation. This report summarizes the current landscape of climate action work for each strategy area and evaluates how it currently impacts inequity. Finally, this report provides guidance to the City and partners on how to do better; it lays out the attributes of an equitable approach to carbon neutrality, framed around three guiding principles: 1) plan carefully to avoid unintended consequences, 2) be intentional in design through a clear equity lens, and 3) practice inclusivity from start to finish

14-01 Exploring the Equity Dimensions of US Bicycle Sharing Systems

Research over the past several decades has made it increasingly clear that livable communities are inextricably linked with the provision of opportunities for active and/or non-motorized transportation; i.e., walking, cycling and their variants. An emerging phenomena that is working within the broader movement of active transportation is public bicycle sharing systems (BSS). Such systems have grown considerably in the US in recent years and, in some cases, are dramatically changing the ecology of urban transport. Alongside celebrations of the early successes of US BSS, have been criticisms that these systems have not been adequately integrated into lower-income communities; a pattern that mirrors (motorized) transportation injustices-both past and present-that have burdened lower-income while simultaneously advantaging middle to higher-income communities. And while diverse communities are embracing non-motorized transportation, there is valid concern that traditionally underserved populations will again be marginalized or unable to share in the full benefits of existing and future bicycle- and pedestrian-oriented infrastructure including BSS. This research explores the spatial arrangements and allocations of US BSS and examines the extent to which lower-income communities experience differential access to bike-sharing infrastructure. Spatial regression models are employed to examine the degree to which race, ethnicity and/or economic hardship explain variations in the distribution of bike-sharing stations

Gauging interventions for sustainable travel: a comparative study of travel attitudes in Berlin and London

So-called ‘soft’ policy instruments that respond to the psychological aspects of travel are regularly acknowledged as necessary complements to ‘hard’ infrastructure investments to effectively promote sustainable travel in cities. While studies investigating subjective orientations among travellers have proliferated, open questions remain including the role of recent technological advances, the expansion of alternative mobility services, locally specific mobility cultures and residential selection. This paper presents the methods, results and policy implications of a comparative study aiming to understand mobility attitudes and behaviours in the wider metropolitan regions of Berlin and London. We specifically considered information and communication technology (ICT), new types of mobility services such as car sharing, electric cars and residential preferences. In each region, we identified six comparable segments with distinct attitudinal profiles, socio-demographic properties and behavioural patterns. Geocoding of the home address of respondents further revealed varying contextual opportunities and constraints that are likely to influence travel attitudes. We find that there is significant potential for uptake of sustainable travel practices in both metropolitan regions, if policy interventions are designed and targeted in accordance with group-specific needs and preferences and respond to local conditions of mobility culture. We identify such interventions for each segment and region and conclude that comparative assessment of attitudinal, alongside geographical, characteristics of metropolitan travellers can provide better strategic input for realistic scenario-building and ex-ante assessment of sustainable transport policy

Gauging interventions for sustainable travel: a comparative study of travel attitudes in Berlin and London

So-called ‘soft’ policy instruments that respond to the psychological aspects of travel are regularly acknowledged as necessary complements to ‘hard’ infrastructure investments to effectively promote sustainable travel in cities. While studies investigating subjective orientations among travellers have proliferated, open questions remain including the role of recent technological advances, the expansion of alternative mobility services, locally specific mobility cultures and residential selection. This paper presents the methods, results and policy implications of a comparative study aiming to understand mobility attitudes and behaviours in the wider metropolitan regions of Berlin and London. We specifically considered information and communication technology (ICT), new types of mobility services such as car sharing, electric cars and residential preferences. In each region, we identified six comparable segments with distinct attitudinal profiles, socio-demographic properties and behavioural patterns. Geocoding of the home address of respondents further revealed varying contextual opportunities and constraints that are likely to influence travel attitudes. We find that there is significant potential for uptake of sustainable travel practices in both metropolitan regions, if policy interventions are designed and targeted in accordance with group-specific needs and preferences and respond to local conditions of mobility culture. We identify such interventions for each segment and region and conclude that comparative assessment of attitudinal, alongside geographical, characteristics of metropolitan travellers can provide better strategic input for realistic scenario-building and ex-ante assessment of sustainable transport policy

Job-worker spatial dynamics in Beijing: Insights from Smart Card Data.

As a megacity, Beijing has experienced traffic congestion, unaffordable housing issues and jobs-housing im- balance. Recent decades have seen policies and projects aiming at decentralizing urban structure and job-worker patterns, such as subway network expansion, the suburbanization of housing and firms. But it is unclear whether these changes produced a more balanced spatial configuration of jobs and workers. To answer this question, this paper evaluated the ratio of jobs to workers from Smart Card Data at the transit station level and offered a longitudinal study for regular transit commuters. The method identifies the most preferred station around each commuter's workpalce and home location from individual smart datasets according to their travel regularity, then the amounts of jobs and workers around each station are estimated. A year-to-year evolution of job to worker ratios at the station level is conducted. We classify general cases of steepening and flattening job-worker dynamics, and they can be used in the study of other cities. The paper finds that (1) only temporary balance appears around a few stations; (2) job-worker ratios tend to be steepening rather than flattening, influencing commute patterns; (3) the polycentric configuration of Beijing can be seen from the spatial pattern of job centers identified.Authors appreciate Beijing Transport Information Center for data access. This work is financially supported by Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. XDA19040402) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41701132 and No. 41722103)

Determinants of public transport use in Perth, Western Australia

This study examines the primary determinants explaining spatial and temporal variations in public transportation use in Perth using 2009 SmartRider data. The developed robust predictive model includes land use, urban form, socio-economic characteristics and public transport availability. Land-use development integrated with sustainable transportation systems, more frequent and densely distributed feeder bus service to train stations, density of low-income resident and university student populations are highlighted as important for policy making encouraging increased public transport use