Geographies of global issues: Change and threat in young people\u27s lives

Children and young people, throughout the world, are experiencing a time of immense and rapid change - environmental, social, political, economic, and cultural. This chapter introduces readers to a volume entitled Geographies of Global Issues: Change and Threat, which is part of the Geographies of Children and Young People series. It provides an overview of the chapters contained in that volume and outlines four key themes that run across those chapters. First, children\u27s geographies are also - fundamentally - about adults. It does not make sense to do children\u27s geographies, without taking the perspectives of adult decision-makers into account. Second, children and young people are agents of change - but their lives are also powerfully influenced by broader structures and processes over which they have little say. Children\u27s geographers need to balance their attentiveness to the microscale of children\u27s everyday lives, with a careful and sustained focus on the bigger picture. Third, change is not just an external force that impacts on children and young people\u27s lives. Children and young people contribute to diverse global, regional, and local changes and threats. It is important to bear in mind that their contributions to change are not always benign or beneficial. Fourth, while change can threaten or undermine children and young people\u27s wellbeing, it can also engender opportunities. Children\u27s geographers have an important role to play in scratching beneath the surface, to uncover sources of possibility and optimism amidst upheaval

Understanding Travel Time Expenditures Around the World: Exploring the Notion of a Travel Time Frontier

Travel behavior researchers have been intrigued by the amount of time that people allocate to travel in a day, i.e., the daily travel time expenditure, commonly referred to as a “travel time budget”. Explorations into the notion of a travel time budget have once again resurfaced in the context of activity-based and time use research in travel behavior modeling. This paper revisits the issue by developing the notion of a travel time frontier (TTF) that is distinct from the actual travel time expenditure or budget of an individual. The TTF is defined in this paper as an intrinsic maximum amount of time that people are willing to allocate for travel. It is treated as an unobserved frontier that influences the actual travel time expenditure measured in travel surveys. Using travel survey datasets from around the world (i.e., US, Switzerland and India), this paper sheds new light on daily travel time expenditures by modeling the unobserved TTF and comparing these frontiers across international contexts. The stochastic frontier modeling methodology is employed to model the unobserved TTF as a production frontier. Separate models are estimated for commuter and non-commuter samples to recognize the differing constraints between these market segments. Comparisons across the international contexts show considerable differences in average unobserved TTF values. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007Travel time frontier, Travel time budget, Travel time expenditure, International comparison, Stochastic frontier model, Activity-travel behavior,