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As a form of social movement aiming to effect social change, protests could bring about unintended impacts on all walks of life. In other words, the cost of protests can be incurred by those who might not be protesters. The protests triggered by an extradition bill in Hong Kong since 2019 are no exception. This paper focuses on the impacts on the ridership of the metro system on protest days. It synthesizes and hypothesizes factors influencing the distribution of the ridership changes and conducts an empirical study in the context of Hong Kong to study the possible influences and spatial dependence. It is found that, across metro stations, political orientation (percentage of votes to pro-democracy camp in the 2019 Election of District Councils), law enforcement (permission from the police to protest), land use type (especially for commercial and open space), population age and income, as well as transit/road network characteristics and intermodal connectivity, significantly influence the ridership of metro stations during protest days. In addition, the mixed regressive spatial autoregressive model has higher explanatory power than the ordinary least square model, suggesting the need for a spatial lag and error specification. The results could also have significant implications for policy and planning for operating metro services and managing metro stations before, during, and after social shocks.

In this article, we address the public transportation system’s resilience in social movements, which has been under-explored in transportation scholarship. On the one hand, public transportation enables mass mobilization of people and materials and large-scale public engagement in political/social events in transit-reliant cities like Hong Kong. On the other hand, public transportation can be an instrument for both the government and event participants—the former interferes with the public transportation service provision to manage and mitigate the adverse impacts of social movements it perceives on society, whereas the latter disrupt public transportation services or vandalize and damage related facilities to express their discontent and to put pressure on the former. The dynamic resilience of the public transportation system against the above backdrop warrants more in-depth exploration. We incorporate both supply and demand shocks to theorize resilience as a public transportation system’s capability to return to a new equilibrium between the supply and demand after a disturbance. The theoretical approach is illustrated using empirical data and publicly available materials concerning the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement in Hong Kong.

Job accessibility measures the ease of accessing potential job opportunities from a given locale, such as a traffic analysis zone (TAZ). In principle, improved job accessibility of a locale should lead to better employment outcomes for job seekers residing there. However, the extent to which residents of a locale can secure jobs within its isochrone by a specific mode of travel has rarely been investigated in the existing scholarship. In this article, we define “accessible jobs” as all the jobs within an isochrone of a locale by a specific travel mode, and “secured jobs” as the subset of these accessible jobs that are actually obtained by residents of the locale. Using a high-resolution location-based service data set, we calculate the secured jobs and accessible jobs of different TAZs by the 15-, 30-, and 45-min isochrones by transit or automobile in Shanghai, China. We investigate (a) the spatial patterns of the secured jobs and accessible jobs, and (b) besides the accessible jobs, what can predict the secured jobs, controlling for travel time and mode of travel. We find that the secured jobs vary across the TAZs, mode of travel, and isochrones but are often spatially autocorrelated at the TAZ level. The accessible jobs are always positively related to the secured jobs, regardless of mode of travel and travel time. This relationship is more salient for those workers by transit. The secured jobs could be predicted by a few TAZ- and isochrone-level indicators concerning land use, transport, and socioeconomic attributes. Our findings indicate that (a) accessible jobs should be considered in tandem with secured jobs, controlling for isochrones by mode of travel and travel time, and (b) both transport-land use and socioeconomic attributes at the TAZ and isochrone levels should be accounted for when planning for secured jobs and accessible jobs.

Jobs-housing studies have rarely used smart card data provided by public transportation agencies or focused on bus commuters. In this study, massive smart card data were used to estimate 216,844 bus commuters’ workplace and residence locations in Beijing. These data enabled a jobs-housing study of bus commuters in the metropolis with a much larger sample size than in most other studies. The study found that Beijing's bus commuters had a shorter actual required commute (ARC) and a shorter minimum required commute (MRC) than commuters in four other auto-dependent Western cities with comparable population and land use size. The study also indicated that Beijing's bus commuters had a longer ARC and a longer MRC than commuters of all modes in Guangzhou, a metropolis in southern China half the size of Beijing. Consultations with local experts, field surveys, and information provided by online housing search engines were used to supplement the smart card data. The study established five land use prototypes of jobs-housing imbalance and proposed countermeasures to address the imbalance.

This study reports on a social experiment conducted in summer 2008 to convert solo drivers to transit. During a 3-month period, which was a time of rising gas prices, drivers were offered a no-cost bus pass if they turned in their commuter parking permits. At the end of 3 months, participants could either regain their parking permits or purchase regular bus passes, which were subsidized at 50%. Of the 381 enrolled in the experiment, 70% continued to use transit (or alternative transportation) after the trial. Only 114 (30%) returned to parking, even as gasoline prices started to moderate. The experiment built on the experience of social marketing programs and other campaigns that have explicitly tried to change habitual driving habits. Typically, these studies track changes in participants' attitudes and behaviors. Researchers measured the attitudes and behaviors of participants, as well as changes in those who sought information but did not sign up and those who did sign up but later retreated to solo driving. Heuristically, these groups were labeled seekers, keepers, and retreaters. The three groups were compared and contrasted to identify factors that facilitate or reduce the likelihood of choosing to commute by public transit. Further applications of the social experiment are warranted because it effectively recruited new transit riders and it also provided insights about the process of changing travel modes.

This paper reports the results of a nationwide survey on transportation planning topics taught at U.S. universities. The survey gathered a comprehensive inventory of courses, documented variations in curricula, and determined the variations among those curricula in how they emphasized different transportation topics. This paper also includes a literature review to trace the evolution of transportation classes and education over time. Along with the survey on course content, the manuscript presents an analysis of the spatial distribution of transportation courses and in particular of transportation planning courses. The study finds that educational opportunities in transportation planning are widely distributed across the nation and that students are able to take advantage of the opportunities. However, some planning programs stand out for offering a wider variety of relevant topics, and those programs are concentrated on the coasts. Relatively little is known about the affect of geography on the allocation of resources in transportation education. Transportation educators have multiple opportunities for exploring new topics and methods, such as by including globalization and comparative study, promoting transportation planning knowledge across different educational levels, and continuing to monitor and evaluate higher education and training programs.

This paper reports the results of a nationwide survey on transportation planning topics taught at U.S. universities. The survey gathered a comprehensive inventory of courses, documented variations in curricula, and determined the variations among those curricula in how they emphasized different transportation topics. This paper also includes a literature review to trace the evolution of transportation classes and education over time. Along with the survey on course content, the manuscript presents an analysis of the spatial distribution of transportation courses and in particular of transportation planning courses. The study finds that educational opportunities in transportation planning are widely distributed across the nation and that students are able to take advantage of the opportunities. However, some planning programs stand out for offering a wider variety of relevant topics, and those programs are concentrated on the coasts. Relatively little is known about the affect of geography on the allocation of resources in transportation education. Transportation educators have multiple opportunities for exploring new topics and methods, such as by including globalization and comparative study, promoting transportation planning knowledge across different educational levels, and continuing to monitor and evaluate higher education and training programs.

This paper reports on a nationwide survey that was conducted from November 2004 through April 2005. The survey is part of a project titled the National Transportation Planning Course Syllabus and Associated Case Studies, funded by the Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship program at the U.S. Department of Transportation. The primary objective of the survey was to determine what topics are currently being covered and their level of emphasis. The secondary objective was to identify topics for which educators would use case studies and references provided by the U.S. Department of Transportation. Instructors of transportation planning courses from 47 universities were chosen for the survey, and they returned 32 completed survey instruments. On the basis of the survey efforts, it was found that, first, the survey and the project that it serves can be useful in improving transportation planning instruction at U.S. universities; second, the survey and the project were welcomed by most universities and educators surveyed; third, the survey results can potentially be used for multiple purposes; fourth, not having a list of the institutions offering a transportation planning course(s) posed challenges for sample selection for the survey and validation of the survey results; and fifth, it is difficult to design a survey instrument for a discipline such as transportation planning, which is dynamic and ever changing.