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Copyright of Journal of Planning Education & Research is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Planning Education & Research is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Robust estimation of concept similarity is crucial for applications of AI in the commercial, biomedical, and publishing domains, among others. While the related task of word similarity has been extensively studied, resulting in a wide range of methods, estimating concept similarity between nodes in Wikidata has not been considered so far. In light of the adoption of Wikidata for increasingly complex tasks that rely on similarity, and its unique size, breadth, and crowdsourcing nature, we propose that conceptual similarity should be revisited for the case of Wikidata. In this paper, we study a wide range of representative similarity methods for Wikidata, organized into three categories, and leverage background information for knowledge injection via retrofitting. We measure the impact of retrofitting with different weighted subsets from Wikidata and ProBase. Experiments on three benchmarks show that the best performance is achieved by pairing language models with rich information, whereas the impact of injecting knowledge is most positive on methods that originally do not consider comprehensive information. The performance of retrofitting is conditioned on the selection of high-quality similarity knowledge. A key limitation of this study, similar to prior work lies in the limited size and scope of the similarity benchmarks. While Wikidata provides an unprecedented possibility for a representative evaluation of concept similarity, effectively doing so remains a key challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Planning Education & Research is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Shared e-scooter programs often generate complaints about improper parking because it creates unappealing clutter and can make it difficult for pedestrians to use the sidewalk. We examine how cities can address noncompliant scooter parking and explore public perceptions of this problem with two related studies. First, we conducted field experiments in Washington, DC (hereafter "DC"), and Auckland, New Zealand. We observed scooter parking and then evaluated the efficacy of three interventions to mitigate noncompliant parking. We find low rates of noncompliance, but the precise rate is highly dependent on how we define noncompliance. We also find that in-app message reminders and sidewalk decals marginally lowered rates of noncompliant parking, but the largest improvement in compliance occurred after DC implemented a requirement that scooters be physically locked to bike racks. Second, we examined public perceptions of improper parking by asking people how much noncompliant parking they think occurs and what practices they think constitute noncompliant parking. We find that the public overestimates improper parking of scooters and underestimates improper parking of bicycles and cars. Given their unfamiliarity with scooter parking regulations, respondents use pedestrian accessibility and tidiness as heuristics to determine what counts as proper scooter parking. Our results suggest that intuitive parking solutions that align with perceptions of orderly parking, such as bike racks or on-street parking corrals, can improve rider compliance and may reduce public dissatisfaction with shared scooter parking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New transportation options like ride-hail can expand accessibility without the costs of car ownership. Ride-hail's potential is particularly salient for lower-income and zero-car households. We used interviews and a national (U.S.) survey to examine how and why lower-income travelers in the United States use ride-hail. Survey and interview responses provided a temporal snapshot and thus reflect, in part, travel challenges specific to COVID-19. Findings suggest that lower-income travelers, particularly those without personal cars, use ride-hail in ways distinct from those typically reported in broader travel surveys. Individuals without cars are more likely to use ride-hail, and use it more often, compared with people with cars, particularly to fill spatial and temporal gaps in public transit service and to access medical care and groceries. Costs and price unpredictability remain significant barriers limiting travelers' use of ride-hail services. This research demonstrates a latent need for car access among lower-income travelers. Substantial gaps in alternative modes pose challenges for travelers seeking reliable and timely transportation. Planners should invest in transit, biking, and walking to provide robust alternatives to car ownership. Such investments, however, take time. In the meantime, cities and agencies should consider subsidizing ride-hail trips to bridge existing gaps in the transportation network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Support for transportation policies and investments is increasingly shaped by partisan ideals. Less well documented is the role of partisanship relative to potential mediating factors like transportation-related values, beliefs about the possibility of change, self-interest, and knowledge. We surveyed a representative sample of 600 U.S. adults about these factors, their political ideology, and their willingness to change the automobile-oriented transportation status quo. We found considerable support for change but also deep partisan divides. In exploring the pathways between partisanship and policy preferences, we found that values and beliefs about change are both deeply partisan and closely associated with policy preferences. By contrast, the results were mixed for self-interest and transportation-related knowledge. Ultimately, we found that these four pathways explain much, but not all, of the partisanship in transportation policy preferences. Very conservative respondents opposed reform efforts above and beyond what we would expect from their values, beliefs, self-interest, and knowledge, indicating continuing salience of partisanship. Our results suggest that transportation reforms enjoy broad public support in urban areas with moderate and left-leaning populaces but may struggle to win approval at the regional, state, or federal level due to partisan geographic sorting. Some planners, policymakers, and advocates may choose to embrace partisanship, but doing so may exacerbate tensions and hamper progress. Others may prefer to tackle the pathways between partisanship and preferences without deepening partisan divides. For instance, practitioners may seek to increase support for reform by tackling widespread misunderstandings about induced demand or by installing pilot projects to help the public understand that it is possible to quickly and inexpensively change infrastructure and travel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper a Penrose limit is constructed for type IIB AdS6× S2× Σ supergravity solutions. These solutions are dual to five dimensional SCFTs related to (p,q) five brane webs, which can often be described in terms of long quiver gauge theories. The null geodesic from which the Penrose limit is constructed is localized at a unique point on the two dimensional Riemann surface Σ, where the AdS6 and S2 metric factors are extremal. The resulting pp-wave spacetime takes a universal form. The world sheet action of the Green-Schwarz string is quadratic in the light cone gauge and the spectrum of string excitations is obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs that motor vehicle parking violations vastly surpass scooters and bikes in busy Market Street in San Francisco, California. Topics discussed include provide an analysis of parking behavior across several cities and a set of tools and procedures for others to collect even more data; and work done by other academic researchers and by cities to document rates of parking violations by shared scooters and bicycles.

Does living in a neighborhood with high-quality public transit influence travel behavior later in life, even if you move to a neighborhood with worse transit service? To test this, we construct residential histories of individuals using decades of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We find that past experiences shape transportation futures. Exposure to transit during young adulthood in particular is associated with an auto-light lifestyle and greater transit usage later in life. This research suggests a long-term benefit for encouraging transit at younger ages to foster a “transit habit.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, researchers and advocates have turned their attention to the trade-offs between housing affordability and transportation expenses. They argue that were families to move to more compact, transit-accessible, and walkable neighborhoods, they would reduce their driving and, possibly, forego the need for one or more cars, thus saving them money. We use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to test this assumption with descriptive statistics and panel regression models, and we find little evidence to support it. We conclude that the location affordability literature may significantly overstate the promise of cost savings in transit-rich neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1998, the so-called "Chinatown buses" have grown from a niche service for Chinese immigrants to an important mode of intercity travel throughout the Northeastern United States. We argue that these buses serve as moving articulations, containers for passengers' perceptions of Chinatown. The Chinatown bus allows riders to explore their conflicted relationships to the Other, and to urban life. We present findings from focus groups with bus passengers ill Mandarin and English. Participants rendered Chinatown and the Chinatown bus as an "authentic" urban experience. These participants sought to establish themselves as experts, eager to share "insider knowledge" of the Chinatown bus that outsiders would not know. For some, the Chinatown bus is a liminal space where calculations of safety and risk are inverted: danger is part of the appeal. This paper situates these responses in literatures of authenticity, cultural tourism and mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigrants account for a majority of recent urban population growth in the United States, and for much economic growth as well. This is expected to continue for the next several decades. The foreign-born are much more likely to use transit, carpool, walk, and bicycle, particularly in their first few years of living in the United States. These trends represent challenges and opportunities for transportation and land use planners to increase the environmental sustainability of population growth, use existing transportation systems to their maximum efficiency, and support economic development. But doing so depends on anticipating the travel demands of varying immigrant groups, and those demands in turn depend on their employment and residential location choices. The authors present the most current data available on these trends, summarize research literature, and identify the major research questions needing answers to understand how to accommodate the travel demands of immigration-driven population growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights from the article: , by Friss, Evan, Chicago, Evan Friss' recent book Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s is a surprisingly rel- Friss argues that for many cyclists, bicycles were not simply away to travelbut awayto form a As bicycles became cheap and popular, bikes lost their.