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The metro has developed rapidly in the past two decades and has become one of the crucial patterns of transportation for urban residents in China. Many studies have explored the factors affecting metro ridership, but few have focused on the metro usage of specific groups, such as the elderly and students. This paper uses the negative binomial regression model to explore the relationship between the built environment and the metro ridership of three types of people (adults, the elderly, and students) by using the metro smart card data of Qingdao. We also used the fractional response model to discuss the factors that influence the ridership share for the elderly and students. The results show that most variables promote the metro usage of the three groups of people but have a significantly different effect on the market share of those groups. Specifically, the number of schools, hospitals, supermarkets, squares, parks, and scenic spots near metro stations significantly increases the proportion of the elderly metro usage. The number of bus stops and schools substantially increases the share of metro ridership by students. The research results can provide valuable insights for promoting the metro's overall ridership and minimizing the gap in allocating public transport resources among different groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the assessment of historic city vitality to address increasingly fragmented urban patterns and to prevent the decline of livability in older urban areas. In 1961, Jane Jacobs theorized urban vitality and found the main conditions that were required for the promotion of life in cities: diversity of land use, small block sizes, diversity of buildings with varied characteristics and ages, density of people and buildings, accessibility for all people without depending on private transport, and distance to border elements. Jacobs' criteria for urban vitality has had an indisputable influence on urban researchers and planners especially in the Anglo-American context. This perspective has influenced the development of New Urbanism and similar planning policies, such as neo-traditional communities and transit oriented development, yet her theories have to be more substantiated in Asia's developing cities, especially in China's historic cities. In order to verify the significance of Jacobs' urban vitality theory in Chinese historic cities, we develop a composite measure of 16 variables of built environment, and we test it using GIS-sDNA in a historic city with an aging population and low-income in Qingdao. A systematic approach to urban spatial analysis allows us to provide a detailed spatial interpretation of a historic city form. The results emphasize that historic cities vitality, far from being homogeneous, followed a multi-centered distribution pattern, which is related to the previous European planning of the region, where a grid-type pattern was more likely to disperse urban vitality. The results can serve as a useful framework for studying the livability and vitality of different areas of the city in different geographical contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]