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We propose a conceptual framework for understanding the complex nature of the correlation between the living environment and intravillage activity-travel. Based on participant observations of 146 villages (2317 rural residents) in Guangdong, China, we find that the rural built environment is predominantly organised by the gemeinschaft cultural environment in which people locate their homes near ancestral halls to maintain the bonds with those who are identified as the Us and to separate themselves from the Other. Together with the impact of the social environment which brings about a dispersed distribution of household farmlands, the phenomenon of home-farmland separation is pervasive. Several transport-related issues are engendered from the rural living environment: (a) distorted time-space for other activities that improve rural residents' quality of life; (b) land abandonment due to unwillingness to travel; and (c) extreme social exclusivity in relation to the Other. • Participant observation of 2317 rural residents in 146 villages in Guangdong. • The rural built environment spatially embodies and shapes the gemeinschaft. • Homes are located to maintain the ties with the Us and exclude the Other. • Home-farmland separation leads to long-time travel. • The rural living environment is more socially exclusive than the urban one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework to elucidate transport-related social exclusion (TRSE) in rural China. Drawing from participant observations across 146 villages in Guangdong (2643 rural residents), we illuminate the multifaceted nature of TRSE in Chinese villages. In term of interregional transport challenges, rural residents are socially excluded due to inadequate transport infrastructure and services. In contrast, within the microcosm of intravillage transport, residents adeptly harness available transport resources to craft exclusionary strategies. This emergent form of TRSE, distinct from previous paradigms, sees villagers deploying transport as an instrument to deliberately exclude the Other based on the depth and nuances of their interpersonal relationships. This exclusion manifests through unique characteristics: the nebulous contours of marginalised groups, mutual exclusion between rural residents, ethical ambivalence, and its profound resonance with traditional cultural norms. Given the intricate layers that seem to eclipse the phenomena observed in urban contexts, we underscore the imperative for a more nuanced exploration of TRSE in rural landscapes. • Participant observation of 2643 rural residents in 146 villages in Guangdong • A novel form of exclusion based on the depth and nuances of interpersonal relationships • Villagers deploying transport as an instrument to deliberately exclude others • Transport-related social exclusion in rural China manifests through 4 unique characteristics • The nebulous contours of marginalised groups, mutual exclusion, ethical ambivalence, and resonance with traditional norms • Transport-related social exclusion in rural China is rooted in the bedrock of traditional Chinese culture [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconsiders transport inequities through the lens of environmental racism. Based on participant observations of 1972 rural-to-urban migrants at 76 worksites and 25 residential communities in five cities in the Yangtze Delta Region, China, we identified two main challenges facing migrants experiencing ethnic discrimination during Covid-19. First, they were more likely to experience housing eviction and, consequently, bear heavier transport burdens when moving. Second, they were more likely to face difficulties when returning to the cities, such as repeated quarantine and displacement, long-time drifting on the highway and transport-related job uncertainty. Although the long-term effects of these policies on migrants' everyday activity-travel behaviour may be limited, their experiences during the early phase of Covid-19 had a significant impact on their Spring Festival homecoming the following year. Regionally targeted transport policies to prevent Covid-19 have fuelled ethnic discrimination by officially classifying people from some provinces as "dangerous". Moreover, transport policies favoured some ethnic groups over others, contributing to environmental racism and exacerbating transport inequity. • Participant observation in 5 cities in the Yangtze Delta Region. • Two main challenges migrants faced during Covid-19: housing instability and transport burdens it engendered, and barriers to returning to the cities. • Experiences during the early phase of the Covid-19 outbreak influence rural-urban migrant workers' Spring Festival homecoming in the long term. • Transport policies implemented in the early phase of the pandemic fuelled environmental racism and exacerbated transport inequity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Egalitarian thought has a long tradition in Chinese history. Synthesized with the socialist ideology, it was practiced nationwide in the first decades of Communist China. Alongside the well-reported quality of life improvements that the recent economic liberalisation reforms have brought about, Chinese people are experiencing an increasingly serious polarization between the rich and the poor. Consequently, an egalitarian tendency has represented itself within contemporary policy and popular discourse. This paper aims to explore how egalitarian thought has influenced public awareness of social inequities by using the case of public attitudes towards the Beijing congestion charge, which is currently still at its planning stage. Nine focus groups, with a total of 73 participants, were undertaken with residents living in different areas of the city. Results show that the perceptions of social inequities are significantly different between low-income and high-income people. Due to egalitarian thinking, low-income people expect the privileges of the rich to be abolished, however, they do not pay much attention to a wider redistribution of wealth and other social resources. By contrast, richer people tend to deny to a wider population the privileges they themselves received, and, to some extent, they are reluctant to accept policy outcomes that may favour those who are in lower social positions. The resentment against the rich, as another by-product of egalitarianism, considerably exaggerates actual social inequalities, thereby intensifying the feelings of being unequally treated. Highlights • Equity issues of congestion charging in the Chinese context are explored via focus group discussions. • Four types of inequities related to congestion charging are identified. • Chinese egalitarianism influences perceived inequities and intensify the feeling of being oppressed. • Chinese egalitarianism leads to an expectation of privilege deprivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes how national imaginaries of market reforms designed to accommodate fast-growing Chinese regions, collide with embedded formal and informal governance practices in less developed provinces. Whilst much of the literature examines the implications of new infrastructure on regional economics, the management of existing networks dominates decision-making in these more stagnant economies. Using interviews with key stakeholders involved in highway management in Heilongjiang across the provincial and local levels, this paper explores institutional change and persistence using path dependence and junctures as an organising lens. We find that the manner and timing of institutional changes are shaped by the need for political elites in the territorial governing body to reinforce their authority over the vertical functional systems within the jurisdiction. Institutional persistence beneath the changes demonstrates path dependence, related to (a) the vested interests due to power trading and interpersonal relationships and (b) the defence of personnel-related benefits derived from long-standing public institutions. Political and administrative factors rather than economic and technical factors are paramount in influencing transport management and institutional processes in China's less developed provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of the modal shift has been central to transport policymaking in the past few decades. Fare-free public transport (FFPT) schemes are among the potential policy instruments that are expected to promote modal shifts. After the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak, FFPT schemes have been implemented in large tourist destination areas in China to attract visitors. However, although FFPT has been practiced across the globe, its effect on travel modal shifts and transport equity is still under scrutiny. This paper, therefore, employs the notion of multimodality and indices for perceived accessibility and equity to investigate whether an FFPT scheme in tourist destination areas encourages a modal shift and promotes transport equity. A two-wave survey was conducted before and after the restoration of within-destination tourist bus tickets in the Mount Yandang Scenic Area, a famous tourist attraction in the Yangtze River delta. Propensity score matching (PSM) was then employed to analyse the treatment effect of the FFPT scheme. Our results indicate that, although the FFPT scheme significantly increased tourists' multimodality, the modal share of within-destination tourist buses was not significantly changed. More surprisingly, we found a modal shift from car-based services such as taxis to informal transportation provided by B&B operators and local residents. Moreover, it is notable that informal transport modes significantly influenced tourists' perceived accessibility and transport equity. Therefore, the tourism industry should encourage the integration of within-destination buses and informal transport modes to encourage multimodal travel, which is more sustainable ecologically and socially. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network morphological analysis has emerged as a tool to quantify street network structures, providing a nuanced foundation for evaluating their impacts on traffic safety. Yet, there is a lack of disaggregate-level evidence on the spillover effects and spatial heterogeneity of these impacts. This research conducts a comprehensive, disaggregate-level, multi-scale examination on the overall impacts of street network morphologies on traffic safety. Our study focuses on the frequency of traffic injury collisions over a five-year period across more than 190,000 street links in Greater London. We characterise street-link morphologies at local (0–1 km), meso (0–3 km), and city (0–8 km) scales using a spatial design network analysis. For each spatial scale, we apply extended auto-negative binomial models to examine the overall impact of street-link morphological characteristics on the injury collision frequency, considering both the link being investigated and other surrounding links determined by the spatial scale. We find significant spatial heterogeneity in the overall safety impacts of street-link morphologies. At the local scale, higher farness of a street link corresponds to an overall increase in injury collisions, whereas at the meso and city scales, it indicates an overall decrease. At the local and meso scales, higher betweenness of a street link is associated with an overall increase in injury collisions, but at the city scale, it correlates with an overall decrease. Independent of the spatial scale, a larger diversion ratio of a street link is linked to an overall decrease in injury collisions. These findings are similar to those on killed and seriously injured-only collisions. Our findings suggest that encouraging compact street network structures, which aligns well with New Urbanism and the Compact City policy, may not necessarily be effective for an overall reduction in injury collisions across an entire city. • We examine the overall impacts of street network morphologies at the street-link level on injury collision frequency. • The overall impact of street-link morphologies on traffic safety presents spatial heterogeneity. • Promoting compact street network designs may not be effective for an overall reduction in collisions across an entire city. • We reflect on the limitations of New Urbanism planning and Compact City policy in ensuring traffic safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a lack of clear understanding of the characteristics and correlates of rural residents' access to periodic markets. This study contributes to the new evidence for this by using data from face-to-face interviews with 4777 rural residents from 276 villages across China. The results show that village terrain is substantially associated with access to periodic markets. Rural residents living in the mountain, high plateau, and hilly areas are more likely to travel a long distance to the nearest periodic market than those living in the plain area. The proximity of the town center positively relates to access to periodic markets. In addition, we found a larger number of shop point of interests within a 2000 m circular buffer around the village center associate with better access to the neatest periodic market. These findings offer new insights for policymaking on improving access to periodic markets for residents in rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outbreak of COVID-19 in China started at the end of December 2019. This led to a series of containment measurements to control the spread of COVID-19. Despite of the widely reported effects of these measures, inadequate attention has gone to their social impacts. The elderly, as one of the most susceptible populations, has experienced a considerable reduction in mobility. This paper explores the role mobility played and how the social environment influenced elderly mobility in the first 2 months of the COVID-19 outbreak. We surveyed 186 families with a total of 248 elderly people in Kunming. The results show that mobility improves the quality of daily living, such as access to grocery shopping, maintenance of outdoor activities for health cultivation and preserving social networks even during the pandemic. Four themes relating to social environment emerged from the data as elements influencing elderly mobility during the pandemic: social pressure, practice of the virtue of Xiao, the social norm of respecting the aged and the impacts of technological advances. Among them, the virtue of Xiao enabled the elderly to stay in place in the early phase of COVID-19 by fulfilling their needs for daily necessities and social interactions, whilst being less technology-savvy further excluded them socially by restraining them from restoring mobility after the lifting of travel restrictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• 186 family interviews were conducted for survey design and result interpretation. • A three-wave cross-lagged model is developed. • The ease of using smartphone-based services dominantly influence transport equity. • Perceived accessibility to services is a sound indicator for transport equity. • New mobility services further excluded and marginalised disadvantaged populations. Individuals have experienced various degrees of accessibility loss during the COVID-19 pandemic, which may consequently influence transport equity. However, conventional measurements of accessibility cannot capture individual experiences and perceptions of accessibility. Moreover, since many daily necessities and services can only be acquired online during the pandemic, the ease of using smartphone-based services play an essential role in people's everyday lives. Therefore, this paper investigates the relationship between the ease of using smartphone-based services, perceived accessibility, and perceived transport equity during the pandemic. Based on 186 family interviews, a panel survey with 569 respondents was conducted monthly from February to October 2020 in Kunming, China, and a three-wave cross-lagged panel model was developed to understand the causal relationship between the three constructs. The results indicate that the ease of using smartphone-based services dominantly influence transport equity in the early phase of the pandemic, but its effect faded after the lifting of travel restrictions. Perceived accessibility to services appears a sound indicator for transport equity in the new normal, but perceived accessibility and transport equity are not strongly associated when staying at home is perceived as desirable. Moreover, we found that contemporary practices of smartphone-based new mobility services only favour those who already have convenient access to services and have further excluded and marginalised disadvantaged populations, which urgently require policy interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human mobility is an important carrier of material flow, information flow, capital flow, and technology flow between locations. A better understanding of human mobility in rural areas could inform efforts to achieve rural revitalization. However, there have been limited evaluations of the characteristics of human mobility in rural areas. Based on human movements estimated from mobile phone data, we constructed an inter-town human mobility network and applied a complex network analysis method to study the spatial characteristics of the human mobility network in rural areas, with China's Greater Bay Area as a case study. We found that rural towns with high centrality were mostly located at the convergence of developed megacities. Rural towns with most connections were not necessarily the most central in the inter-town human mobility networks, leading to anomalous values of the centrality. We demonstrated that the anomaly of centrality values emerged due to the community structure of the network. We identified nine communities in the network and found that the geographical borders of communities partly matched the urban administrative borders. However, the results also showed that many rural towns on the fringes of a city were dissolved in their adjacent developed cities, independent of the urban administrative boundary effect. The formation of communities cannot be explained only by the impacts of urban administrative boundaries, but also by the growth of large cities and the geographic dispersal of economic activities. Finally, we identified seven roles of rural towns based on their pattern of intra-community and inter-community connections. These findings provide important insights into the pattern of interaction among rural towns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Ridesplitting adoption rate (RAR) presents spatial heterogeneity across regions. • Factors affecting the RAR during different time periods are examined. • Subway station density is positive with the RAR in the southern area. • Potential substitutive and complementary effects between ridesplitting and transit. • Percent zero-vehicle households is negative with the RAR for most regions. Ridesplitting, a form of ride-hailing service where passengers with similar travel routes are matched to the same driver, can reduce the negative effects of solo ride-hailing trips and bring various environmental and social benefits. However, limited efforts were made to examine the spatial variation of ridesplitting trips, which was not conducive to the formulation of ridesplitting policies. To fill the gap, this work investigates the spatial variation of ridesplitting adoption rate (the proportion of ride-hailing trips with shared trip authorized, RAR) and its association with built environment and socio-economic factors at the census tract level, using the ride-hailing trip data in Chicago. To addressing the spatial heterogeneity, geographically weighted regression models are established to detect the factors influencing the RAR during different time periods, such as weekday, weekend, weekday morning peak and evening peak. Modeling results show that GWR models outperform the traditional global models in terms of model fit. The census tract level factors including subway station density, frequency of transit, land use mix, homicide density, percent female, the share of nonwhite, and percent zero-vehicle households have impacts on RAR, and the coefficient estimates of each explanatory variable vary across regions. The research results can help urban planners and transportation network companies develop refined policies to promote shared ride-hailing trips. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Travel burden on rural residents is an important theme in transport geography. However, the empirical evidence for this remains scarce. This paper aims to shed light on rural travel burden by examining the relationship between the rural built environment and villagers' travel burden, as measured by the time and money spent on essential and regional trips. A national survey of rural residents in 287 villages across China is analysed. The results show that residents living in rural areas are more likely to be faced with travel burden than are urban residents when accessing livelihood opportunities in local rural settlements and regional urban centres. The built environment attributes are significantly correlated with residents' travel burden. Specifically, the distance from the village to the destination has the strongest relationship with essential trips compared with other built environment variables. Villagers tend to incur higher time costs for an essential or regional trip when paved roads, bus stations and high-quality roads are less accessible. Bus transfer times from the village to the town centre, the population density, and the accessibility of local facilities also show significantly correlation with villagers' travel cost. Moreover, those residents who are elderly, low-income, or have a physical disability are more likely to suffer from high travel burden. The findings will enhance our understanding of the role of land use and transport policies in releasing villagers' travel burden to achieve sustainable transport development in rural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since many parents travel separately for escorting and commuting, certain hidden daily car trips may have been ignored in previous research regarding parental escort behaviors. By defining an escort-space model using the spatial relationships between home, the workplace, and school, this study focuses on the daily modal split among parental chauffeurs using data from Qujing, China, while focusing on the effects of different escort-space models: spatial aggregation, job-housing separation and school-housing separation. The descriptive statistics of parental chauffeurs’ travel mode choices under the influences of these three escort-space models are presented. The statistical results demonstrate that the modal splits of parental chauffeurs perform significantly differently under these three escort-space models. Furthermore, the determinants of the daily travel mode of parental chauffeurs, including escort-spaces and other selected variables, are investigated using a multinomial logit model. A model without the escort-space model is also presented for comparison. The results show that the model with the escort-space model has a more significant goodness-of-fit than the model without the escort-space model. Both the job-housing separation and school-housing separation of parental chauffeurs result in the increase of car trips, while the usage amount of car in daily journeys is higher than that in escort trips. Moreover, car ownership, bike ownership, household income, residential location, age, gender, income, and education level all significantly impact the daily travel mode choices of parental chauffeurs. These findings can help policymakers create suitable policies to reduce excessive car trips by parental chauffeurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The weak and sustained tropical cyclone (TC) Rumbia (2018) and its associated heavy precipitation after landfall are simulated by the Weather Research and Forecasting model using three microphysics parameterizations (MP) and two planetary boundary layer (PBL) schemes. Key factors regulating the heavy rainfall distribution of landed TC at three stages (landfall, inland slow-moving and recurving stage) and their sensitivities to multi-physics parameterizations are examined. Results show that heavy rainfall distribution is largely regulated by the intensity of TC itself at landfall, but more affected by environmental factors at the two inland stages, including the environmental vertical wind shear, the associated upper-level wind divergence and low-level moisture convergence. Different MP and PBL schemes mainly affect the simulation of TC thermodynamic structure and key environmental factors, leading to their different forecast skills at three stages. Specifically, the Yonsei University (YSU) PBL scheme systematically outperforms the Mellor-Yamada-Nakanishi-Niino (MYNN) scheme in simulating stronger TC and heavy rainfall intensity. With the advantageous YSU PBL scheme, the Ferrier MP scheme only shows a slight advantage in simulating the intensity of TC and heavy rainfall at landfall. However, the WRF single-moment 6-class (WSM6) and Thompson scheme produce more graupel or snow, and better simulate the key environmental factors, showing their respective advantages in simulating the heavy rainfall structure and location at the two inland stages. This implies that the use of nonlocal YSU PBL scheme and the MP schemes with sophisticated ice processes shows superiority in simulating the postlandfall heavy rainfall induced by weak TCs. • Postlandfall rainfall of weak TC is highly affected by environmental factors. • Ice species and radial distribution of diabatic heating affect TC structures and rainfall. • The MYNN PBL scheme underestimates TC intensity and heavy rainfall compared to YSU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]