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Rural mobility inequality is an important aspect of inequality-focused Sustainable Development Goals. To reduce inequality and promote global sustainable development, more insight is needed into human mobility patterns in rural areas. However, studies on rural human mobility are scarce, limiting our understanding of the spatial and social gaps in rural human mobility and our ability to design policies for social equality and global sustainable development. This study, therefore, explores human mobility patterns in rural China using mobile phone data. Mapping the relative frequency of short-distance trips across rural towns, we observed that geographically peripheral populations tend to have a low percentage of short-distance flows. We further revealed social gaps in mobility by fitting statistical models: as travel distances increased, human movements declined more rapidly among vulnerable groups, including children, older people, women, and low-income people. In addition, we found that people living with low street density, or in rural towns in peripheral cities with long distances to city borders, are more likely to have low intercity movement. Our results show that children, older adults, women, low-income individuals, and geographically peripheral populations in rural areas are mobility-disadvantaged, providing insights for policymakers and rural planners for achieving social equality by targeting the right groups. [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]

In order to explore the factors affecting users’ behaviors in a free-floating bike sharing (FFBS) system in China, a survey was conducted in Jiangsu province, China in 2017, and the travel characteristics of FFBS users were analyzed. A binary logistic model was applied to quantify the impact of various variables regarding residents’ usage preference based on 30401 valid questionnaires. The findings show that (1) FFBS was mainly used for short-distance travel in cities, especially for commuting and schooling, and the time period of travel in FFBS coincided with the rush-hour in urban areas; (2) a higher level of education, a higher daily transportation cost, the convenience of picking up and parking, and the contribution to users’ health could promote the usage of FFBS, while malfunctioning bicycles and limited regulations were major obstacles restricting the development of FFBS; (3) interestingly, people with high-incomes rather than those with low-incomes showed an inclination for FFBS owing to the charge mode. This research provides empirical evidence to facilitate the formulation of urban transportation policies and to improve the management of FFBS for the operators. [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]