The place of transport in facilitating social inclusion via the mediating influence of social capital

Social policy makers rarely associate the ability to be mobile with having a role in the facilitation of social inclusion. This paper provides an initial exploration of the association between a person’s travel patterns and their risk of social exclusion. Information is drawn from a major Australian Research Council transport study which interviewed 535 people from Metropolitan Melbourne, Australia. It includes an analysis of the extent of the person’s bonding and bridging social networks, their connectedness to the community, self-assessed level of well-being and their beliefs about whether or not they are able to control outcomes in their life. It was found that those who had the greatest risk of social exclusion, travelled less often and less distance, owned fewer cars and used public transport less, than those who were more socially included. However, those who were more at risk of social exclusion did not identify their lower trips as due to either a lack of transport, or problems with the public transport system. The ability to have good bridging networks appears to be related to increased trip-making and promotion of social inclusion but not necessarily self-assessed well-being which is satisfied by bonding networks.     

Investigating heterogeneity in social influence by social distance in car-sharing decisions under uncertainty: A regret-minimizing hybrid choice model framework based on sequential stated adaptation experiments

The present study is designed to investigate social influence in car-sharing decisions under uncertainty. Social influence indicates that individuals’ decisions are influenced by the choices made by members of their social networks. An individual may experience different degrees of influence depending on social distance, i.e. the strength of the social relationship between individuals. Such heterogeneity in social influence has been largely ignored in the previous travel behavior research. The data used in this study stems from an egocentric social network survey, which measures the strength of the social relationships of each respondent. In addition, a sequential stated adaptation experiment was developed to capture more explicitly the effect of social network choices on the individual decision-making process. Social distance is regarded as a random latent variable. The estimated social distance and social network choices are incorporated into a social influence variable, which is treated as an explanatory variable in the car-sharing decision model. To simultaneously estimate latent social distance and the effects of social influence on the car-sharing decision, we expand the hybrid choice framework to incorporate the latent social distance model into discrete choice analysis. The estimation results show substantial social influence in car-sharing decisions. The magnitude of social influence varies according to the type of relationship, similarity of socio-demographics and the number of social interactions.     

社会排斥视角下的我国城市中低收入家庭住房政策研究

文章从社会排斥的视角探讨我国城市中低收入家庭的住房政策,着重分析现有的住房政策所带来的社会排斥问题,以及采取怎样的措施来避免社会排斥现象的发生,从而为修正现有的住房政策打下良好的基础。     

The economic impact of the ATA/Southwest Airlines code-share agreement

This paper examines the economic impact of the code-sharing agreement between ATA and Southwest Airlines, the first time Southwest has chosen to enter markets via a code-share alliance rather than direct entry. We examine the impact of complementary code-sharing on incumbent airline's fares and passenger volumes and also the overall impact on consumer welfare in Denver airline markets. Empirical results show that air fares decreased and passenger volumes increased for incumbent carriers operating on code-shared routes. Further, we find evidence that this code-sharing arrangement increased both consumer and producer surplus. Thus, the well-known “Southwest Effect” is observed not only when Southwest enters a route directly, but also when it enters a route via a code-share agreement with another airline.     

Extracting patterns from Twitter to promote biking

Emphasis on non-motorized travel modes (for example, biking) reduces motorized trips and provides positive effects on the environment and the quality of human life. Understanding factors that influence people to biking or bike commuting can help decision makers, transportation planners, and bike commuting networks. Historically, conventional methods like surveys and crash data analyses were conducted to understand relevant factors. Survey and crash data analysis are difficult to perform in broad scale due to data availability and efforts. An innovative approach to determining these factors is to conduct social media mining to understand sentiments or motivations of bike commuters. People use terms (with hashtag at the beginning of the term) in Twitter, a popular social media network, to express their thoughts, activities or information. This study developed a framework for using Twitter data in understating the sentiments of the bikers with minimal effort. In this study, Twitter data associated with bike commuting hashtags were obtained for eight years (2009–2016). This study provided a framework of data collection and application of various natural language processing (NLP) tools (for example, text mining, sentiment analysis) to extract knowledge from the unstructured text data. Findings show that biking is associated with weather and seasonal patterns. The general sentiment towards biking is positive. However, negative sentiments are associated with bad weather, crime, and other challenges. The polarity scores indicate somewhat positiveness in the recent few years. The developed framework and the findings of this study will help planners and decision makers to promote biking on a broader scale.     

Transport pricing and Public-Private Partnerships in theory: Issues and Suggestions

This chapter offers a theoretical examination of the following questions: what are the issues that arise when Social Marginal Cost Pricing is to be incorporated in Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs); and how may these issues be dealt with?We first briefly discuss Public-Private Partnerships in transport: what are the defining characteristics and what are the main types that exist in the different modes of transport? Next we consider the economics of Public-Private Partnerships, in particular from the viewpoint of incentives. Subsequently we identify and examine the issues that arise when Social Marginal Cost Pricing is to be incorporated in PPPs as a regulation with regard to pricing in the transport sector. Lastly, we investigate the possibilities of resolving these issues.     

Application of multi-criteria decision analysis methods for assessing walkability: A case study in Porto Alegre,Brazil

The concept of walkability refers to the extent to which a neighbourhood is walking-friendly. Several walkability indexes have been developed to quantify and evaluate the pedestrian environment. These indexes differ in terms of type of data, methods and goals. The indexes variables may present either uniform or distinct weights, defined by arbitrary, empirical or other diverse weighting methods. This paper pursues the determination of a weighted walkability index, constructed on the basis of the relative importance of their attributes. Weights were determined by the application of the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP), a robust multi-criteria method which considers the experts’ uncertainty in decision making. Moreover, FAHP weights were compared with the attribute weights obtained from other simpler methods, and a chi-square test for homogeneity was computed to compare the obtained values. The three most important walkability attributes were: Public Security, Traffic Safety and Pavement Quality, similar results to the ones found in the literature. The application to a case study in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, allowed categorizing the studied neighbourhoods and to analyse the effect of changes on attributes in walkability.     

Role model advocacy for sustainable transport

Individual aspirations of associating with role models are routinely harnessed by marketers, who for instance, use celebrity endorsement in selling brands and products. It appears there has been no research to date, however, on the potential for celebrity activism, or role model advocacy beyond celebrities, such as from politicians, to form effective interventions for encouraging sustainable transport behavior. This is despite studies suggesting that celebrity endorsement is a potential gateway for transforming public opinion on carbon intensive transport modes. The present paper consequently offers a critical review of the literature on role model advocacy and celebrity activism, and how these concepts have been harnessed to address environmental issues, in order to conceptually assess the potential for extending these intervention techniques to the context of sustainable transport. The scope of the paper includes the potential that high profile politicians/celebrities might play as role models in exercising referent power to influence social norms surrounding sustainable transport, given that the success of social marketing interventions are closely tied to the need for changes in the policy landscape. Key dimensions of role model endorsement in transport are identified and applied to a series of examples of how celebrity and political role models have influenced transport cultures. In addition to offering an original application of a theoretical framework to a new context, in order to help address the increasingly important societal issue of transport’s growing contribution to climate change, the paper discusses the challenges associated with the neoliberal framing of this approach.     

Social welfare analysis of investment public–private partnership approaches for transportation projects

This paper has two objectives: (i) to introduce a new approach in order to gain widespread support for road pricing; and (ii) to develop a detailed social welfare analysis for road pricing schemes. We first describe our novel approach that stimulates public support for road pricing, which we refer to as an investment public–private partnership, or IP3. This approach returns a significant portion of the economic value created by road pricing back to the citizens who own the newly priced facility. We then present a social welfare framework that estimates the benefits and costs of using the IP3 approach on an urban transportation network. A P3 project’s impact on overall social welfare provides a more comprehensive evaluation criterion than the often-used Value for Money (VfM) analysis. Apart from several theoretical studies, a detailed social welfare analysis that includes all major P3 project stakeholders is absent from the literature. We use Fresno, California as our case study in order to conduct a welfare analysis on IP3s. Our results show that system-optimal tolling favors average users, but that government—and consequently taxpayers—should pay for costly tolling systems (negative profits). In contrast, unlimited profit-maximizing tolls raise substantial profits for government, for the infrastructure’s citizen-owners, and for the private sector, but the average user is worse off. From a social-welfare perspective, one should search for a Pareto improvement under which all major stakeholders are better off. Our estimates indicate that a mixed public and private tolling scheme offers such an improvement.     

现代项目管理理论在高校社会实践活动中的应用浅析

深化高校社会实践活动是落实中共中央关于进一步加强和改进大学生思想政治工作的重要途径和有效载体。随着社会的不断发展,传统的社会实践运作模式不能很好的适应时代发展的需要。现代项目管理无论从时间利用、成本控制、资源分配等方面都具有明显的优势,本文运用项目管理生命周期理论,把社会实践活动分为筹备、启动、实施、控制、收尾五个阶段,并结合社会实践的特点进行了研究分析。