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.     

群众路线折射中国特色社会主义民主的诉求探析

文章通过分析社会主义民主的本质要求与群众路线的关系,说明了中国特色社会主义民主采用群众路线的实施方式和障碍,提出了群众路线活动是满足特殊国情需要的中国式民主。     

社会和谐的政府信用维度

和谐社会的建立需要两个基本条件：利益关系的调适和社会信任的增进。这两个条件的实现需要依赖于信用政府的主导作用,政府信用作为信用政府的根本,对于这两个基本条件都有至关重要的影响,政府信用的维护和增进是建立和谐社会必不可少的条件。     

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。     

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。     

变系数线性常微分算子的正规能解性

结合广义函数论，局部凸拓扑空间理论和正规能解算子理论，证明了变系数线性常数分算子的正规能解性，从而解决了相应微分方程的弱解存在性问题。     

Part II: Policy instruments for sustainable road transport

Without questioning the fact that to achieve efficiency emitters should pay for the true costs of their actions (a core principle of economic policies such as pollution taxes), we find sufficient evidence in the literature to demonstrate that many other policy instruments can be used in combination with taxes and permits to ensure that the transport needs of the present generation can be met without compromising the ability of future generations to meet any needs of their own.The policies and policy aspects considered in this paper broadly fall into three categories: physical policies, soft policies, and knowledge policies. All three aim to bring about changes in consumers’ and firms’ behaviour, but in different ways. The first category includes policies with a physical infrastructure element: public transport, land use, walking and cycling, road construction, and freight transport. We also consider the particular challenges for mobility in developing countries, and how these may be addressed. Soft policies, on the other hand, are non-tangible aiming to bring about behavioural change by informing actors about the consequences of their transport choices, and potentially persuading them to change their behaviour. These measures include car sharing and car pooling, teleworking and teleshopping, eco-driving, as well as general information and advertising campaigns. Finally, knowledge policies emphasise the important role of investment in research and development for a sustainable model of mobility for the future.The main findings can be summarised as follows.

Physical policies

An increase in the use of public transport, combined with a decrease in the use of private cars, can reduce traffic congestion and, more importantly, carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, as public transport generally causes lower CO₂ emissions per passenger kilometre than private cars. Public transport fares are subsidised in most places, which can be justified by economies of scale and by the fact that public transport can reduce total road transport externalities. London, Singapore, Portland and Curitiba are all examples of good practice at government level, having achieved reliable, frequent and integrated public transport.Policies to increase public transport use must be part of an integrated policy. Integrated policy refers to integration across different modes of transport, different government objectives (such as the economy, health and the environment), considering the needs of different social groups, and coordinating action between the relevant government institutions. There is evidence that a lack of coordination can jeopardise the achievement of policy objectives.A sustainable model for transport policy also requires integration with land-use policies. These may be somewhat limited within the bounds of existing cities, but as cities grow and new cities are built, urban planners must put more emphasis on land use for sustainable transport in order to reduce congestion and CO₂ emissions. Sustainable land-use policy can direct urban development towards a form that allows public transport as well as walking and cycling to be at the core of urban mobility.Walking and cycling, which improve general health and produce no tailpipe emissions, constitute an excellent alternative to motorised transport on short-distance trips within towns and cities. The policies which can incentivise walking and cycling include crime reduction to make streets safer, well-maintained and clean pavements, attractive street furniture, safe crossings with shorter waiting times, dedicated cycle paths, showers in offices, and lower speed limits, to name but a few.Road construction and expansion used to be seen as one of the most promising ways to reduce traffic congestion. However, in the mid-1990s, the issue was reassessed and it was found that building and expanding roads, increased, rather than decreased, congestion, and ultimately induced higher levels of travel demand. The reason for this is that the extra capacity reduces the general cost of travelling and the less expensive the travel, the more it will be demanded. Regarding freight modal shift, road transport is much more polluting than rail per tonne-km of goods transported and therefore a shift towards greater use of rail in freight transport is desirable. Inadequate infrastructure is the main obstacle preventing this modal shift taking place.Developing countries face great mobility challenges: rural areas are often extremely poorly connected to transport infrastructure, such that, in contrast to the situation in developed countries, the benefits of road construction can strongly outweigh the total costs (including environmental ones). The main challenge, however, is to develop a solution to the problems arising from the combination of urbanisation and motorisation. Integration of transport and land-use policy will be key to rising to this challenge.

Soft policies

Car sharing and car clubs can also potentially reduce CO₂ emissions, although the aggregate reduction in congestion and emissions has not been measured with an adequate degree of precision in the literature. Teleworking and teleshopping can potentially reduce congestion and also CO₂ emissions. However, the evidence for this reduction is rather mixed, as it is unclear whether these measures lead to overall reductions in road transport.Eco-driving campaigns aim to inform and educate drivers in order to induce them to drive in a fuel-efficient and thus environmentally friendly way. There seems to be some consensus in the literature that eco-driving could lead to reductions in CO₂ emissions of around 10 per cent.Information and education policies have often been advocated as instruments which may affect behavioural change. We find in this paper that these types of measures are necessary, but not sufficient for behavioural change. Advertising and marketing may go a long way in changing peoples’ behaviour. In California, for example, Kahn (2007) finds the “Prius” effect: the Toyota Prius is preferred by consumers relative to other similarly green vehicles, probably due to extensive marketing and celebrity endorsements. Family life changes are also found to trigger changes in behaviour ( [Goodwin, 1989] and [106]). People whose lives are being changed by some important development (birth of a child, retirement, etc) tend to respond more to changes in the relative attractiveness of different transport modes. Advertising campaigns promoting a modal shift towards public transport, for instance, may thus be more successful if targeted at people in the process of important life transitions.

Knowledge policies

Research and Development is crucial for developing sustainable and low-carbon transport for the future, and it is essential that governments provide incentives to undertake R&D, so that new low-carbon technologies in the transport sector can be demonstrated and applied at a large scale.Finally, we consider the issue of policy combination and integration. There is evidence that the combination and integration of policies can lead to positive side-effects and synergies. Policy integration is crucial in order to rise to the challenges we face in moving towards a sustainable mobility model. We conclude that classical economic policies may be successfully combined with a number of policy measures discussed in this paper in order to achieve sustainability in transport.     

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.     

Social marginal cost pricing and second best alternatives in partnerships for transport infrastructures

According to the economic theory, if all the first-best conditions are met, social optimality involves the prices to be set equal to social marginal costs. When it is not possible to set prices equal to social marginal costs, due to the presence of constraints within the transport sector or distortions elsewhere in the economy, the theory suggests corrections to the SMC principle (second-best alternatives). But the implementation of second best alternatives can give rise to serious problems when transferred from theory to practice. This chapter will discuss in particular the problems that might rise when investment cost are included (totally or partially) in the social marginal costs rules, and in particular when private operators are involved.