Impacts of Digital Transformation on Mobility and Transportation Sector

It is indeed a fact that the digital transformation has been changed rapidly in the last few years, and the appearance of the COVID-19 pandemic played a significant role in accelerating the wheel toward intelligent and digital transformation in all sectors; some countries have been recovered quickly from the pandemic and managed to eliminate most of the obstacles while others still struggling. The public transport sector PT during COVID-19 pandemic was affected directly, which is an inevitable result that disrupted the system. This paper will investigate through an online questionnaire survey the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and the digital transformation on transportation modes and activities by evaluating the current situation and assessing future transportation sustainability and whether it will continue to recover appropriately. The research will identify user's awareness, attitude, and behavior toward PT before and during COVID-19, as the trend has been in favor of private vehicles and avoidance of PT, therefore increasing confidence in PT requires decisive action from governments, policymakers, and planners to keep pace with the intelligent transformation. Keywords; COVID19, transportation, sustainability, digital transformation, transportation modes, and activities.

The Impacts of Transportation Sustainability on Higher Education in China

Improving transportation sustainability serves as a means of reducing the perceived and real distance, thereby contributing to the city and higher education development. In this paper, the complexity of transport sustainability is measured via four different dimensions: economy, society, environment and politics. The variables are designed by the four dimensions. The higher education development is measured via the ratio of higher education degree holders, reflecting the skilled work mobility. Over the last 30 years, university students moving to cities for study and work purposes have become an important part of rural–urban transition mobility. However, few studies have explored the impacts of transportation sustainability on higher education development in China. The economic, environmental, social and political dimensions in transportation sustainability can boost China’s higher education attainment in different ways. Against this background, this study, drawing on the panel data and employing the spatial multilevel model, investigated the impacts of transportation sustainability on higher education in China, adding new empirical evidence for China’s higher education development. A panel analysis revealed that the increase in transportation sustainability induces the growth of higher education. Moreover, higher education attainment showed significant spatial dependence at the county level and had significant spatial clustering of county-level higher education attainment across provinces. Furthermore, modeled test results showed that the spatial multilevel model was more suitable for our study than traditional regression models. By identifying transport sustainability variables that have an effect on higher education, this study is the first to uncover the complexity of transportation sustainability and contributes to the latest policy implications for promoting higher education attainment through sustainable transportation.

Sustainable Transportation: An Overview and Fusion for the Last Decade

This paper reviews transportation sustainability from theoretical and experiential approaches collected from previous journal papers and books published on the latest ten years. Application of sustainable policies was faced many problems and limitations. This study assigns the available literature researches related to theoretical and applied sustainability in transportation and road construction fields in addition to self-organized steps. Also, the transport sustainability issues, aspects, visions, challenges, and benefits have been presented. Finally, it discusses the future theoretical and experiential research approaches that can connect the current long-winded literature on transportation sustainability which may generate a number of probable future research directions.

Implementation of Principles of New Urbanism on Malegaon City (Nashik District)

In the past era the towns were formed by settlements of people around their place of work. The workers used to construct temporary residences as close to their workplace such as factories and industries to reduce travelling distances. These temporary residences eventually converted into permanent residences and in the same way entire towns were established. Due to lack of planning and haphazard uncontrolled land usage various problems started to grow in these towns. This project focuses on one such town named Malegaon in Nashik district in Maharashtra. This town was formed by accumulation of handloom workers around handloom industries which have been in this city for many decades. Improper distribution of land and lack of planning of development have given rise to problems such as traffic congestions, poverty, riots between multiple communities, lack of employment opportunities other than looms and overall deprivation of standard of living. This project focuses on solving a few of these problems by implementation of principles of new urbanism on the Malegaon city. The principles upon implementation will help to improve transportation efficiency, easier access to public facilities and utilities, elevation of standard of living of the citizens and overall development of the area. Keywords: New Urbanism, Malegaon, Nashik, Walkability, Connectivity, Diversity, Housing, Transportation, Sustainability, neighborhood, Density, Architecture

Comparing Regional Sustainability and Transportation Sustainability at the Metropolitan Level in the U.S. using Artificial Neural Network Clustering Techniques

Regional sustainability and transportation sustainability have been intensely discussed and analyzed in recent decades. Though the use of indicators has been adopted in those models, debates continue on what indicators should be used and how to optimize the number of indicators. This results in the lack of a comprehensive and efficient method to assess and compare the sustainability of a sub-system, such as transportation system, and overall regional sustainability. A thorough literature review is conducted to identify indicators used to assess regional sustainability and transportation sustainability. Then, based on the available data, two sets of indicators for regional sustainability and transportation sustainability are identified and calculated respectively for the 382 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the U.S. A self-organizing map, which is a type of artificial neural network, is used to cluster the MSAs and compare their regional sustainability and transportation sustainability as well as to investigate the relationships among indicators. The results show that MSAs with a higher score on regional sustainability do not necessarily have a higher score on transportation sustainability. Some MSAs that are geographically close to each other have similar scores in regional sustainability and transportation sustainability. These findings provide insights to decision makers that the assessment of sustainability should consider both correlation and heterogeneity of different indicators within a region. Therefore, it is important to develop a comprehensive and efficient method to evaluate the role of sustainability in one urban sub-system, such as transportation, in the overall regional sustainability.

Does metropolitan form affect transportation sustainability? Evidence from US metropolitan areas

In this paper, we examine transportation sustainability in American metropolitan areas using transportation-related CO2 emissions, public transit accessibility, and commuting times as indicators. Though variations in these indicators may stem from historic contexts, policies, institutional arrangements, social and cultural origins, the spatial structure of metropolitan areas—in particular their formal characteristics—may also be a contributing factor. To test this relationship, we identify metropolitan form metrics from prior literature that are expected to impact transportation outcomes, and choose five metrics to which we introduce significant improvements. We apply the metrics to all 166 Combined Statistical Areas in the US, using an open-source GIS toolbox released along with the paper. Our findings demonstrate that form-based metrics provide a better explanation to CO2 emissions, public transit accessibility, and commuting times in US metro areas than the simpler population size or density metrics typically used in practice. We also show that counter to prior literature on urban scaling laws and economies of scale, which have argued that larger cities and metro areas are more sustainable per capita, transport-related CO2 emissions and transit accessibility are actually less favorable in larger CSAs when controlling for formal characteristics of metropolitan areas. Instead of scale, compactness has the highest elasticity with respect to transportation sustainability of metro areas.