Travel-Limiting Disabilities in the United States: Why Accessibility Matters?

This study evaluates the distribution of travel-limiting disabilities across genders and geographic locations in the United States. This study aims to describe and compare the socioeconomic and demographic variables of the people with and without travel-limiting disabilities across geographic locations and gender. The study further evaluates the trip purpose and impact of Covid-19 fourth wave pandemic on the use of public transit and travel to physical workplace for the people with and without travel-limiting disabilities across gender and geographic locations. The study uses the 2022 weighted National Household Travel Survey dataset and employs descriptive statistics. Results reaffirm the findings from previous literature that there are more people with travel-limiting disabilities in urban areas and among women. Over 50 percent of people aged 65 and above have a form of travel-limiting disabilities. The most trip for people with travel-limiting disabilities is made for shopping and medical purposes. Across all categories, rural areas, urban areas, male and female for the people without travel-limiting disabilities, COVID-19 fourth wave did not change the pattern of trips made to physical workplace as pre-COVID-19 era. This pattern is also observable for the people with travel-limiting disabilities in rural and urban areas. Females with travel-limiting disabilities reported making less trips to physical workplaces while male reported doing the same as before COVID-19 era. The study concludes that the quantification of travel-limiting disabilities across geographic location and gender is vital in disability study and could drive policy implementation for improved accessibility for the vulnerable population.

Modeling urban housing price： The perspective of household activity demand

Existing studies about the modeling of urban housing price have figured out sets of factors and the main focus is on the relative spatial location. Generally, this line of research is descriptive rather than modeling in nature. The underlying reasons for the distribution of housing price are largely unexplored and more research is needed. The paper therefore attempted to systematically explore the spatial heterogeneities of urban housing price based on the urban activity interaction rule. Using Beijing as a case study, this study first developed a new measurement of accessibility which directly depicts the cost and possibilities to access opportunities of different activities such as employments, educational, shopping and medical services. From the perspective of demands of different households, the paper then modelled the relationships between urban housing price and these accessibilities and found that the distribution pattern of housing price can be relatively well represented by this model that the R^2 could achieve 0.7. We investigated the relationship between housing price and the demands of different kinds of households categorized by households of one-generation, two-generation, three-generation and four-and-plus-generation and found that the demands of household of four-and-plus-generations is the most highly correlated with housing prices. The reason might be that this kind of household has more household members and the demands are more diverse and complex, which is more similar to the distributions of all kinds of activity opportunities in the real world. In the end of the paper, some implications for policy-making are proposed based on the results of the analyses.

Modeling Morning Commute with Different Kinds of Activities Based on Bottleneck Model

Morning commute problem has always been concerned by researchers in transportation research field.For the bottleneck existing in the road network between home and school,this paper studies the household travel with different kinds of activities,i.e.,home-school-home trip and home-school-workplace trip.Individuals just send their children to school and then go home,which is named school travel.Individuals need to send their children to school firstly and then go to work,which is named household travel.Firstly,according to the proportions of two types of travelers and school-work start time difference,the possible equilibrium cases are solved and the conditions for the occurrence of each case are revealed.Different from the traditional bottleneck model with a unique equilibrium traffic pattern,the mixed travel case has six possible equilibrium traffic patterns.Secondly,the cost of traveler is analyzed for all possible equilibrium traffic patterns.Result shows that equilibrium trip costs of two types of travelers are more sensitive to the number of travelers in that class than the number in another class in all possible equilibrium cases.Finally,the influence of school-work start time difference on the total travel cost is discussed.Result shows that the total system travel cost can be reduced by appropriately adjusting the difference of school-work start time.