Transit Travel Research Articles

Professional Adaptation Experiences of Chinese Migrant Nurses in Australia: A Qualitative Study.

Chinese-educated nurses are increasingly important to the international labor market. This study aimed to examine how Chinese migrant nurses adapt and evolve professionally while pursuing nursing careers in Australia, using a qualitative descriptive approach. A total of 17 Chinese-educated nurses were recruited by purposive and snowball sampling in Australia during 2017. Data were collected by individual semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic analysis. Three central themes and eight subthemes were generated. Perceived differences in nursing involved: work options and flexibility, professional autonomy and independence, and freedom of expressing professional opinions. Elements comprising challenges to adaptation included communication barriers, nursing workload and responsibilities, and collegial relationships. Participants' professional transition journeys were accompanied by two key areas of self-evolution: Embracing the authentic self and embracing individual differences. Our findings have important implications for migrant-host nursing workforce integration in Australia and internationally.

The transition journey of EU vs. NON-EU countries for waste management.

This study aims to identify macroeconomic indicators that can be used as predictors of waste management on the European continent. The study was conducted taking in account the intensification of urbanizations, the increase of standard of leaving that fuels to consumerism phenomenon, and imposed challenges for waste management. The research focuses on the interval from 2010 to 2020 for 37 European countries grouped according to EU15/EU28/non-EU and EU/non-EU members. As macroeconomic indicators, human development index (HDI), GDP/capita. GNI/capita, general government expenditure with environment protection, people at risk of poverty or social exclusion, population by educational attainment level, sex, and age (%)-less than primary, primary and lower secondary education (levels 0-2) were used. A multilinear regression model with collinearity diagnosis was applied to find out the direction and intensity of the contribution of independent variables and to hierarchy the predictors of waste management.. For multiple comparison between and inside of each grouping of countries, statistical inference methods were used: one-way ANOVA with Bonferroni post hoc test multiple comparisons and independent samples Kruskal-Wallis test with Dunn's post hoc test. The main conclusions of the study are that EU15 countries have the highest average values for most indicators of waste management, comparative with EU28 and with non-EU countries, followed by a group of EU28 countries. For indicators of recycling rate of packaging waste by type of packaging-metallic and recycling rate of e-waste, the non-EU countries have the highest values of mean compared with the EU15 and EU28 groups of countries. This can be explained by the high level of development of the some non-euro area countries (Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Liechtenstein) that have intense concerns about waste recycling and have the necessary financial strength to carry out complex environmental protection programs.

Transit Travel Community Detection and Evolutionary Analysis: A Case Study of Shenzhen

Community detection can reveal specific urban spatial structures related to human activities, and is achieved using mobility data from various sources. In the existing research, less attention has been devoted to communities related to urban transit travel. As public transit is a key component of the urban transport system, it is important to understand how transit communities are organized and how they evolve. This research proposes an approach to urban transit travel community detection using transit travel data and examines how the communities have evolved over time. The results in Shenzhen from 2015 to 2017 showed that the transit travel network had an obvious community structure, and the components (TAZs in this case) of the communities changed over time. During the three years, the western part of Shenzhen experienced more component changes on weekdays, and the central part of the city underwent more component changes on weekdays. In addition, the transit travel communities had a significant coupling relationship with urban administrative divisions. Exploring transit travel communities provides insight for improving public transit systems and enriches the research genealogy of urban spatial structure.

“Seeing the day-to-day situation”: A grounded theory of how persons living with dementia and their family caregivers experience the hospital to home transition and beyond

Most older adults with dementia live at home, they primarily receive care provided by family members and friends. Given the decline in memory and other cognitive functions, there to be higher rates of touch points with the health system for those living with dementia. Evidence has shown that these care transitions mark critical changes in the lives of older people, including significant and far-reaching changes to family caregivers. Therefore, it is imperative that complex social processes enacted by persons with dementia and their family caregivers in response to care transitions be more thoroughly explained. This study took place in Canada between 2019 and 2021 and adopted a constructivist grounded theory design. Twenty-five people participated in 20 interviews: 4 people living with dementia and 21 caregivers. We report on six concepts grounded in the data that are linked to a core process engaged in by the participants throughout the care transition journey and beyond: Seeing the day-to-day situation. This study contributes theoretically to the care transition literature by making explicit not only the visible work done by patient-caregiver days during the care transition journey, but it has also illuminated the ongoing processes engaged in by caregivers who are navigating the health and social care systems with their family member living with dementia. During the care transition, and beyond, the caregiver is forced to take over and connect the dots. Even though the caring experience is fraught with traumatic and very challenging situations, for many caregivers, they rise above and can reconcile their suffering with a desire to help their family member and others who may be going through similar experiences. This theory provides a foundation on which to develop theory-driven interventions that focus on support the patient-caregiver dyad during care transitions.

A mixed-methods investigation of older adults’ public transit use and travel satisfaction

Public transit may be a low-cost and environmentally friendly way for older adults to maintain independent mobility as they age, and yet little is known about older adults’ transit travel behaviours or travel satisfaction. To address this research gap, this paper explores older people’s (60+) responses to a travel survey on the Hamilton Street Railway (HSR). Distributed in 2019 to residents of Hamilton, Ontario, 5844 people responded to the survey, 1002 of which were aged 60 years or older. Descriptive statistics were conducted to assess older adults’ responses, as well as to compare these responses to respondents aged 18–59 years. A thematic analysis of responses to an open-ended question was also completed.The results indicate that older adults are more frequently occasional transit users (monthly, annually) than younger people who more frequently use the bus daily. Older adults are also more satisfied with the transit service than those aged 18–59 years. Older respondents were least satisfied with comfort amenities at bus stops and shelters and bus crowdedness. However, their satisfaction with these aspects of the service is not statistically significantly different from younger adults. From the thematic analysis, the top barrier shared by older adults is related to accessing the transit service. Across older adults, women, employed people, and those without a car or a driver’s license were more likely to be frequent transit riders. Taken together, this paper sheds light on an understudied population’s transit experiences and can be used to inform policy on how to make public transit more age-friendly.

Influence of Centrality Indices of Urban Railway Stations: Social Network Analysis of Transit Ridership and Travel Distance

This empirical study calculated the network centralities of urban railway stations in Seoul using Social Network Analysis (SNA) and analyzed the effect of this value on the number of passengers and average travel distance at each station. Network centrality can be calculated using various methodologies. In this study, reach, betweenness, and closeness were used as network centrality indicators. A regression model was used with the characteristics of building use in the station catchment areas as control variables. This methodology was compared to previous studies’ methods for obtaining stations’ topology values. The adjusted R2 values increased by 0.272 and 0.220 for the respective models, explaining the number of passengers and the average travel distance, respectively; the number of significant variables also increased in both models. These results indicate that defining the network centrality obtained through SNA as the station’s topology could improve explanations of the number of passengers and the average travel distance by 27.2% and 22.0%, respectively, compared to previous studies. While this methodology is not new, this study demonstrated the advantages of using SNA to determine the centrality indices of urban railway stations.

Longer trips to court cause evictions

Studying ∼200,000 evictions filed against ∼300,000 Philadelphians from 2005 to 2021, we focus on the role of transit to court in preventing tenants from asserting their rights. In this period, nearly 40% of tenants facing eviction were ordered to leave their residences because they did not show up to contest cases against them and received a default judgment. Controlling for a variety of potential confounds at the tenant and landlord level, we find that residents of private tenancies with longer transit travel time to the courthouse were more likely to default. A 1-h increase in estimated travel time increases the probability of default by between 3.8% and 8.6% points across different model specifications. The effect holds after adjusting for direct distance to the court, unobserved landlord characteristics, and even baseline weekend travel time. However, it is absent in public housing evictions, where timing rules are significantly laxer, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, when tenants had the opportunity to be present virtually. We estimate that had all tenants been equally able to get to the court in 10 min, there would have been 4,000 to 9,000 fewer default evictions over the sample period. We replicate this commuting effect in another dataset of over 800,000 evictions from Harris County, Texas. These results open up a new way to study the physical determinants of access to justice, illustrating that the location and accessibility of a courthouse can affect individual case outcomes. We suggest that increased use of video technology in court may reduce barriers to justice.

From academia to freelance medical writing: Navigating the transition

Academics who have transitioned to medical communications (MedComms) find that there are many parallels between the two fields, leading to fulfilling and rewarding careers. Many of the skills honed in academia such as research, technical writing, and rigour are transferable to MedComms. Technical competence alone, however, is not enough. The transition from academia to freelance medical writing presents a unique set of challenges with a steep learning curve. In this article, four ex-academics share their transition journeys from academia to freelance medical writing, the challenges they encountered, and their learnings. Apart from the core business of writing, freelancers must wear many hats to be able to operate a successful business. Additional skills such as networking, marketing, and business management are a fundamental requirement for success as a freelancer. Equally important is skilfully defining your niche for services and positioning yourself as an expert to potential clients.

Estimating suburban preferences for integrated public transit and ridesourcing services through a revealed-preference/stated-preference survey

Low-density areas like suburbs can be challenging to serve with fixed-route transit. Demand responsive transit has been used to service these areas with mixed results, but suburban travellers may respond to ridesourcing integrated with transit more positively because of the improved booking and dispatching interface offered by ridesourcing. This paper explores how suburban residents perceive transit-integrated ridesourcing, both for cost and time attributes of the system and in comparison to other travel modes in the area (cycling, auto, taxi or Uber, and transit). A Hierarchical Bayes mixed logit model was estimated using the results of a revealed-preference/stated-preference survey, revealing that transit-integrated ridesourcing had similar preferences to fixed-route transit. Across time and cost variables, respondents were more sensitive to walk time, transfer time, the number of transfers, parking cost, and taxi or Uber fare, and were minimally impacted by changes in the IVTT deviation of their trip times. The change in utility for the length of transit or transit-integrated ridesourcing in-vehicle travel time versus auto in-vehicle travel time was found to have a strongly linear relationship, while other attributes exhibited non-linearity to different degrees, particularly walk time, transfer time, transit-integrated ridesourcing fare, and taxi or Uber fare. Respondents who were female, younger, taking home-based school trips, or had lower household incomes were more open to transit-integrated ridesourcing and transit than other demographic groups. The likelihood of taking each of the five travel modes was assessed after COVID-19, finding generally minimal to negative impact for transit-integrated ridesourcing. Insights into vehicle and transit pass ownership, existing travel alternatives, and a prior transit-integrated ridesourcing pilot in the area are presented.

Temporalities Beyond Transition: Form, Genre, and Contemporary Trans Novels

ABSTRACT: Popular narratives about trans identity traditionally rely on a metaphorical understanding of trans embodiment as a linear and unidirectional journey. This paper discusses how this temporality is questioned, reshaped, interrupted, and sidestepped in five recent novels by trans and non-binary authors: Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby (2021), Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (2017), Juno Dawson’s Wonderland (2020), Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), and Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless (2021). The spatiotemporal organization of these novels negotiates the linearities that are conventionally employed in relation to trans stories, as each text engages with the conventions of specific genres—from the Bildungsroman to the picaresque, from science fiction to “chick lit,” from young adult literature to horror—in order to move beyond the structure of the personal transition journey.

Inferring origin and destination zones of transit trips through fusion of smart card transactions, travel surveys, and land-use data

This paper presents a data fusion method to infer the origin and destination zones of transit trips from smart card data. The fusion framework has disaggregate mixed multinomial logit models at its core that predict the most probable origin and destination zones of individual transit trips using smart card transaction records, land use data, and transit system characteristics. The logit models are estimated using revealed trip origin and destination responses from a travel survey that are augmented by land use and transit system data to provide contexts about the zones' trip generation and attraction potentials. For empirical analysis, the methodology is applied to the smart card system of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. Specifically, it is tested under different system configurations (tap-on-only and tap-on-and-off) and for networks with substantial shares of automobile and walk access/egress. When applied to transit trips constructed from the smart card transactions, the estimated models successfully capture the spatial distribution of trip origin and destination at the traffic analysis zone level. The empirical analysis also demonstrates that the proposed fusion method can be appropriately used to reconcile information provided by transit smart card and travel surveys to generate up-to-date transit demand data necessary for public transport planning and operations.

The Value of Having a Public Transit Travel Choice

The value of having a public transit travel choice is occasionally acknowledged by planners but never quantified; this paper provides a methodology to quantify it. This value of having a public transit choice is in addition to public transit’s benefits to users and non-users as a result of the improved performance of other modes in the transportation system resulting from the public transit investment. The value of choice accrues to the total population that has access to public transit, not just those who chose to use it or those who benefit because others have chosen it. This paper develops a methodology and a crude but plausible estimate of the value of choice for public transit using data describing features of U.S. daily personal travel in 1995. For perspective, this estimate is compared with the total operating and capital expense of providing public transit in the United States. The result indicates that the value of choice alone is comparable in magnitude to the cost of providing public transit in this country.

A New Transit Safety Narrative

Public transportation is, overall, a relatively safe (low crash risk) and secure (low crime risk) transport mode. Transit travel has about one-tenth the traffic casualty (injury or death) rate as automobile travel, and residents of transit-oriented communities have about one-fifth the per capita crash casualty rate as in automobile-oriented communities. Transit also tends to have lower overall crime rates than automobile travel, and transit improvements can help reduce overall crime risk by improving surveillance and economic opportunities for at-risk populations. Despite its relative safety and security, many people consider transit travel dangerous and are reluctant to use it or support service expansions in their communities. Various factors contribute to this excessive fear, including the nature of transit travel, heavy media coverage of transit-related crashes and crimes, and conventional traffic safety messages that emphasize danger rather than safety. Transit agencies can help create a new transit safety narrative by better communicating transit’s overall safety and security impacts and providing better guidance concerning how users and communities can enhance transit safety and security.

Determinants of Bicycle-On-Bus Boardings: A Case Study of the Greater Cleveland RTA

Transit agencies around the country have made significant investments since the late 1990s to provide improved service to cyclist-transit users (CTUs), that is, transit riders who bring bicycles with them by using bicycle racks installed on buses. Use of these bus bicycle racks appears to vary significantly from transit system to transit system. It is unclear, however, what specific factors contribute most to bicycle-on-bus boardings (BoBBs). Using multi-variate regression analysis and a detailed data set of 2008–2011 BoBBs for Northeast Ohio’s Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (GCRTA), this study compared daily BoBBs to general ridership (measured by unlinked passenger trips) in light of key weather, transit service, and travel cost variables. Rates of BoBBs rose during the study’s time period and were strongly associated with weather conditions, though even in wet and cold weather, dozens of transit users traveled with their bicycles. To a lesser extent, BoBBs are also associated with transit service levels and travel costs.

Parcel-Level Modeling to Analyze Transit Stop Location Changes

Because of how important walk access is for transit travel, service changes that affect walking distance, such as route or stop relocation, call for modeling at a fine enough level to accurately reflect the often arbitrary aspects of the access network and of demand distribution within a zone. Case studies of stop relocation in Boston and Albany demonstrate the feasibility of parcel-level modeling on the unabridged street network using an assessor’s database. Parcel-level demand is estimated by allocating observed on/off counts as a function of a parcel’s land-use type, size (e.g., gross floor area), and location factors. With actual land-use and street network data, we show how stop service areas can deviate substantially from the simple geometric shapes that follow from assuming airline or rectilinear travel, and demand distribution can be far from uniform within a zone. These factors can significantly favor particular transit stop locations.

Style versus Service? An Analysis of User Perceptions of Transit Stops and Stations

Transit travelers expend a great deal of time and energy on out-of-vehicle walking and waiting, which significantly affects their perceived burdens of travel. Accordingly, this article is concerned with ways to reduce the perceived burdens of out-of-vehicle time spent walking, waiting, and transferring to improve users’ experience at transit stops and stations. We surveyed 749 transit users at 12 transit stops and stations around metropolitan Los Angeles and found that the most important determinant of user satisfaction with a transit stop or station has little to do with the physical characteristics of the facility; instead, frequent, reliable service in an environment of personal safety matters most to riders. In other words, most transit users would prefer short, predictable waits for buses and trains in a safe, if simple or even dreary, environment over long waits for late-running vehicles in even the most elaborate and attractive transit station, especially if they fear for their safety.

A DSS Framework for Advanced Traffic Signal Control System Investment Planning

This article presents ongoing research on the initial development of a decision support system (DSS) framework for integrated emergency vehicle preemption and transit priority system investment planning. A conceptual intelligent DSS framework provides a holistic framework to perform analytical assessments of integrated emergency vehicle preemption and transit priority systems. Three analytical tools are presented for incorporation into future DSS design: the first addresses the potential impact of transit travel time reduction on transit operating costs; the second addresses the potential impact of reduced emergency vehicle crashes at signalized intersections on fire and rescue operating costs; and the third integrates fuzzy sets concepts and multiattribute decision-making methods to rank order transit signal priority strategy alternatives at the intersection level.

Transit Access to Subsidized Food Stores in the U.S. Midwest

In the United States, low-income individuals and some racial and ethnic minorities have higher rates of transit use and food insecurity. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides low-income households with money for groceries at authorized retailers, creates a unique food procurement environment for participants. In this article, transit networks’ effect on access to SNAP retailers is assessed by calculating transit travel times to all transitable SNAP stores of census block groups (CBGs) in thirty-three metropolitan areas in the U.S. Midwest. Low transit access CBGs are identified and compared to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) low-income, low-access (LILA) census tracts. Store type transit access ratios are analyzed to further specify disproportionate access to healthy food retailers. Findings indicate low transit access is experienced in fringe-urban, majority white, car-dependent CBGs. Approximately 24,380 people receiving public assistance, 145,636 Black people, 135,731 non-Black Hispanic people, and 108,325 low-income people live within these CBGs, however. The USDA’s LILA census tracts are more expansive than this study’s low-income, low-transit-access (LILTA) tracts. Despite being classified as rural, LILTA-only tracts had sixty-eight households without a vehicle, on average. Future research and policy should engage populations in suburban and exurban regions to accommodate transportation needs of a nonnegligible portion of potentially food-insecure households.

Measuring City-Level Transit Accessibility Based on the Weight of Residential Land Area: A Case of Nanning City, China

A large body of research on transit accessibility emphasizes the importance of methods to simulating the real-world travel process. Few efforts have been made to conduct empirical research and comparative analysis of overall city-level transit accessibility. In addition, most of literatures utilize census tracts combined with the buffer method to estimate transit travel demand or available service areas, failing to take into account the reality that different land-uses have their own population. This research aims to develop an overall index of city-level transit accessibility based on the weight of residential land area. We integrated five types of destinations and the coverage of residential area within the transit stop service area to evaluate the overall structural problems of land use and public transportation in the process of urban development. Based on a case study on Nanning City, it was found that the weighted average travel distance is increased by 5.42 km, but the overall weighted travel time of the city is shortened by 7.65 min. In addition, an increase in coverage within the stop threshold and a decrease in the number of residential communities outside the threshold indicate that transit accessibility facilitates urban expansion. The empirical results show that the overall transit accessibility index can provide a reasonable measure criterion for the compact spatial structure and support urban strategic planning and address the problem of land use and public transport in the process of urban development.

What Do We Know When? Modeling Predictability of Transit Operations

Predictions of transit delays are crucial to passengers and operators. Passengers utilize the predictions to decide on departure time, route choice, and mode choice, whereas operators decide on schedules, timetables, rolling stock allocation, and control actions. We introduce the concept of predictability of transit travel times as the study of the reduction of the predicted variability with the temporal approaching of a predicted event. We evaluate predictability on a real-life test case in Zurich, Switzerland, spanning multiple transit lines over one year of operations. The concept is shown based on predictions obtained by a state-of-the-art Bayesian network approach, where we show how predictability (in general) can be modeled as an exponential decay phenomenon. The study of predictability of transit operations leads to additional insights for control actions and system analysis compared to other complementary concepts such as punctuality or regularity, for instance, concerning bunching, identification of bottlenecks, and passenger routing.