Fann Chen, Jingyang Lyu, and Tianye Wang. 2020. “
Benchmarking road safety development across OECD countries: An empirical analysis for a decade.” Accident Analysis & Prevention, 147, November, Pp. 105752.
Publisher's VersionAbstractBenchmarking performance, monitoring progress and then recalibrating interventions is widely recognized as a valuable process for achieving continuous improvement in road safety. In this study, a systematic and effective methodology, IV-VIKOR with FNBC, is developed to perform the benchmarking of road safety development in an integrative manner for OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries. Linking to other methods and measures as the references, 36 OECD Member countries are ranked and grouped into several classes based on their overall achievement regarding road safety from the past decade (2009–2018). This provides government officials and policymakers, across the OECD Member countries, with a flexible tool to comprehensively benchmark road safety development. Providing the ability to identify delays in action plan implementations and proactively redistribute resources toward more effective measures where required. Such a tool can also serve to increase political will and stakeholder accountabilities, at the highest level of government and the private sector for all OECD members: Thereby keeping the implementation of action plans on schedule. It helps OECD Member countries to establish the capacity for sustainable safety management; supporting them in developing future strategies and reforms to create better policies for better lives.
Chenghe Guan, Jihoon Song, Michael Keith, Yuki Akiyama, Ryosuke Shibasaki, and Taisei Sato. 2020. “
Delineating urban park catchment areas using mobile phone data: A case study of Tokyo.” Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 81, May, Pp. 101474.
Publisher's VersionAbstractUrban parks can offer both physical and psychological health benefits to urban dwellers and provide social, economic, and environmental benefits to society. Earlier research on the usage of urban parks relied on fixed distance or walking time to delineate urban park catchment areas. However, actual catchment areas can be affected by many factors other than park surface areas, such as social capital cultivation, cultural adaptation, climate and seasonal variation, and park function and facilities provided. This study advanced this method by using mobile phone data to delineate urban park catchment area. The study area is the 23 special wards of Tokyo or tokubetsu-ku, the core of the capital of Japan. The location data of over 1 million anonymous mobile phone users was collected in 2011. The results show that: (1) the park catchment areas vary significantly by park surface areas: people use smaller parks nearby but also travel further to larger parks; (2) even for the parks in the same size category, there are notable differences in the spatial pattern of visitors, which cannot be simply summarized with average distance or catchment radius; and (3) almost all the parks, regardless of its size and function, had the highest user density right around the vicinity, exemplified by the density-distance function closely follow a decay trend line within 1-2 km radius of the park. As such, this study used the density threshold and density-distance function to measure park catchment. We concluded that the application of mobile phone location data can improve our understanding of an urban park catchment area, provide useful information and methods to analyze the usage of urban parks, and can aid in the planning and policy-making of urban parks.
Haikun Wang, Xiaojing He, Xinyu Liang, Ernani F. Choma, Yifan Liu, Li Shan, Haotian Zheng, Shaojun Zhang, Chris Nielsen, Shuxiao Wang, Ye Wu, and John Evans. 2020. “
Health benefits of on-road transportation pollution control programs in China.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117, 41, Pp. 25370-25377.
Publisher's VersionAbstractChina started to implement comprehensive measures to mitigate traffic pollution at the end of 1990s, but the comprehensive effects, especially on ambient air quality and public health, have not yet been systematically evaluated. In this study, we analyze the effects of vehicle emission control measures on ambient air pollution and associated deaths attributable to long-term exposures of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and O3 based on an integrated research framework that combines scenario analysis, air quality modeling, and population health risk assessment. We find that the total impact of these control measures was substantial. Vehicular emissions during 1998–2015 would have been 2–3 times as large as they actually were, had those measures not been implemented. The national population-weighted annual average concentrations of PM2.5 and O3 in 2015 would have been higher by 11.7 μg/m3 and 8.3 parts per billion, respectively, and the number of deaths attributable to 2015 air pollution would have been higher by 510 thousand (95% confidence interval: 360 thousand to 730 thousand) without these controls. Our analysis shows a concentration of mortality impacts in densely populated urban areas, motivating local policymakers to design stringent vehicle emission control policies. The results imply that vehicle emission control will require policy designs that are more multifaceted than traditional controls, primarily represented by the strict emission standards, with careful consideration of the challenges in coordinated mitigation of both PM2.5 and O3 in different regions, to sustain improvement in air quality and public health given continuing swift growth in China’s vehicle population.