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Sustainable Transportation and Urban Planning

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Transportation".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2023) | Viewed by 12639

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Transportation and Logistics, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China
Interests: sustainable urban planning and transportation planning; land use and transportation integration; urban transportation network analysis; transportation network reliability; road congestion pricing; logic-driven transport big data analysis; data mining techniques for traffic monitoring data
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Transportation and Logistics, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China
Interests: traffic planning and management; traffic safety; intelligent transportation systems
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Sustainable development of urban transportation is based upon social, environmental, and economic sustainability, and should aim to provide a safe and healthy environment for people. However, there are still many problems in the process of promoting transportation development, including traffic congestion, road accidents, and air pollution. Improving urban habitat and promoting urban green development have become common goals and actions of all counties in the world. In addition, cities have also shifted from a stage of high-speed growth to a stage of high-quality development, and the public has new expectations for the livability of the cities. Therefore, it is urgent to accelerate the transformation of the current urban transportation development mode, focus on solving transportation problems, and promote urban sustainable development.

The emerging technologies of intelligent connected vehicle create new opportunities for realizing sustainable urban mobility initiatives. Higher energy efficiency, eco-routing, reduced demand for parking infrastructure, integration with land use and power systems, and other effects make intelligent connected vehicles promisingly positive in sustainable development. However, the lower cost of travel and induced demand at the society level is likely to encourage greater vehicle utilization and vehicle miles traveled, resulting in less positive effects than expected from intelligent connected vehicles.

In this Special Issue, we expect to gather high-quality articles that address the impact of intelligent connected vehicles on energy, environment, and sustainability.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Travel demand estimation and management;
  • Performance and environment of passenger transportation system;
  • Decarbonizing the transportation sector and pathways to net-zero emissions;
  • Transportation service ticketing and pricing solutions;
  • Urban transportation electrification and energy consumption;
  • Combination of intelligent connected vehicles and the above topics.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Shaopeng Zhong
Dr. Hongmei Zhou
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • intelligent connected vehicles
  • autonomous vehicles
  • emerging transportation modes
  • sustainable development
  • air pollution
  • climate change
  • urban governance
  • urban planning

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Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

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20 pages, 8318 KiB  
Article
Promoting Emergency Medical Service Infrastructure Equality to Reduce Road Crash Fatalities
by Soyoung Jung and Xiao Qin
Sustainability 2024, 16(3), 1000; https://doi.org/10.3390/su16031000 - 24 Jan 2024
Viewed by 1018
Abstract
Timely emergency medical service (EMS) is critical to mitigate outcomes of severe traffic crashes, especially in rural areas. The urban–rural inequality of the EMS infrastructure has been one of the factors contributing to a higher death rate for patients in rural road crashes. [...] Read more.
Timely emergency medical service (EMS) is critical to mitigate outcomes of severe traffic crashes, especially in rural areas. The urban–rural inequality of the EMS infrastructure has been one of the factors contributing to a higher death rate for patients in rural road crashes. To address the spatial imbalance of EMS infrastructure, this study aimed to provide a methodological framework for evaluating the existing EMS infrastructure by taking South Korea’s EMS infrastructure expansion plans as the case study. Specifically, this study developed a road crash data-driven methodology to promote spatial balance and economical expansion of EMS infrastructure of all types, including EMS stations, hospitals, the helicopter fleet, and landing spots. Geographically weighted binary logit regression and spatial analysis identified strategic locations for prioritizing the EMS infrastructure expansion using crash victim data and road networks to close the gap between urban and rural areas. The analysis of access to existing EMS infrastructure showed that the 16 to 20 min EMS response time, including on-scene time and transport time ranging from 11 to 15 min, are significantly associated with higher crash fatalities. The results also suggested that EMS stations and heliports are inadequate to meet the EMS time thresholds in the central province of Korea. The findings of this research could inform policymakers as they are working toward expanding the EMS infrastructure and creating a more equitable EMS response when it comes to transporting rural road crash patients. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Transportation and Urban Planning)
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20 pages, 1082 KiB  
Article
A Need-Based Approach for Modeling Recurrent Discretionary Activity Participation Patterns for Travel Demand Analysis
by WooKeol Cho, Jinhee Kim and Jin-Hyuk Chung
Sustainability 2023, 15(21), 15426; https://doi.org/10.3390/su152115426 - 30 Oct 2023
Viewed by 1109
Abstract
As society advances and various technologies like AI and LLMs are further developed, the proportion of human labor contributing to the productivity of nations and societies is gradually decreasing. This has led to increased attention to the quality of life of individuals, and [...] Read more.
As society advances and various technologies like AI and LLMs are further developed, the proportion of human labor contributing to the productivity of nations and societies is gradually decreasing. This has led to increased attention to the quality of life of individuals, and cases of implementing policies such as a four-day work week are on the rise. Therefore, the objective of this study was to analyze the patterns of how people are spending their increased leisure time amid this social trend and to identify the factors influencing these patterns. Building upon the need-based theory proposed in previous studies, this research analyzed people’s recurrent discretionary activity patterns. Multiday analysis was conducted considering the characteristics of leisure activity patterns, and a hazard-based duration model was estimated for statistical analysis. The research results revealed that people’s patterns of consecutive activities are influenced by various factors, such as socio-economic attributes, time–space budgets, previous activity experiences, and preferences for specific days of the week. Through this, we were able to confirm that socio-demographic and household characteristics, as well as attributes of time/space budgets, influence the growth speed and threshold of needs as suggested in need-based theory. Additionally, we observed a preference for specific days of the week for different types of activities. As a result, people tend to either postpone activities until specific days even when their need has accumulated sufficiently or engage in activities on specific days even when the need has not yet accumulated to the desired level. This study demonstrates novelty in that it utilizes the need-based theory proposed in prior research to identify factors influencing multiday activity participation patterns. Additionally, it presents the first study providing model estimation results from the perspective of need-based theory. The correlation between the time–space budget and discretionary activity patterns identified in this study is expected to serve as a guideline for future transportation-related policies, including regional balanced development. This study demonstrates a unique contribution compared to existing research in that it established that, with improvements in activity/travel conditions, there can be an induced demand for activities. This finding can contribute to the feasibility study of transportation projects and the establishment of policies related to regional balanced development. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Transportation and Urban Planning)
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20 pages, 3324 KiB  
Article
Traffic Status Prediction Based on Multidimensional Feature Matching and 2nd-Order Hidden Markov Model (HMM)
by Fei Li, Kai Liu and Jialiang Chen
Sustainability 2023, 15(20), 14671; https://doi.org/10.3390/su152014671 - 10 Oct 2023
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1107
Abstract
Spatiotemporal data from urban road traffic are pivotal for intelligent transportation systems and urban planning. Nonetheless, missing data in traffic datasets is a common challenge due to equipment failures, communication issues, and monitoring limitations, especially the missing not at random (MNAR) problem. This [...] Read more.
Spatiotemporal data from urban road traffic are pivotal for intelligent transportation systems and urban planning. Nonetheless, missing data in traffic datasets is a common challenge due to equipment failures, communication issues, and monitoring limitations, especially the missing not at random (MNAR) problem. This research introduces an approach to address MNAR-type missing data in traffic status prediction, utilizing a multidimensional feature sequence and a second-order hidden Markov model (2nd-order HMM). First, this approach involves extracting spatiotemporal features for the preset data sections and spatial features for the sections to be predicted based on the traffic spatiotemporal characteristics. Second, using the extracted features, distinctive road traffic features are generated for each section. Furthermore, at specific intervals within the defined time period, nearest distance feature matching is introduced to ascertain the traffic attributes of the road section under prediction. Finally, relying on the matched status results, a 2nd-order HMM is employed to forecast the traffic status for subsequent moments within the defined time period. Experiments were carried out using datasets from Shenzhen City and compared against the hidden Markov models and contrast measure (HMM-C) method to affirm the efficacy of the proposed approach. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Transportation and Urban Planning)
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19 pages, 2447 KiB  
Article
Center-Aware 3D Object Detection with Attention Mechanism Based on Roadside LiDAR
by Haobo Shi, Dezao Hou and Xiyao Li
Sustainability 2023, 15(3), 2628; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15032628 - 1 Feb 2023
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 2791
Abstract
Infrastructure 3D Object Detection is a pivotal component of Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperated Autonomous Driving (VICAD). As turning objects account for a high proportion of traffic at intersections, anchor-free representation in the bird’s-eye view (BEV) is more suitable for roadside 3D detection. In this work, [...] Read more.
Infrastructure 3D Object Detection is a pivotal component of Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperated Autonomous Driving (VICAD). As turning objects account for a high proportion of traffic at intersections, anchor-free representation in the bird’s-eye view (BEV) is more suitable for roadside 3D detection. In this work, we propose CetrRoad, a simple yet effective center-aware detector with transformer-based detection head for roadside 3D object detection with single LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging). CetrRoad firstly utilizes a voxel-based roadside LiDAR feature encoder module that voxelizes and projects the raw point cloud into BEV with dense feature representation, following a one-stage center proposal module that initializes center candidates of objects based on the top N points in the BEV target heatmap with unnormalized 2D Gaussian. Then, taking attending center proposals as query embedding, a detection head with multi-head self-attention and multi-scale multi-head deformable cross attention can refine and predict 3D bounding boxes for different classes moving/parked at the intersection. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the DAIR-V2X-I benchmark with an acceptable training time cost, especially for Car and Cyclist. CetrRoad also reaches comparable results with the multi-modal fusion method for Pedestrian. An ablation study demonstrates that center-aware query as input can provide denser supervision than a purified feature map in the attention-based detection head. Moreover, we were able to intuitively observe that in complex traffic environment, our proposed model could produce more accurate 3D detection results than other compared methods with fewer false positives, which is helpful for other downstream VICAD tasks. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Transportation and Urban Planning)
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19 pages, 3597 KiB  
Article
Impact-Asymmetric Analysis of Bike-Sharing Residents’ Satisfaction: A Case Study of Harbin, China
by Lixuan Zhao, Dewei Fang, Yang Cao, Shan Sun, Liu Han, Yang Xue and Qian Zheng
Sustainability 2023, 15(2), 1670; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15021670 - 15 Jan 2023
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3053
Abstract
Harbin, China, has a large population density and a large number of motor vehicles. To alleviate traffic congestion, based on the survey data of bike-sharing riders in the new and old urban areas of Harbin in May 2022, this paper uses an impact-asymmetric [...] Read more.
Harbin, China, has a large population density and a large number of motor vehicles. To alleviate traffic congestion, based on the survey data of bike-sharing riders in the new and old urban areas of Harbin in May 2022, this paper uses an impact-asymmetric analysis and gradient enhancement decision tree to analyse the asymmetric relationship between bike-sharing travel environment elements and cyclists’ satisfaction, and the optimisation strategy for the bike-sharing riding environment was obtained so that more residents can choose to ride. This research shows that the infrastructure of the motorway in the old urban area had the greatest impact on the overall satisfaction, while the travel quality of the shared bikes in the new urban area had the greatest impact on the overall satisfaction. In addition, due to the differences in urban environments and satisfaction, planning directions are different when satisfying cyclists in the new and old urban areas. The old urban area should emphasise cycling comfort and road coherence to provide a good travel environment; however, the new urban area should focus on the operation of shared bikes to meet the needs of cyclists. Therefore, future research should formulate refined improvement strategies for different regions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Transportation and Urban Planning)
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Review

Jump to: Research

20 pages, 2191 KiB  
Review
Towards a Sustainable Transport System: Exploring Capacity Building for Active Travel in Africa
by Desmond Lartey and Meredith A. Glaser
Sustainability 2024, 16(3), 1313; https://doi.org/10.3390/su16031313 - 4 Feb 2024
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2024
Abstract
The promotion of active travel is deemed a crucial component of the transition to sustainable urban mobility. Several barriers hinder its policy implementation and uptake. Some evidence suggests that capacity building could be a useful tool for deepening sustainability efforts. This concept involves [...] Read more.
The promotion of active travel is deemed a crucial component of the transition to sustainable urban mobility. Several barriers hinder its policy implementation and uptake. Some evidence suggests that capacity building could be a useful tool for deepening sustainability efforts. This concept involves the development and deployment of skills and resources. However, a clear framework for understanding the dimensions of capacity building for active travel is lacking. Furthermore, most research and findings use cases within a Global North context, constricting implications and transferability to the Global South, especially to African cities. This study responds to the dearth of scholarly work exploring Global South cases and fills a knowledge gap regarding capacity building in the case of active travel. Through a literature review, we examined the dimensions of capacity building that are necessary to improve active travel in selected African countries. We focus on multilevel transportation governance with highlights from five African cities. Our findings suggest that the literature and policies on transport in Africa have key dimensions for capacity building for active travel but lack the introduction of key instruments and strategic pathways to meet these requirements for improved sustainable mobility. We propose a thematic guiding framework that delineates the strategic application of capacity building at three levels of governance. This framework helps integrate capacity building for active travel policies and implementation at the institutional, individual, and environmental levels. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Transportation and Urban Planning)
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