Evaluate the impacts of extreme weather and air pollution on urban mobility

The impacts of climate change and air pollution on urban mobility or daily travel have aroused much research attentions in transport studies. Existing studies have typically focused on the impact of either climate change such as extreme weather or air pollution on urban mobility. Not many efforts have been spent to compare the impacts of these two factors and estimate their joint effects, despite their significant practical values in allocating limited public resources to address different challenges. This project is proposed to address these knowledge gaps. The study will comprehensively assess the impacts of temperature and air pollution on human mobilities by different transport modes in Chengdu, a provincial city of China, not only for the availability of the city’s data on weather conditions, air pollution, and daily trip making by various transport means, but also for the city’s great variations in weather conditions and air quality throughout the seasons.

We plan to set up a panel dataset that includes transport demand and travel distances by different transport modes including subway, bus, private car, taxi, ride-hailing, and bike-sharing–coupled with data on weather conditions and air pollution levels. We will first employ non-linear panel distributed lag models to estimate both the contemporaneous and lagged effects of temperature and air pollution on transport demand and travel distances by different transport modes. Furthermore, we will use machine learning-based interactive fixed effects counterfactual and matrix completion estimators to examine the joint effects of temperature and air pollution on urban mobility.

This project will enrich the existing knowledge about the travel behavior impacts of extreme weather and air pollution and contribute to a better understanding about the socioeconomic consequences of climate change. Practically, the outcomes of this project will offer valuable policy recommendations for improving urban mobility management and prioritizing policy interventions to enhance the climate change resilience of urban mobility systems.