This study used metro smart-card data from Wuhan, China, and explored the impact of the built environment on the metro ridership and station travel distance of elderly people using geographically weighted regression (GWR). First, our results show that elderly ridership at transfer stations is significantly higher than that at non-transfer stations. The building floor area ratio and the number of commercial facilities positively impact elderly ridership, while the number of road intersections and general hospitals has the opposite impact, of which factors show significant heterogeneity. Second, our results show that the average travel distance of terminal stations is significantly higher than that of non-terminal stations, and the average travel distance of non-transfer stations is higher than that of transfer stations. The distance of stations from the subcenter and building volume ratio have a positive effect, while station opening time and betweenness centrality have a negative effect. Our findings may provide insights for the optimization of land use in the built environment of age-friendly metros, help in the formulation of relevant policies to enhance elderly mobility, and provide a reference for other similar cities.

Urban planning/management is a complex process requiring multidisciplinary technical support and public approval. With the rapid development of information and communication technology, e-participation has brought unprecedented opportunities for urban planning and management in the sense that it potentially represents more efficiently and effectively the interests of different citizens. Nevertheless, the availability of new technologies does not guarantee success. In China, many local planning agencies began with enthusiastic ideas and investments but ended up with disappointment and frustration. Therefore, it is of critical importance to understand the general interest of the public to have access to and use information and communication technologies (ICT) in urban planning processes. This study develops a Stated Preference (SP) experiment to measure citizen’s preferences and intentions to use modern ICT media in urban planning processes. The results show that the intention to participate in urban planning processes using different ICT tools differs by socio-demographic variables. The research findings provide relevant information about the effects of different communication strategies on citizen engagement.

The bus stop layout and route deployment may influence the efficiency of bus services. Evaluating the supply of bus service requires the consideration of demand from various urban activities, such as residential and job-related activities. Although various evaluation methods have been explored from different perspectives, it remains a challenging issue. This study proposes a spatial statistical approach by comparing the density of the potential demand and supply of bus services at bus stops. The potential demand takes jobs-housing locations into account, and the supply of bus services considers bus stops and their associated total number of daily bus arrivals. The kernel density estimation (KDE) and spatial autocorrelation analyses are employed to investigate the coupling relationship between the demand and supply densities at global and local scales. A coupling degree index (CDI) is constructed to standardize the measurement of demand-supply balance. A case study in Wuhan, China demonstrated that: (1) the spatial distribution of bus stops is reasonable at global level, (2) Seriously unbalanced locations for bus services have been detected at several stops. Related adjustments that can improve these defects are highly recommended.

The fusion of a monocular camera and an inertial sensor (i.e., IMU) can help the autonomous navigation ability of a mobile robot, as well as obtain the environmental information. However, it is difficult to adapt the fusion for dynamic objects. Although several recent studies have tracked or even retrieved simple structural information about dynamic objects, there is no reported visual-inertial sensing research for unknown rotating objects, especially for those that are not surrounded by any static environmental visual feature. In fact, such rotating objects indeed represent a class of real and challenging scenarios, e.g., space debris. This letter discusses the monocular visual-inertial sensing of unknown rotating objects. Our first contribution is the comprehensive nonlinear observability analyses. We theoretically prove that the monocular visual-inertial sensing possesses favourable observability properties with respect to rotating objects, and we derive all observable and unobservable modes for the cases with unknown gravity and without gravity. The second contribution of this letter is a validation case study, i.e., the metric 3D reconstruction of space debris by means of a micro space robot. We propose a practical inertial sensor-assisted Structure from Motion strategy that can perceive rotating space debris. The experiment demonstrates that by using only the onboard monocular camera and IMU, the robot can obtain sufficient information about the space debris, such as all rotation parameters and even a dense point cloud model with absolute metric scale information. This case study confirms our theoretical results.

Community identity generates a sense of community belonging, which in turn influences public participation. Based on the conceptual model of the theory of planned behavior and three elements of community identity, the study constructs a structural equation model (SEM) to explore the pathways that how community identity affects participation attitudes, subjective norms of participation, perceived behavioral control of participation, participation willingness, and participation behavior. The result indicates that participation willingness has a significant positive impact on participation behavior. Participation attitude, participation subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control over participation interact with each other, influencing participation willingness and participation behavior. Overall, public participation presents different in different kind of communities. At the end of the article, the author analyzes the potential data errors in the research and summarizes future research work, in order to conduct a more in-depth and comprehensive analysis of the impact of community identity on public participation.