Conference Agenda

The transportation infrastructure plays a crucial role in urban formation and evolution. High-speed rail (HSR) enables residents to travel at higher speeds and access amenities in other cities more conveniently. In this paper, we examine the urban amenity sharing caused by the HSR through a novel city-pair analysis strategy. We infer the changes of urban amenities based on housing prices and wage levels, because the sum of amenity and wage minus housing price should be roughly equal in each location as illustrated by the Rosen-Roback spatial equilibrium model. Employing the difference-in-difference approach, we find that once two cities in a city pair were connected by HSR, the housing price gap narrowed by approximately 2% on average, while the inter-city wage difference increased, implying a regional convergence in quality of life due to urban amenity sharing. Responses to the HSR treatment are heterogeneous with regard to the development stage of the HSR network, the regions and geographical distance of connected cities, as well as the inter-city disparities in existing transportation conditions and socioeconomic development. The results suggest that the route layout of HSR should consider not only economic connections but also urban amenity sharing among node cities, so as to improve the quality of life for residents in low-amenity cities and alleviate economic and social inequality among cities.

COVID-19 has transformed the way people live and work, and the perception toward quietness. Using the outbreak of COVID-19 in Singapore as a quasi-natural experiment, we investimgate tenants’ changing behaviroual responses to traffic noise in the rental housing market, using 46,980 transaction records between 2006 and 2022. By constructing threshold zones by distance to major roads, we first identify treatment vs. control groups in exposure to traffic noise. Second, our difference-in-differences (DiD) estimates show that traffic noise decreases housing rents by 3.8% in the immediate first year after the pandemic outbreak (January – December 2020). The estimate rockets to 12.7% in the subsequent year (January 2021 to March 2022), which is equivalent to 186.7 US dollars per month. Our results are robust to parallel trend analysis, permutation placebo tests, and robustness tests using alternative distance thresthods or linear distance to the nearest major road. Third, we adopt a machine learning text analysis of 10,425 rental housing advertisements, showing that tennats’ preference for quietness significantly increases during this time period. The new work-from-home business model and rising traffic from delivery services can partially explain this pattern. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper using large volume of transaction records to quantify the price of quietness that people are willing to pay in the COVID-19 context. Our results have policy implications on the interaction between urban planning and human wellbeing, and shed light on the post-pandemic urban design in promoting health living.

This research aims to examine gentrification, displacement and relocation of the poor in Hong Kong by employing the population census data from 2006 to 2021. Gentrification over time is measured by key indicators which include changes in income, rent and educational attainment. Increasing unaffordability in metropolitan areas raises concerns over gentrification and displacement of the poor incumbent residents. The results present spatial distributions of gentrification, displacement pressure and relocation of the poor in this severely unaffordable city.

The paper also explores the effects of neighbourhood characteristics and recent transportation development on the above neighbourhood changes. TPUs with higher proportion of tenants are more likely to lose poor households while newly built MTR stations attract the poor to move in. Timely and targeted policies on social welfare and housing supply are suggested to be implemented to ease the plights of the poor who currently live under gentrification and/or displacement pressure and reduce the likelihood of housing-led poverty.

In the era of e-mobility, promoting electric vehicle (EV) usage is considered a policy worth incorporating into a government’s agenda. While accessibility has been broadly recognized as important for user EV adoption intention, few studies have considered how accessibility affects public acceptance of EVs. This study measures the objective, perceived and prospective accessibility of public EV charging facilities, investigating how and to what extent this novel set of accessibility measures affects the EV adoption intention of individuals. The data are primarily derived from a recent questionnaire survey of driving licence holders in Hong Kong administered to both EV owners and non-EV owners. Objective accessibility is measured by the number of (population-weighted) Tesla and standard chargers publicly available within five minutes walking distance of an individual’s residential district; subjective (i.e., perceived and prospective) accessibility is measured by four Likert-scale questions. The results show that objective accessibility significantly and substantially influences an individual’s EV purchase intention. Meanwhile, both perceived and prospective accessibility are highly significant for the adoption intention of non-EV owners. We also observe significant effects for perceived and prospective driving range, environmental consciousness and prior experience with EVs. This study provides a valuable reference for the impact of the accessibility of public EV chargers on EV adoption in the context of a high-density Asian city. Based on the findings, we propose various policy recommendations that integrate accessibility planning strategies into EV promotion in cities that aspire to expand e-mobility.