Becky P Y Loo

The University of Hong Kong | HKU · Department of Geography

Social segregation is a challenge intensified by rapid urbanisation. Using mobility data, researchers have widened the scope of analysis from static residential segregation patterns to experienced segregation in activity space. Despite such progress, we have yet to decipher how social segregation evolves with the urban development process. The diff...

Background The processes of transport decarbonisation are complicated. In this paper, we adopt the Activity-Modal Share-Energy Intensity-Carbon Intensity of Fuel (ASIF) approach and propose a conceptual framework on the direct and indirect impact of COVID-19 on transport CO2 emissions. In the Chinese context, changes of carbon emissions associated...

This paper proposes a holistic framework to identify public transport disadvantaged areas in terms of the level of services (LOS), area-based accessibility, and facility-based accessibility by employing the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) dataset. The framework considers the spatial and temporal levels of transit services, the spatial sep...

Worldwide, people living in mega cities are increasingly dependent on metro systems. Their travel experience, however, has not been closely examined. In particular, travel time estimates often do not consider in-station time, which can be significant, especially at large interchange stations with multiple exits and platforms. This study represents...

Few studies have investigated how older people’s daily activities and characteristics of the surrounding urban environment affect their emotions and daily satisfaction. This study fills the research gap by using a paper-based survey and a smartphone ecological momentary assessment (EMA) application (with GPS tracking and pop-up surveys about activi...

This study proposes a method for measuring travel delays caused by traffic crashes based on taxi GPS data and other open-source spatial data. Travel delays caused by traffic crashes are quantified according to the difference between the post-crash and typical travel speeds on affected road segments. Based on multiple sources of data in Hong Kong, w...

Urban vibrancy can be captured by people’s out-of-home mobility. It is an essential indicator of the ‘liveliness’ of cities. Nowadays, many cities, however, are suffering from air pollution, which is harmful to human health. As such, health authorities are advising people, especially vulnerable groups with respiratory or other chronic diseases, to...

With an increasingly urbanized world, there is an urgent need to examine how cities may evolve and achieve sustainability. This paper systematically looks at the Greater Bay Area (GBA) and the Poyang Lake Region (PLR) in China to examine the spatial processes for insights into cities and urbanization, balancing the environmental and socio‐economic...

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted homeworking to become a ‘new normal’. Consequently, the effects of various homeworking-related housing attributes on housing prices may be changed. However, few studies have explicitly examined if and how the practice of homeworking changes the associations between these particular housing attributes and housing p...

Data are essential for planning walkable cities that are comfortable, convenient and safe to pedestrians. Yet, in contrast to massive vehicular traffic data, data on pedestrian traffic have not been systematically collected by municipal governments. Nowadays, geospatial big data provide rich information related to human activities and, hence, can c...

While numerous studies have been done to examine the general trend of urban mobility during COVID-19, there is not enough research on changes in pedestrian behavioural characteristics and crowd dynamics in public space. Understanding and monitoring such changes are critical for the better management and design of public open space in case of future...

Transport stress is a pervasive phenomenon in big cities, and can lead to various negative impacts on health and well-being. However, the associated stressors have not been clearly understood. This study proposes a people-environment framework, which incorporates personal stressors, environmental stressors, and travel impedance to capture the “tota...

Traffic noise is a growing threat to the urban population. Prolonged exposure to traffic noise has been linked to negative health consequences such as annoyance, sleep disturbances and cardiovascular diseases. While electric vehicles are known to have lower noise profiles, the impacts of electric mobility on traffic noise, especially for electrifie...

A longstanding line of research in urban studies explores how cities can be understood through their appearance. However, what remains unclear is to what extent urban dwellers' everyday life can be explained by the visual clues of the urban environment. In this paper, we address this question by applying a computer vision model to 27 million street...

The spatial mismatch between jobs and housing in cities creates long daily travels that exacerbate climate change, air pollution, and traffic congestion. Yet, not enough research on occupational differences has been done. This study first applies the Hidden Markov Mixture Model (H3M) to model travel patterns for different occupation groups in Hong...

Introduction This study sets out to provide scientific evidence on the spatial risk for the formation of a superspreading environment. Methods Focusing on six common types of urban facilities (bars, cinemas, gyms and fitness centers, places of worship, public libraries and shopping malls), it first tests whether visitors' mobility characteristics...

In road safety research, bus crashes are particularly noteworthy because of the large number of bus passengers involved and the challenge that it puts to the road network (with the closure of multiple lanes or entire roads for hours) and the public health care system (with multiple injuries that need to be dispatched to public hospitals within a sh...

Research on the relationship between space and social interaction has focused on indoor spaces, such as museums and offices. However, empirical evidence on the connection between the intensity of social interaction and outdoor public spaces is still lacking. Applying machine learning algorithms to a 9-hour time-lapse video of an urban park, we deci...

Background: Studies on the health effects of heat are particularly limited in Texas, the U.S. state with the top ten highest number of annual heat-related deaths per capita from 2018 to 2020. This study aims to assess the effects of heat on all-cause and cause-specific mortality in 12 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) across Texas from 1990 to...

Construction is a major source of carbon emissions. Moreover, it faces various other sustainability challenges, such as construction waste, construction noise, vehicular traffic near construction sites, dust and other air and water pollutants, and safety and well-being of construction workers. Poorly designed and constructed buildings will continue...

Demand responsive transit (DRT) echoes the new requirements of modern travel on flexibility and carbon reduction, as well as achieving a better match between demand and supply. However, many DRTs still failed. An important step named adaptability analysis helps to understand the context, desirability, and feasibility of introducing DRT. An adaptabi...

Estimated time of arrival (ETA) is essential to enable various intelligent transportation services and reduce passenger waiting time. Estimating the time of arrival of public transport in a highly dynamic and uncertain transportation system could be challenging. Many indirect factors beyond the remaining travel distance could dramatically deviate t...

This research aims to explore the feasibility of replacing fixed route transit (FRT) with route deviation demand responsive transit (RdDRT) in low passenger density areas. A multi-agent-based simulation model on AnyLogic platform is designed to assess the performance of RdDRT and FRT under different scenarios. This study also develops a vehicle ope...

Conventional cast in-situ, precast and prefabricated construction are construction methodologies with increasing construction modularity. Construction methodologies and modularity, in turn, are determinants of sustainability onsite. This paper analyses 38 construction projects in Hong Kong, spanning a substantial period of twenty years for a system...

Life, including working style and travel behaviour, has been severely disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The unprecedented number of work-from-home (WFH) employees after the outbreak of COVID-19 has attracted much scholarly attention. As it is generally believed that WFH arrangements are not ephemeral, it is imperative to study the impacts of WFH...

We simulated the COVID-19 Omicron spread in Hong Kong, China, by building a novel three-dimensional (3D) agent-based model that incorporates its vertically expanded, hyperdense urban environment. The model examined the effectiveness of the 'zero-COVID' interventions (i.e., Compulsory Universal Testing (CUT) and citywide lockdown) that were for deba...

The urban population are increasingly suffering from rising transport costs, worsening air quality, longer commuting time, and traffic congestion. Although much scholarly attention has focused on modeling urban traffic congestion, news contents about traffic jam have rarely been examined systematically. This study selects 12 large metropolitan citi...

Introduction: Motor-vehicle crashes at signalized intersections are a significant traffic safety problem. To address this problem, many Asian cities have installed signal countdown displays at signalized intersections, aiming to assist drivers to make correct decisions in response to traffic signals. Method: In this study, we assessed the short-...

Despite unprecedented progress in developing COVID-19 vaccines, global vaccination levels needed to reach herd immunity remain a distant target, while new variants keep emerging. Obtaining near universal vaccine uptake relies on understanding and addressing vaccine resistance. Simple questions about vaccine acceptance however ignore that the vaccin...

Traffic congestion has been a persistent problem in cities globally. Theoretically, commuting-related congestion can be relieved by promoting working from home (WFH). Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, WFH arrangement has been encouraged or enforced to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. Under these circumstances, it was reported that traffic congestion...

Fifteen cities across the world have been selected to investigate the public health co-benefits of PM2.5 reduction, during a period when various non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) were adopted in the COVID-19 pandemic. Through applying a public health model, AirQ+, substantial spatial variations of global public health co-benefits were identif...

Aging in place enables seniors to live at home and in their familiar neighborhoods as long as their health conditions allow. To date, few efforts have been made to examine the linkage between the physical and social aspects of the neighborhood environment, the activity-travel patterns, and their overall effects on life satisfaction. Therefore, this...

Background Despite substantial investment in step-free access at UK railway stations, persons with reduced mobility (PRMs) continue to travel less than their able-bodied counterparts and little is known about the value of step-free access. This research examines the benefits of step-free access and its relationship with rail usage among PRMs, and t...

Ongoing efforts among cities to reinvigorate streets have encouraged innovations in using smart data to understand pedestrian activities. Empowered by advanced algorithms and computation power, data from smartphone applications, GPS devices, video cameras, and other forms of sensors can help better understand and promote street life and pedestrian...

Bus bunching can deteriorate bus service quality and jeopardise the effectiveness of public transit in promoting sustainable urban transport. This study applies artificial intelligence (AI) techniques in visual analytics to examine the spatiotemporal characteristics of bus bunching from a stop-based perspective. A total of 25 405 real-time traffic...

Electric mobility has the potential to spearhead transport decarbonisation. While there is a vast literature on the potential benefits of electric vehicles (EVs) towards sustainability and national policies of EV adoption, regional and local polices are often overlooked. Hence, this paper aims to capture lessons learned from two bay areas, namely t...

Existing transit-oriented-development (TOD) classification studies primarily focus on the static characteristics around transit stations to measure the built environment's density, diversity, and design. As a community development model, time-variant variables, dynamic human activities throughout different times of the day and week matter in furthe...

Although a large body of research has advanced our understanding of the definition, characteristics, and domains of smart cities at a high level of abstraction, relatively little attention has been given to varying smart city practices. This study analyses the contents and progress of 2,080 smart city pilot projects across 136 sampled smart cities...

This study seeks to understand children’s road-crossing decision-making. A range of factors affect children’s judgments, including 1) traffic characteristics, 2) travel behaviour, 3) neuropsychological characteristics and 4) other relevant individual, parental and household factors. The critical factors associated with the road-crossing judgments o...

Identifying congested areas for implementing road pricing is a complicated task, especially as traffic speed and other census data may not be readily available before a detailed feasibility study is commissioned. In this study, we introduce a spatial approach to identify areas with road traffic congestion within cities. The results obtained are val...

Transport demand management (TDM), an approach different from the previously supply-oriented methods of alleviating traffic congestion, has been put into practice in countries across the world during the past decades. As congestion continues to worsen in big cities, it is important to summarize the categories, measures, and effects of commonly impl...

Public transport is a core component of sustainable transport. Indeed, public transport has wide implications for the environment. This chapter first provides a comprehensive evaluation of the potential environmental benefits contributed by public transport, including greenhouse gas reduction, air quality improvement and climate change mitigation....

Despite a series of transport decarbonisation initiatives, transport carbon emissions have been growing in both absolute and relative terms since 1990, and this is contributing to climate change. This study scrutinises the decoupling experiences of transport carbon emissions in 16 selected countries, including both developed and developing countrie...

This paper aims to pursue and to strengthen a paradigm shift in transport. It offers a fresh perspective on how the vehicle-oriented paradigm has been translated into specific biased practices and priorities in transport policy and research that jeopardized walkability. Then, it examines the transformational role of walking in the sustainable urban...

With rapid road infrastructure development in the past century, the role of water passenger transport has diminished drastically worldwide. A lot of ferry services in coastal cities have become financially unviable. However, water transport has huge potentials in promoting transport sustainability and resilience. This paper proposes a holistic fram...

COVID-19 reaffirms the vital role of superspreaders in a pandemic. We propose to broaden the research on superspreaders through integrating human mobility data and geographical factors to identify superspreading environment. Six types of popular public facilities were selected: bars, shopping centres, karaoke/cinemas, mega shopping malls, public li...

With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), there has been a proliferation of urban studies using big data. Yet, another type of urban research innovations that involve interdisciplinary thinking and methods remains underdeveloped. This paper represents an attempt to adopt a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) toolbox developed in Computer Science fo...

This chapter delves deeper into the implications of generational changes on sustainable transport (i.e. social, economic and environment) by examining three generation groups - Pre-war Generations, Baby Boomers and Generation X, and Millennials. Environmentally, the Millennials tend to have lower transport energy use as they are more adapted to pub...

Background Geriatric depression is a growing public health issue worldwide. This study aims at identifying the relevant neighbourhood attributes, separate from the individual-level characteristics, that are related to the onset of depressive disorders among the geriatric population. Methods This study adopts a structural equation modelling (SEM) a...

Applying a novel approach based on the fusion of social media data, land use data and other information, this paper examines the spatio-temporal patterns of public responses towards urban flooding in Nanjing city during July 1–21, 2016. Spatially, “pockets” of high public concern towards urban flooding were found in areas with low altitude, high pe...

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected various aspects of life, at different levels and in different countries on almost every continent. In response, many countries have closed their borders and imposed lockdown policies, possibly bringing benefits to people’s health with significantly less emission from air pollutants. Currently, most studie...

Many studies have explored the influence of individual and neighbourhood factors on active school travel (AST), this novel study is the first to examine how AST and formal extracurricular activities are associated with children’s active lifestyles. The aims of this study were to (a) create an active lifestyle variable (ALIFE) measured in terms of t...

This paper examines the prevalence of active travel to school and the associated determinants for Hong Kong schoolchildren aged 5–12. Data were collected through questionnaire surveys, which provided information relating to children’s travel characteristics for their journeys to school and personal/household socio-demographic characteristics. Secon...

This study examines the transport decoupling pathways of the 16 selected countries from 1990 to 2015. Transport carbon emissions (i.e. decarbonisation) and road traffic fatalities (i.e. defatalisation) have been chosen as proxies of environmental and social decoupling respectively. Real GNI in purchasing power parity (based to 2011) is used to refl...

With more high-speed railway (HSR) being built worldwide, its better integration into the ‘urban fabric’ is imperative. Focusing on the travel experience, this paper presents an analysis of the intermodal integration of HSR with the local public transport system at the newly opened HSR station in Hong Kong. A participatory survey was conducted with...

Addressing fatalities on road is a major concern in most countries in the world. South-East Asian countries are no exception. In Indonesia, three persons die on road every hour. Understanding where and how road traffic crashes happen is imperative before the most efficient countermeasures can be devised and implemented. In this paper, three tools—h...

Applying a novel approach based on the vast city-related information in the Internet, this paper probes into the hierarchy of Chinese cities in virtual space by developing a theoretical analysis framework and analyzing the amount of coverage that a city received in the Internet news media (attribute data) and the distance decay effect in Internet s...

This study explores how short-term, school-based cycling training programs can promote cycling among schoolchildren in the high-density city of Hong Kong. The schoolchildren’s progression in cycling ability was monitored closely by professional cycling coaches. Fifty-two children (aged 8–17) at three schools participated. Before and after data on t...

The availability of wireless networks and the pervasive use of mobile ICT devices have allowed passengers to conduct various e-activities during journeys. These various e-activities, in turn, may change people's conventional perception of travel time from being “wasteful” and “unproductive,” to “desirable” and giving rise to satisfaction. Journeys...

In consumer surveys, more information per response regarding preferences of alternatives may be obtained if individuals are asked to rank alternatives instead of being asked to select only the most-preferred alternative. However, the latter method continues to be the common method of preference elicitation. This is because of the belief that rankin...

Smart cities are designed to use data to optimize resources, maintain sustainability, and improve people’s quality of life. While many urban technologies are employed to make cities “smart,” one constellation of technologies has been less examined in the academic literature—digital maps and the spatial data infrastructure. This paper is an attempt...

Conservation education can be fostered through formal and informal learning. An increasing number of zoological facilities with conservation missions have provided experiential learning venues characterized by self-directed, self-motivated and diversified learning experience integrated with fun and entertainment. In this paper, we develop an emotio...

In this paper, the focus is on examining children's extra-curricular activities in a high density urban East Asian environment, specifically Hong Kong. The paper offers a framework to understand children's extra-curricular activities time allocation and active travel participation. Three variables of interest are considered: residential location ch...

In this paper, a holistic strategy of the “Five Transformations” is introduced to offer a comprehensive and synergetic theory to tackle various daunting challenges faced by the transport sector and ultimately pave the way to sustainable transport. The Five Transformations span across city development, the economy, vehicle technology, modal-split an...

Rapid urbanization has brought the needs to minimize negative transport externalities in cities to the forefront. The development of metros is a response to urban sustainability challenges, but the construction of underground infrastructure often requires massive excavation and long construction time, disrupts the economy and people’s everyday livi...

Everyday living is supported by an array of services provided by a complex local infrastructure nexus that is financed and funded by the public, private and third sectors. The on-going debate on the financialization of infrastructure has neglected to explore the provision of local infrastructure in places experiencing infrastructural exclusion. Thi...

The widespread adoption of information and communication technology has facilitated frequent e-activities in people’s daily life. From the perspective of individual’s time use on e-working and e-shopping at home, this paper aims to enhance our understanding of the function of home beyond a living space for family life. Using a household survey of 6...

Despite the well-established benefits of active transport (AT) (walking and bicycling), the rate of AT is generally decreasing across the globe. To reverse this trend, AT needs to be promoted by governments worldwide with a strategic framework to guide national AT policy formulation and administration. With a nine-component strategic framework, the...

Highly advanced information and communication technologies have reshaped the common ways urban residents interact with each other. With the widespread use of online social networking websites, research interest in the evolving spatial concepts (such as distance) in new digital age has grown exponentially. Data collected by Sina microbloggers from a...

This book discusses various transport sustainability issues from the perspective of developing countries, exploring key issues, problems and potential solutions for improving transport sustainability in China. It first reviews the current transport sustainability baselines in the three key dimensions of environmental, economic and social sustainabi...