Transportation Equity in China: Does Commuting Time Matter?

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for properly addressing my comments.

Reviewer 2 Report

The revised version of the paper can be accepted in the presented form.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Manuscript Number: sustainability- 579822

Title: Transportation equity in China：Does commuting time matter?

Review: This research studies the relationship between urban commuting and social equity perception using data from the China Labor-force Dynamic Survey (2016) and multilevel regression. The results of the models show that commuting time has a negative effect on perceived social equity. However, this effect was only present on commuters by foot or by motorcycle. In addition, income had not a moderating effect on social inequity perception, as was expected according to the commuting paradox hypothesis, except for bikers.

Overall view: in my opinion the interest of the paper is limited given that the results have not real application and the policy recommendations outlined are quite generic and not clearly connected with the methodology and the results obtained. Besides, the paper does not contain any clear contribution in the method applied or the data collection process.

General comments:

Pg 4. It is said that the model applied was order logistic regression. However, there is no explanation of the characteristics of this technique and its differences with traditional multiple regression.

Pg 4. It is nor clear whether the sample available is representative of the population and the sample size is big enough to perform the analysis.

Pg 7, model 2. The significance of the independent variables disappears when the interaction analysis is introduced. I think this effect should be mentioned in the text.

The policy recommendations of the paper are not clearly extracted from the previous analysis. In my opinion, from the results obtain, it is only possible to extract conclusions about the influence of different variables (including commuting time) on social equity perception.

Specific comments:

Pg 6, Line 198. “perceived social equity of medium- and high income” should read of “low- and high income”.

Pg 10, line 296. The word "that" appears twice.

Reviewer 2 Report

The article is focused on the problem of transportation equity evaluation in relation to commuting time in China. The conducted analyses based on data available in the Center for Social Survey. The used data sample can be considered representative. The problem is worth investigating and adjusts to the scientific scope of the given Journal. The main reviewer's suggestions regard to:

-the authors did not provide the definition of transportation equity that is used by them in their analyses

-figure 2 is difficult to read (due to e.g. its size).

-policy recommendations should be more explained. For example, what is the possibility of their implementation in China, how the implementation may be performed, how to asses if the given solutions increase the social equity of citizens.

- conclusions should be extended by adding e.g. what are the possible future research in this field.

Reviewer 3 Report

This is an interesting article and I enjoyed reading it. I have some comments that could help improving the work:

 

The focus of the article is on transportation equity, while content lacks information regarding transportation needs for people with restricted mobility. The authors have briefly pointed this out in their definition of "vertical equity". However, the topic is much broader and more important than just simply mentioning this and needs more discussion and reference. I suggest that the authors improve the introduction section by presenting the other existing studies on transportation needs and studies of people who use wheelchair. There are several example's and references, but the one that comes to my mind is the result of the European project on using open data for improving the accessibility of urban traveling. Please see: OpenStreetMap data quality enrichment through awareness raising and collective action tools—experiences from a European project. Geo-spatial Information Science, 21(3), 234-246. or another study on the same topic:  Crowdsourcing for individual needs—The case of routing and navigation for mobility-impaired persons. European Handbook of Crowdsourced Geographic Information, 325. Figure 2 needs more explanations and discussion so the readers can understand the meaning behind the graphs Table 5 needs to be re-structured, as the current version is using a lot of space (esp. the column 1) The discussion section can be improved by explaining how your work and results is different (or even partly similar) to other studies on this topic. This should lead to the pros and cons (strengths and weaknesses) of your proposed models.