Assessment of Spatial Accessibility to Residential Care Facilities in 2020 in Guangzhou by Small-Scale Residential Community Data

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Major improvements:

1. In general, I highly recommend using a professional language editing service.
2. The abstract needs to be more concise.
3. The introduction section should be broken down into introduction and previous work since most of it describes previous work in the field, which looks well done.
4. The first figure should be an example of what a map showing several residential communities and how it maps to one of the districts in the city, together with the streets and the residential care facilities. Later in the text, a reader could benefit from examples of how different metrics are calculated on the same example of the residential communities and its streets. The same level map should be used later to illustrate the findings. E.g. the reader would like to see examples of streets that have different accessibility to residential care facilities, etc.
5. The placement of figures and tables: a figure/table should be mentioned in a minimum two-sentence paragraph before it is inserted in the text. After the figure/table is inserted it should be explained in the following paragraph. This general practice gives a reader a better overview instead of having to scroll up/down.
6. Did the authors obtain permission to use the data from the listed websites? The use of that data can represent terms and conditions infringement. This should be clarified in-text.
7. Lines 233-234: I suggest researching appropriate terminology such as “beds per 100 elderly” instead of “beds per 100 old people”. If the suggested term is used in the literature, I suggest listing references for this term. Such a measure can be called BP100E, as that would sound more intuitive.
8. Figures should be exported in higher resolution. Even zooming in to 200% doesn’t show the figures clearly – Fig.5(b) BPHOP points are not clearly visible.
9. Figures 5 and 8 should have only map b with an inset map that shows the city center where dense points cover the blue polygons. That would look better than these side by side maps where the one on the left shows the same layer as the one on the right.
10. A reader would benefit from an example of how results in section 3.2 are calculated based on the methodology laid out in section 2.3. Namely, how is the density of old people measured in persons/square km (measurement based on area) calculated for streets (measured in length)? The same goes for BPHOP metric described in section 3.3. The reader needs to see a very clear idea of how these metrics are calculated.
11. Does the maximum difference in accessibility (MDA) depend on the street length? An example of how this metric is calculated would be nice.

Minor improvements:

12. Line 58: the URLs should be in a footnote or references. The same goes for lines 116, 138, 153, 352.
13. Line 24: a numbers->a number
14. Line 34: clarification is needed in text what an internal street is.
15. Line 39: influenced -> affected
16. Line 91: numbers -> a number
17. Line 26: detail->detailed
18. Line 131: needs better wording.
19. Line 133: Subjective language should not be used, stick to the facts. If the data was not obtained for some places, only state the reason objectively.
20. 1 a is not showing any streets.
21. Table 2 should have “Speed (km/h)” in the second row instead of just Speed.
22. Line 155: instead of “through calculating and simulating”, which sounds too vague, I suggest listing the name of the method of forecasting the population. Also, table 1 should say that the population was forecasted for 2020 using that particular method based on 2010, 2017 and 2018 data.
23. Line 171: “Besides, the method is easy to implement” should be removed. It represents emotive language and authors should stick to objective language and stating facts. The same goes for the line 95.
24. Lines 97, 99: colloquial language “Take the central city of Guangzhou as an example…”
25. Line 240: the term “increasing distance” is a pleonasm, “with distance” will suffice. If it were decreasing with “decreasing” distance one would use an antonym of distance and say “decreasing with proximity”
26. Line 246: an absolute number of what?
27. Line 322: “We could find” -> “It was found”.
28. Line 332: “much low” -> very low.
29. Line 348: “mostly streets” -> most streets; enlarge->increases.
30. Line 350: difference->differences.
31. Line 393: we advise->a potential solution is
32. Line 201: spread -> spread out
33. Line 208: what is “the remaining median”?
34. Figure 3: I suggest the following scale: very low, low, medium, high, very high.
35. Line 233: bigger -> higher.
36. Figure 5 captions should say what Fig. 5a is (street scale) and what Fig. 5b is (community scale)
37. Figure 4 should use a more intuitive color ramp.
38. Line 269: correlation -> autocorrelation. Global Moran’s I analyzes spatial autocorrelation.
39. Line 279: are -> and

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

We appreciate that editors and you provided the valuable comments for the improvement of the manuscript. Following your thoughtful suggestions, we have revised the manuscript very carefully. All the revising have been marked in red in the marked-up mode. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Its necessary a better cartography for the results for many reason. All the research don't have a very clear presentation in the map and could be better. In all the maps I recommend you to eliminate the blue color in the river, in some maps distorts the results.

On the one hand, the location map of Guangzhou in China is necessary , because do not all the researcher know where it is.

All the maps should be have a small space where can see the Central city in all the results (like a zoom), since the area where the results and all the information are, is  more important and now it's not possible too see.

The Figure 1, is difficult to see the difference between Districts and Region, specially the name of districts. 

Figures from 4 to 9, could be interesting reduce the number of interval, since in some occasions is too many. Moreover, I recommend checking the color palette used; maybe colors in the same spectrum could be better.

On the other hand, 

It's necessary review literal citation of website inside the text and could be better a new citation and could be the website in the reference space. You can be this in line: 58 and 153.

In the section 2.2 a better explanation is necessary in the information of no data in 4 streets and 12 towns. Why?

In the same section could be necessary an explication about the decision of the values of delimitation of speed. What is it based on?

Line 134 Fig. 1 a or Fig. 1?

Could be interesting an international research of reference in the theme, because the majority are Chinese authors reference.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

We appreciate that editors and you provided the valuable comments for the improvement of the manuscript. Following your thoughtful suggestions, we have revised the manuscript very carefully. All the revising have been marked in red in the marked-up mode. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This manuscript assesses accessibility to residential care facilities at two levels in order to account for internal differences within the street level. This type of research is important for social sustainability and fits the scope of the journal. There are areas that merit further refinement in this manuscript to improve it.

1-The authors should clarify why they are referring to boundary levels that remind the reader of districts as streets. This cognitive inconsistency should be dealt with clearly at the beginning of the manuscript to help the reader not become confused.

2-The authors should expand the Method section, provide more justification and details about the utilized method. That section is currently too short. As examples, they should provide more background of the method and not assume the reader's familiarity with it for granted. Current coverage of the method also does not include how the speed limit of roads is incorporated.

3-Use a different color scheme, preferably monochromatic, for Figure 4.

4-The same comment as above for BPHP of residential communities in Figure 5.

5-This is another comment that might arise from the current paucity of details about the method, but why the accessibility to RCFs is very low in the surrounding city given that the elderly population density is also low in those areas (line 266)?

6-What is the spatial connectivity measure when estimating the Moran's I at the residential community level (points)?

7-Use LISA instead of Anselin Local Moran's I (line 274).

8-You should explain more clearly how relative errors and more importantly cumulative errors are estimated and translated into AP and CB measures.  

Author Response

Dear editor and reviewer,

We appreciate that editors and you provided the valuable comments for the improvement of the manuscript. Following your thoughtful suggestions, we have revised the manuscript very carefully. All the revising have been marked in red in the marked-up mode. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Accept in the current form. That would be great if a final language and style review is done. Congratulations!