The Impacts of Transportation Sustainability on Higher Education in China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript presents a multilevel model to analyze the influence of “transportation sustainability” on higher education in China. It is an interesting topic. Comments follow.

• The manuscript needs substantial editorial work in most sections, which now makes it difficult to read and understand.
• The main concern is the use of the term “transport sustainability”. The authors use this general term that encompasses various dimensions and within them a variety of variables, to refer to a subset of variables in their work. This is very confusing. The variables that they use are interesting, however, it is not possible to say that they provide a comprehensive view of transport sustainability. It would be better if the authors presented their work as identifying variables that contribute to transport sustainability that have an effect on higher education. Instead of saying that the variables they use “are transport sustainability”. The problem is basically the framework that they have used to present their study.
• On this same line of thought, perhaps instead of focusing their literature review on how “transport sustainability influences higher education”, they should look at literature on the specific variables. For example, public transport and higher education, or public transportation policies and higher education. For sure they will find studies in these areas.
• 67: the authors state their study answers the question “how transportation affects China’s higher education”. This is not exactly what the study is about. Sustainability is a dimension of transport and in this study, there are specific variables that measure it. So, again, confusing.
• The results are combined with the discussion so it is glean how exactly the results fit into answering the questions.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The abstract corresponds to the title of the work. Introduction and literature review according to the requirements of the journal. Some reservations are raised by the obvious thesis of the influence of the development of transport on higher education and the increase in the level of education.The adopted methodology for the implementation of the research seems to be correctly selected and sufficient to carry out the set analysis.    In Table 2 there is no clear description of the meaning of variables, for the reader such information may simplify the understanding and reception of the article. In general, the discussion of the results made correctly with reference to the conducted research. Also the conclusion does not raise any objections, it is coherent and refers to the conducted research. The literature is correctly selected and up-to-date.    

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors presented a very interesting study in this paper. They performed a spatial multilevel analysis of the influence of transportation sustainability on higher education in China. The literature review is good. The authors made great efforts in conducting the case study and interpreting the results. However, after a thorough review, I found some technical comments as well as editorial issues for the authors. In addition, the paper contains some statements that are questionable.

Please find my detailed comments below for your consideration:

1. The paper is very poorly written in English. Although I understand that English is not your first language, manuscript like this is not acceptable. There are too many misuse of words and inaccurate expressions. In addition, many discussions are redundant and repetitive. Professional English proof reading is strongly recommended.
2. The paper lacks of methodological innovation. The methodology as well as the process used in this paper highly overlaps with the Reference #53 “A spatial multilevel analysis of the impacts of housing conditions on county-level life expectancy at birth in China” Even the title reads similar. This is not encouraged and therefore the contribution to the academic is very limited. The originality is very low
3. Throughout the manuscript, many necessary explanations and discussions are missing. See my following comments for details
4. Line 10. Change “in” to “during”
5. Line 14. Change “of” to “on”
6. At the very beginning, please provide the definition of “transportation sustainability”. It is a vary abstract definition and needs to be clarified
7. Line 43. “put” is not the correct word
8. The authors need to be responsible for their statements. Line 49, the authors said “Rich research has …” However, only one reference is provided. This is not scientifically rigorous. You can not say “rich” if there is only one reference
9. Line 62. The authors said “China is a typical and representative case to explore the impacts of transportation sustainability on higher education.” I do not this this statement is appropriate and even correct. Different countries will have different patterns. Not all developing countries share the same relationship. I will only limit this paper to the case study of China
10. Higher education is impacted by many factors. How can you separate the impact of transportation sustainability out? In other words, how can you ensure that the findings of this paper is because of transportation sustainability but not other factors?
11. Line 75. Please provide the full spell of “OECD” since this is the first time you use it
12. There are too many “contributing to” expressions. Can you please find some other ways to express it to avoid frequently usage?
13. Line 85. Change “answer” to “to be answered”
14. Line 87. Delete “design”
15. Line 93 to Line 95. “Building on … into consideration.” This sentence is not correct in grammar. Please revise
16. Line 95. Delete “also”
17. Line 98. “… and selection of sustainable transportation”. Selection of what? Sustainable transportation or sustainable transportation indicators?
18. Line 98 to Line 101. “According to past research … address the research question” This sentence is completely repetitive with previous discussions and can be deleted. No need at all.
19. Line 110. Delete “the”
20. Line 115. The authors said “Considering the fact that higher education population has higher demand for obtaining driver’s licences and accessing different transportation modes …” This statement is very questionable. How did you make this statement? Do you have any data support for this statement? I would doubt if this statement is true. I cannot see any relationship between the demand for driver licenses and higher education. Please explain
21. I am even not sure if the dependent variables listed in Table 1 are good indicators of transportation sustainability. For example, I would question if the “Proportion of the number of public policies in transportation to the total number of public policies”. Why is only the number of policies matter? Besides the numbers, the contents are also important, but contents are not included. The dependent variables overall is not persuasive enough
22. Table 1. When discussing factor “PE”, why is only public transportation considered? I think transportation sustainability includes both public transportation and private vehicle. Why is personal vehicle not considered?
23. Line 140. Change “level” to “levels”
24. Line 146. Why is “Expenditure” capitalized?
25. Table 1. Factor “FR”. Why is freight shipment by rail considered? What about other types of freight shipment, e.g. highway, ship? They also represent transportation sustainability to some extent. Why are they excluded?
26. Line 149. Why can FR decrease expenditure and to increase revenue in local operators and governments of transportation systems? I do not see any logical relationship
27. Table 1. While other variables are “per capital”, why is VR per area?
28. Table 1. RL and VR are somehow correlated, aren’t they? RL is the total urban roads length per capita, and VR is the total length of routes, which should include urban road length. Why are both of them included?
29. Line 206. The authors mentioned that they used “urbanization”. However, I do not see in the following analyses where and how you applied urbanization. Please explain.
30. Line 222. Why do they obey normal distribution? Can you further elaborate?
31. Line 236. Change “t” to “at”
32. Line 244. A better way (maybe a table) is needed when describing various models.
33. Since you have identified those variables in Table 1, what is the point of applying those different models? Why not directly apply Model 9, which includes all variables? Some discussions of necessity are needed. Please add
34. More descriptions on the input data is needed. What does the input data look like? All variables associated each of the counties in China?
35. Line 271. The authors said “except to TM, other determinants are positively related to HEA”. The negative relationship of TM means that the higher number of transportation modes, the lower education level? Why is this the case?
36. Line 273. “… NE, TM and RE are insignificant statistically.” What do these insignificant variable indicate? How do you deal with it?
37. Why are some variables insignificant in certain models but significant in others? For example, FR is insignificant in Model 3 but significant in Model 9. What does this indicate? Please explain.
38. Line 274. The authors said “the results of Pearson correlation coefficients also indicate that collinearity is not an important challenge for our analysis.” Well, I do not agree with the authors in this questionable statement. Collinearity is always an issue in statistical analysis. You need to face it and respect to the fact that collinearity exists. You cannot say it is not an important challenge. Corresponding discussions need to be revised
39. Line 287 to Line 289. “Model 7 examined … includes all the variables” These sentences can be completely deleted. Repetitive with discussions from Line 249 to Line 251
40. Line 290. Why after including the county-level socioeconomic indicators, the variables of PE, TM and RL are no longer significant? What does this indicate? Can you explain using examples?
41. There is no background on how you define SDI 1 to SDI 5, which is necessary to the paper. Please add
42. Line 298 to Line 302. “The significant provincial-level effects … and higher education attainment.” This is a very long and confusing sentence that is hard to follow. Please rephrase to include readability
43. Line 305. Change “the study” to “studying”
44. Line 307. “politics dimension has always maintained a significant and strong impact in models” This statement is not correct. Politics include both PT and TL. You need to specify PT, not TL. TL is insignificant. Please be careful in making statements
45. Line 322. “we speculate that politics factor is also a strongly potential one.” This is inappropriate. Never use words like “speculate” in the paper to express your subjective opinions. You need to follow the results and facts, not something out of your mind.
46. Table 3. It is not a good presentation of the results of Model 2 to 6. It confuses the readers because you combined the results of 5 models in one column. Please revise
47. Line 426. Change “in clude” to “include”
48. Line 453. I do not understand what the authors wrote in Funding section.

Hope my comments can help you further improve your manuscript.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Dear authors,

first of all, I would like to point out that you chose an interesting topic. Unfortunately, I cannot give you a positive review of your manuscript, because I noticed too many gaps in it, but I will try to give you my comments and suggestions. Hopefully, you will be able to improve it and submit it once more.

Best regards.

 

The abstract

The abstract is confused and not structured. It is not clear what you mean by sustainability and there are various language mistakes.

Introduction

Line 31: I suggest you give a definition of what you mean by »sustainability« already in the introduction. In this way, it will be easier for the reader to follow your line of reasoning.

Line 33: to understanding;

Line 34: developMENT;

Line 42 and others throughout this part: put the reference near the authors' surname.

Line 43: you can DEVELOP an algorithm, but not PUT. Also which algorithm? You state here »...and used them to put the algorithm«, but you did not explain earlier what algorithm is it.

Line 44: Mahdinia et al. is the same study of the previous sentence? Please, put the reference.

Subdivisions – maybe subcategories.

Line 46-48: »...be designed towards a more sustainable consideration«. It is not clear. Please, reformulate the sentence.

Also, till this moment only 3 studies are cited and only 1 of these is related to some indicators.

Line 49-58: This part is not needed here and it does not link to the rest of the intro. Put it rather in the methods.

Literature review

Overall the literature review is poor and has a lot of repetitions (lines 81-82, lines 99-101).

Line 75: the acronym OECD is not defined, nor reference is given.

Line 77: the reference for Mahdinia et al. is missing.

Lines 84-87: this part is not clear.

Line 89: with indicator design you mean the creation of a NEW indicator, or the selection of particular indicators?

Line 90: rather than rich, I suggest using "huge number, great amount, ..."

Line 93: references are missing.

Line 103 and throughout the text: labour is not correct, probably better to use work or job.

Lines 107-108: government's transportation governance ability sounds a bit strange. Maybe management or another more appropriate term.

Methods – data and variables

The main issue that I have in this part is that it is not well structured, no data are presented and for the recalled indicators, no ranges are given. Everything is too general.

Methods – method

Line 211: I suggest adding a brief explanation of what a spatial multilevel analysis is.

Line 212-213: Please, define Moran's index and Local Moran's index.

Line 222: rather than obey, I suggest you use "to follow".

Line 235: are betas the same coefficients as in the previous formula, or are they different? This should be better explained here.

Line 243: the study – which study? Yours or [53]?

Lines 246-256: this part is too general to be in the methodological section. How are these models? Which variables do they use? Which formulas do they apply? When reading, I expect to have a description of the models implemented. Also: are these models that you developed or that you kept from previous studies and applied to your research?

Results

Lines 287-293: this part is not clear.

In general throughout the manuscript: there are a lot of acronyms. Maybe it could be useful to add a legend with the same. Extensive editing of the English language is needed. The format of the references should be checked.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors' efforts to address the reviewers' comments are appreciated. However, important  sissues still remain.

• The authors have a problem with the use of the term "transport sustainability". They use it like if it was one uni-dimensional thing, like traffic, for example. Transport sustainability is complex. The authors need to revise the document and check the sentences where they use the term, to make sure it is being used appropriately. A perfect example is the first sentence of the abstract where they say "Improving transport sustainability acts as a means … contributing to the development … and higher education.". What dimension and what variables about transport sustainability are they referring to?  For example, do you improve environmental transport sustainability and higher education increases? That doesn't make sense. Specifics on what dimensions of sustainability and what variables they are using for each, is key from the beginning of the manuscript. Another reviewer pointed to this, and it has not been resolved. The framework needs to be properly defined to avoid confusion and incorrect statements.
• The authors say in the response to the reviewer's comments that they added a literature review on how some of their chosen variables affected higher education. They addressed briefly public transportation. How about the rest of the variables they used? Do they even affect education? For example, freight shipment per capita? Is there any evidence of the effects of this variable on higher education?
• The use of the term "labour" was pointed out by another reviewer and it is still used throughout the manuscript.
• 82: what algorithm are you referring to? This is later clarified, but you do not bring this up assuming the reader knows.
• The manuscript still requires substantial editorial work.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Thanks for the authors taking time addressing my comments. I think the manuscript quality is improved as a result. Why an author is added and the added author is corresponding author? If the author made contributions to the paper, he should be added in the original submission. How does this happen?

Author Response

Dear reviewer,   Thank you very much for your kind help. You gave us a lot of valuable comments. We also addressed all your comments point-by-point. In this version, we do the proofreading job again. We hope this version can meet the quality requirements.    According to your question, we added a new author due to the following two reasons:   1) The newly added author (Prof. Jian Xu) has substantial contributions to the manuscript. Prof. Jian xu belongs to the key team member in our research team. He contributes a lot to the contextualization and results discussion of the draft of this paper. In detail, he works extensively on conceptualization, writing—review and editing and formal analysis. After we receive the revision request, Prof. Xu does contribute extensively to the revision. Over 70% of revision working was done by Prof. Xu. At the beginning, Prof. Jian xu was not listed as a co-author, because he will be extremely busy and will not be available for further revision;   2) Unluckily, our previous corresponding author is sick and cannot work on this revision anymore. Therefore, Prof. Jian xu has to cancel other academic activities and works on the revision, together with Prof Zu.    Building on the contributions of Prof. Jian Xu, Prof. Kang Cao and Prof. Daqing Zu both agree to add Prof. Jian Xu as the new author and modify the corresponding author.    Thank you again for your understanding and help. Your timely support does contribute to this paper and our acedmic journey.    All the best!

 

Reviewer 4 Report

Dear authors,

I would really like to thank you for the efforts you put in addressing all my comments and suggestions. I think you did a great job and I am positively impressed. I do not have further remarks. 

All the best!

Author Response

Dear reviewer, I would really like to show our sincere thanks for your comments and suggestions. Your kind help does contribute to improving our paper. We are glad that this paper meets the quality requirements. All the best.