Simon A. Andrew

Transportation-disadvantaged (TD) populations, including many older adults and people with disabilities, often face mobility barriers linked to fragmented transportation services, limited information about available ride options, and weak coordination across providers. While One-Call/One-Click (1C1C) systems have emerged as solutions to centralize transportation information, support trip planning, and coordinate services across public, nonprofit, and private actors, their capacity to scale remains limited. Using a mixed-methods design, this study examined the institutional arrangements, functional scope, and service scale of 67 operational 1C1C systems to identify systemic barriers to expanding coordinated service access. Quantitative analysis revealed substantial variation in governance, service configurations, costs, and coverage relative to conservative population-based benchmarks, with most systems operating at limited scale. Qualitative interviews with system administrators provide explanatory insight into these patterns, identifying three recurring institutional constraints: funding instability, limited capacity for technology and data integration, and shallow vendor networks for specialized transportation services. The findings indicate that limits to 1C1C performance are rooted in institutional and financial conditions rather than system design. Situating coordinated transportation within the Age-Friendly Cities framework, the study argues that mobility coordination must be treated as durable public infrastructure if equitable, age-friendly mobility is to be achieved at scale.

Food insecurity is not only shaped by behavioral, socioeconomic, and demographic factors but is also determined by an individual’s ability to access food in their community. Analyzing new survey data from a large city located in the southwest USA, this research adds to current dialogues on food insecurity among older adults and individuals with disabilities in economically disadvantaged communities. Using logistic regression, the findings provide nuanced evidence to distinguish between two crucial determinants of food insecurity related to transportation access—the lack of service availability and transportation unaffordability. One-third of respondents missed grocery trips due to a lack of affordable transportation. For individuals who cannot drive or do not own vehicles, access to ride services is critical to overcome exacerbated risks owing to food insecurity compared with those who own personal vehicles. Those relying on community-based ride services are more likely to miss grocery trips due to inadequate services. Our research further provides evidence that inadequate services result in greater food insecurity for specific vulnerable subgroups, such as those with poor health, renters, and those with lower incomes. Our findings highlight the importance of understanding behavioral travel constraints and call for equity-focused improvements in transportation systems to mitigate food access barriers.

Local government managers play a critical role in sustainability and climate adaptation planning, and in relation to land-use policy, but little is known about how managers’ hazard risk concerns influence the implementation of resilience policy or how this relationship may vary across different landscapes and types of hazards. Linking managers’ disaster concerns to their planning choices is particularly relevant to resilience planning for adaptation to climate change, since greenhouse gas emissions are global but the harms produced by climate change are local. Moreover, climate adaptation planning encompasses risks from multiple hazards. For a sample of cities in the state of Florida, USA, we report the findings of empirical analysis of the relationships between local government managers’ hazard-specific climate-related disaster concerns and their resilience-planning priorities for four types of hazards: river flooding, sea-level rise, storm surge and hurricane/tornado winds. Drawing on data from a survey of local disaster managers and policy data on the implementation of adaptation-planning actions, the link between managers’ concerns and plan implementation is identified and compared across communities and across types of hazards. The pooled logit regression results reveal that the differences observed among these hazards persist even after controlling for objective risks and relevant community characteristics. We discuss the nature of the differences across four hazards and explore the implications of the findings for the literature on land use and climate adaptation and for the education of local government managers.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe empirical research intended to gauge the channels of risk information and their perceived effectiveness expressed by Hajj pilgrims in 2013 to better inform risk-reduction strategies at crowded religious events.Design/methodology/approach: To do so, a research team partially funded by the Transportation and Crowd Management Center of Research Excellence from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia conducted face-to-face interviews with 348 Hajj pilgrims in 2013. The semi-structured survey instrument used the Protective Action Decision Model framework to gather information on six pre-decisional variables that influence threat perceptions, stakeholder perceptions and decisions to take protective actions against impending threats.Findings: Results of the multinomial logit regression using the traditional media (i.e. television and radio) as the reference category found support for ease of access, language of choice, gender and age differentials, as factors positively or negatively influencing respondents’ selections of their top three most preferred channels for risk communication materials. Printed materials (i.e. pamphlets and billboards) ranked first followed by smart technologies and outreach activities.Research limitations/implications: The convenience sampling strategy adopted with only four female interviewers compared to 17 male interviewers, limited the number of female respondents to only 47 (13.7 percent) due to cultural restrictions. Interviews were conducted only in English and Arabic, leaving out the preferences of other language speakers.Originality/value: Despite these limitations, this study makes a valuable contribution to theory and practice by highlighting the social and cognitive variables influencing risk communication at Hajj. No studies to date have examined choices and preferences of heterogeneous Hajj pilgrims.

Following the 2015 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak in South Korea, this research aims to examine the structural effect of public health network explaining collaboration effectiveness, which is defined as joint efforts to improve quality of service provision, cost savings, and coordination. We tested the bonding and bridging effects on collaboration effectiveness during the MERS outbreak response by utilizing an institutional collective action framework. The analysis results of 114 organizations responding during the crisis show a significant association between the bonding effect and the effectiveness of collaboration, as well as a positive association between risk communication in disseminating public health information and the effectiveness of collaboration.

Based on the Institutional Collective Action framework, this research tests the impact of two competing hypotheses—bonding and bridging—on enhancing organisational resiliency. The bonding hypothesis posits that organisational resiliency can be achieved if an organisation works closely with others, whereas the bridging hypothesis argues that such a structure places considerable stress on an organisation and advocates for an organisation to position itself as a central actor to gain access to novel resources from a diverse set of entities to achieve resiliency. The paper analyses data gathered from semi‐structured interviews with 44 public, private, and non‐profit organisations serving communities affected by the Great Floods of 2011 in the Thai capital, Bangkok (urban), and in Pathum Thani (suburban) and Ayutthaya (rural) provinces. The findings suggest that: organisational resiliency was associated with the bridging effect; organisations in the rural province were more resilient than those in the suburban and urban centres; and private and non‐governmental organisations generally were more resilient than public sector organisations. The findings highlight the importance of fostering multi‐sector partnerships to enhance organisational resiliency for disaster response.

The nature of emergency preparedness is that problems are seldom immediate and continuous, and effective emergency planning requires the involvement and sustained commitment of multiple organisations and their personnel. It is proposed that the level of participation by local organisations in formal regional planning activities is related to the social position their managers play in local planning networks. Local organisations embedded in bonding structures may choose to be active in regional planning initiatives in order to establish close contacts with others they believe can provide them with valuable planning information. Alternatively, organisations may choose to be more active participants in region-wide planning activities because this role supports their bridging activities by providing them with greater control over information about the activities and resources of the different jurisdictions in the region. These propositions are examined through an analysis of the participation by officials from 73 local governments in two regional committees designed to promote emergency preparedness planning throughout the Dallas–Fort Worth–Denton, Texas, metropolitan area. The analysis provides strong support for the proposition that the organisations in bonding structures in this network have a more active role in the work of these two committees.

Although much has been written about interlocal agreements for the delivery of services, few studies have examined the factors that influence the establishment of different types of multilateral agreements (MLAs). To address this lacuna, the authors draw a distinction between an adaptive and restrictive MLA and seek to understand why local governments enter into one type of arrangement over the other. The authors build our theoretical argument on the basis of previous research that suggests agreements are designed to minimize the uncertainties associated with transaction risk. On the basis of this premise, the author’s general proposition is that the decision to establish an adaptive MLA is shaped by the asset specificity and measurability of the goods and services of the transaction. The authors utilize data on public safety agreements among municipal and county governments in the state of Florida. Findings suggest that local governments are more likely to form an adaptive MLA when goods and services are relatively high in service measurability difficulty and when both high and low asset specificity exit.