Ning Zhang

Improving students’ course satisfaction is conducive to the development of sustainable education. Based on the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) theory and the perceived value theory, this paper constructs an analytical framework of “teacher teaching–students’ psychological transformation–students’ course satisfaction”; puts forward hypotheses; builds models; collects 270 valid questionnaires from current students in universities majoring in economics and management in mainland China; and uses correlation analysis, regression analysis, and mediation test methods to study the influence of the economics and management major teachers’ teaching on students’ course satisfaction. This research shows that (1) teachers’ teaching has a differentiated driving effect on students’ psychology, with the usefulness of teaching content being the key path to enhancing students’ perceived value, teachers’ teaching attitudes and methods being the core means to building trust in a course, and the moderate difficulty of examination driving students’ examination preparation intention, and (2) students’ psychology is the core means for the transformation of course satisfaction, with perceived value directly driving course satisfaction; course trust being the cornerstone of course satisfaction and playing a significant mediating role between teachers’ teaching attitudes and methods and students’ course satisfaction, and students’ examination preparation intention positively promoting course satisfaction and playing a significant mediating role between moderate difficulty of examination and course satisfaction. This study provides some scientific basis for improving course satisfaction and teaching efficiency, enhancing the teaching quality of higher education, and promoting the development of sustainable education.

Safe traffic is an important part of sustainable transportation. Road traffic accidents lead to a large number of casualties and property losses every year. Current research mainly studies some types of traffic accidents and ignores other types of traffic accidents; therefore, taking various types of road traffic accidents as a whole, an overall study of their influencing factors is urgently needed. To improve road traffic safety, taking various types of road traffic accidents as a whole, this paper analyzes the influencing factors and finds out the causative factors of road traffic accidents. A new index system of road traffic accident influencing factors is constructed based on the existing literature and real traffic data, and their subjective weights and objective weights are obtained by the analytic hierarchy process based on the subjective data and the normalization of the actual traffic data for Yizheng City, Yangzhou, China from January 2020 to December 2020, where the subjective weights are the main weights, and comprehensive weights are obtained by the minimum discrimination information principle correcting the subjective weights with the objective weights. Finally, the global weights, their ranks, and their weight differences are obtained. The main findings are as follows: (1) compared with the real traffic data, experts generally overestimate the impact of road factors on traffic accidents and underestimate the impact of human factors on traffic accidents; (2) in the first-level, human factors and road factors are the causative factors; (3) in the second-level, “motor vehicle drivers’ misconduct”, “road condition”, and “road section” are the causative factors; and (4) in the third-level, “slippery road”, “rain and snow weather”, “intersection”, and “untimely braking” are the causative factors. The research results can provide some scientific basis for improving road traffic safety.

Topological analyses of multi-airport regional air transport networks are the basis for the sustainable development of multi-airport systems. In this study, we modeled the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region’s airport infrastructure as a network and presented a weighted approach by which to analyze the network structure and robustness from the perspective of complex network theory. The analysis of the Yangtze River Delta Airport Network (YRDAN) indicates that it is a small-world network, and its cumulative degree has a power-law distribution, suggesting that it has scale-free properties. As its weighted clustering coefficient was found to be much smaller than the non-weighted counterpart, this demonstrates that most of the network traffic is focused on a hub-and-spoke pattern. Furthermore, the over-centrality of the YRDAN suggests weak accessibility of small cities and high dependence of air transport on the hub-and-spoke pattern. The assessment of the robustness of the YRDAN in the face of intentional attacks found that domestic networks are more robust than foreign aviation networks. However, the isolation of a small fraction of selected nodes can cause serious problems in the functioning of the YRDAN.

Background: At a critical stage of the shift of economic growth, this work studied urban community infrastructure’s driving role in consumption, discusses the causes and action mechanisms of infrastructure in promoting residents’ consumption. Methods: Based on micro-household survey data, applying probit regression. Result: We found that community infrastructure, divided according to either its engineering or its service nature, has a great positive externality, significantly increasing the proportion of residents’ consumption, and that the driving force behind consumption in urban central areas, transportation, and environmental protection infrastructure is more obvious. Good urban community infrastructure facilitates residents’ production and promotes the efficient circulation of information, resources, and factors; improves residents’ subjective expectations; and brings more consumption opportunities so that community infrastructure significantly improves residents’ probability of consumption. Conclusion: In the context of economic transformation to a high-quality economy, we should pay attention to the key role of community infrastructure investment in structural transformation and choose urban central areas, capital-intensive industries, and transportation and environmental protection infrastructure as the investment focus so as to improve the consumption returns brought by infrastructure and achieve the transformation of the economy from an investment-driven one to an innovation-driven one.

Accurate measurement of airport operational efficiency and the analysis of key influencing factors can provide theoretical references for regional airport planning and air traffic management. Many studies are conducted on the operational efficiency of airports in the region, but little attention is paid to their interactions. To fill this gap, this paper measures the operational efficiency of airports in four major cities in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region, and on this basis, the spatial Durbin model is used to explore the influencing factors and spillover effects of airport operational efficiency based on two aspects: airport physical characteristics and regional characteristics. The study demonstrates that the efficiency of airport operations has a significant negative spillover effect, indicating that the efficiency of neighboring airports evolves in a competitive interaction. In terms of direct effects, the number of flights, the number of destinations, airport capacity utilization and GDP are important factors affecting airport efficiency. In terms of spillover effects, this paper found that the population and income positively affect the efficiency of local airport operations, while the number of flights and airport capacity utilization effects have negative effects.

This paper extended the Vickrey’s point-queue model to study the early bird parking mechanism during morning commute peak hours. We not only investigated how commuters choose departure times in view of morning commute traffic congestion and the discounted early bird parking fee, but also analyzed the conditions which are determined for the existence of the user equilibrium in the analysis model provided in this paper. Moreover, the tendency of the total queuing time and the incremental parking pricing revenue was derived along with the different choice strategy between early bird parkers (ERPs) and regular parkers (RPs). The results showed that the number of commuters was jointly determined by the desired time and the bottleneck capacity for different schedules. Additionally, the method of fare incentive showed a better effect on reducing queue than the initial no-incentive method with the instantaneous travel demand. Most importantly, the incremental parking revenue can be increased by properly adjusting the parking pricing gap between ERPs and RPs. Our research not only provided several important propositions for the early bird parking mechanism but also included the optimal solutions for optimal parking pricing and schedule gap in two groups of parkers. This work is expected to promote the development of early bird parking to mitigate morning commute traffic congestion and motivate the related research of schedule coordination for regulating parking choice behavior in morning peak hours.

With increasing availability of alternative mobility options for city transportation system, it is necessary to better understand how emerging mobility options are impacting the travel demand and consumer-social surplus. However, few study have been conducted to evaluate the social welfare effects of the range of vacant trips in ride-sourcing service modes. This paper identified the vacant trip and loading rate evaluation model under the ride-sourcing service mode to enhance the effective operation of the different mobility services under numerical illustrations. The solution can also offer some beneficial guidance and theoretical basis for ride-sourcing systems in regard to planning and management aspects.

The impacts of transportation infrastructure on sustainable economic development are multifaceted. The existing literature works on the assumption that transportation infrastructure influences sustainable economic development by influencing production behavior. By observing the increasingly common phenomenon of family tourism, this paper finds that transportation infrastructure not only affects production behavior, but also directly impacts residents’ consumption behavior. Based on this, this paper constructs a growth model in which the traffic infrastructure affects both production and consumption in order to reveal the mechanism by which railway infrastructure changes residents’ consumption structures and ultimately promotes sustainable economic growth by promoting private tourism. In order to verify this theoretical proposition, this paper also constructs panel data from the provinces of China from 2008 to 2018 and conducts an empirical study. It was found that railway and railway infrastructure investments can not only directly promote sustainable economic development through the multiplier effect, but can also indirectly promote economic growth by increasing the amounts of private tourism and their proportions.

Investigation shows that train travel has a lower pollution impact on the environment than flight travel or car travel. A stated preferences (SP) survey can effectively obtain the data of the commuter’s response to the hypothetical train price changes beyond the scope of previous observations. To this end, based on SP survey, we estimate the price elasticity of train travel demand and analyze its variation rules. It is shown that: (1) the own-price elasticities of demand are −1.049028 during peak period and −1.090438 during off-peak period, respectively; (2) the cross-price elasticities of demand are 0.001280 for train and air and 0.001156 for train and car during peak period; and 0.001350 for train and air and 0.001230 for train and car during off-peak period; (3) the own and cross-price elasticities of demand during off-peak period are bigger than the ones during peak period; (4) when the influence factors’ influence degree is 3 or 5, the own and cross-price elasticities of demand are largest; when the influence degree is 1, the own and cross-price elasticities of demand are smallest. A result application example shows that the elasticities obtained from this paper could be used to reduce energy used and CO₂ emissions effectively.

This paper proposes an equilibrium bus boarding model to investigate optimal pricing and service for peak-period bus commuting inefficiency of boarding queuing congestion. Commuters are assumed to choose their optimal time-of-use decision from home or the workplace to the bus. We found that: (1) when the earliest commuter boards the bus as soon as the bus arrives at the bus station, the dynamic boarding queuing congestion toll that eliminates the boarding queuing congestion creates social optimal equilibrium and the optimal bus departure interval during the peak period; (2) the optimal bus departure interval during the peak period is the time that the preceding bus riders spend on boarding, which means the relationship between service frequency and ridership does not conform to the square root principle: the optimal bus frequency is proportional to the square root of the number of commuters.