As the role of information and communications technologies (ICTs) grows, governments have seen the Geoweb and Web 2.0 as an opportunity to increase citizen involvement through e-government which provides citizens with the ability to record and share information. 311 services represent citizens' most direct contact with local governments in the form of volunteered geographic information (VGI) empowering citizens with the means of solving community issues. Past studies have examined VGI and e-government use finding patterns of a digital divide with survey data; yet, further research which allows for the visualization of these patterns using citizen-generated data is needed to understand the link between users and the content they create. This paper seeks to explore the relationship between sociodemographic status and 311 service request frequency in three cities within the United States using geographic information systems (GIS) and regression analysis. Results suggest the potential existence of a digital divide and that the demographic profile of a city plays a role in participation in e-government.
Smartphone-based household travel survey (HTS) studies to date have typically followed the two-part survey process that has historically been used for paper, computer-assisted telephone interviewing, and online HTS. In this two-part survey process, households provide demographic data in a recruit survey (part one) and record trips in a travel diary (part two) often at a later date. The Metropolitan Council, the planning organization serving the Twin Cities metropolitan area in Minnesota, has conducted a pilot study for their cyclical HTS, the Travel Behavior Inventory (TBI), that is one of the first large-scale fields of an all-in-one smartphone HTS design. For the 2018 TBI pilot, the traditional two-part survey was merged into a continuous survey experience within a smartphone app. The TBI pilot used a split sample to test this all-in-one design against a traditional two-part smartphone survey design. For the all-in-one design, households were invited to sign in directly to the smartphone application instead of first recruiting online or by phone. The pilot results provide a direct comparison of the two-part and all-in-one designs at the household-, person-, and trip-levels. The results showed a lower overall recruit and completion rate for the all-in-one design but showed clear promise for increasing representation of younger and lower-income populations—traditionally hard-to-reach groups who completed at a higher rate with all-in-one. The authors discuss several factors which may have contributed to the lower overall completion rate and describe planned updates for future waves of the TBI aimed at improving overall response while maintaining the developments that have improved representation from hard-to-reach groups.
This paper looks at the effects of using bus service subsidy to develop the local bus network through tendering, specifically within the city of Plymouth. However, much of this may be applicable to other urban areas. The authors argue that while tendered rural bus services may never cover their marginal costs and hence become commercially sustainable, within the urban context seed-corn funding can frequently be used to pump prime services, which then go on to become commercial operations, as has been demonstrated in Plymouth. By so doing, this releases that subsidy to be used elsewhere within the network, to develop a further section of that network. For Plymouth, the average time that this takes is approximately five years. The issue of operators ceasing to cross-subsidise services which may cover their marginal costs and contribute to overheads, but instead require external subsidy, is examined. A further question is posed regarding whether the remaining municipal bus companies (which still includes Plymouth Citybus) deliver better value for money than the publicly listed operators. Finally, although Best Value is supposedly designed to test value for money, a note of caution is sounded about its use in this context.
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