In recent years, perception of flood risks has become an important topic to policy makers concerned with risk management and safety issues. Knowledge of the public risk perception is considered a crucial aspect in modern flood risk management as it steers the development of effective and efficient flood mitigation strategies. This study aimed at gaining insight into the perception of flood risks along the Belgian coast. Given the importance of the tourism industry on the Belgian coast, the survey considered both inhabitants and residential tourists. Based on actual expert's risk assessments, a high and a low risk area were selected for the study. Risk perception was assessed on the basis of scaled items regarding storm surges and coastal flood risks. In addition, various personal and residence characteristics were measured. Using multiple regression analysis, risk perception was found to be primarily influenced by actual flood risk estimates, age, gender, and experience with previous flood hazards.

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IntroductionUrban planners and transportation researchers have undertaken evaluations of urban service delivery for more than three decades. They have examined mainly citizens' satisfaction with public service provision (

This paper provides a critical review of the progress in understanding the linkages between transport disadvantage and social exclusion. It follows earlier work in proposing social capital as a concept that mediates those linkages but argues that transport researchers must not confine themselves to conceptualisations of social capital as predominantly benign and capable of reducing transport disadvantage and social exclusion. A range of hypothetical pathways is discussed, highlighting the Janus-faced character of social capital as a medium for both the effectuation of progressive social change and the perpetuation and creation of social inequalities. An analysis is provided of the extent to which the recent transport-related literature supports or rejects the hypothesised pathways, and key avenues for future research are identified.Key words: social exclusion, transport disadvantage, social capital, literature review, social network 1 1| IntroductionThere is a long tradition in transport studies, urban studies and human geography of research that examines the connections of mobility with social inequality and deprivation (Kain, 1968;Wachs and Kumagai, 1973;Hanson and Hanson, 1980;Kwan, 1999;Neutens et al., 2010), and a range of papers on those connections have recently been published in TransportationResearch Part A (Stanley et al., 2011;Martens et al., 2012;Mullen et al., 2014). Within that tradition researchers have suggested direct causal links between transport and social exclusion (Church et al., 2000;Hine and Mitchell, 2001;Lucas et al., 2001;Kenyon et al., 2002; Lucas, 2004Lucas, , 2012Cass et al., 2005;Gray et al., 2006;Preston and Rajé, 2007;Stanley et al., 2011). Scholarship on these links flourished in the early 21 st century, in part because of the interest the Labour government under Tony Blair took in reducing social exclusion in the UK. Yet, this flourishing also reflects more general concerns over the effects of neoliberal urban and transport policies on the less privileged segments of urban and rural populations in the UK and elsewhere.The intimate connections of academic work on mobility and exclusion with the realms of policy-making and -less frequently -grassroots activism imply that research on transport and social exclusion ticks many of the 'impact' and 'knowledge valorisation' boxes that are increasingly important in research evaluations. However, the flipside of this orientation on policy and practice is that theoretical development has not always been the highest priority among researchers. Past studies have significantly expanded our understanding of concepts, such as mobility-related exclusion (Kenyon et al., 2002), access (Cass et al., 2005 or network capital (Urry, 2007(Urry, , 2012, but research has to a considerable degree progressed through cumulative broadening of empirical research.2 Therefore, the current paper draws upon various theoretical perspectives on social capital and explores how they can strengthen the theoretical basis of research about transport and social ...

In this paper, proximity-based Bluetooth tracking is postulated as an efficient and effective methodology for analysing the complex spatiotemporal dynamics of visitor movements at mass events. A case study of the Ghent Festivities event (1.5 million visitors over 10 days) is described in detail and preliminary results are shown to give an indication of the added value of the methodology for stakeholders of the event. By covering 22 locations in the study area with Bluetooth scanners, we were able to extract 152,487 trajectories generated by 80,828 detected visitors. Apart from generating clear statistics such as visitor counts, the share of returning visitors, and visitor flow maps, the analyses also reveal the complex nature of this event by hinting at the existence of several mutually different visitor profiles. We conclude by arguing why Bluetooth tracking offers significant advantages for tracking mass event visitors with respect to other and more prominent technologies, and outline some of its remaining deficiencies. KeywordsBluetooth, tracking, mass event, geographical information technology, geographical information systems IntroductionIn the last few years the representation and analysis of large volumes of trajectory information of objects moving through geographical space has become a major topic of interest in research domains such as geographical information science (Ahlqvist et al., 2010;Shaw, Yu, & Bombom, 2008), computer science (Bogorny, Kuijpers, & Alvares, 2009;Orlando et al., 2007), visual analytics (Andrienko & Andrienko, 2007 and urbanism (Van Schaick & Van der Spek, 2008). This burgeoning academic interest has emerged as a result of the increased feasibility and affordability of collecting detailed data about spatiotemporal phenomena triggered by the widespread adoption of location-aware technologies. Past studies have focused on the movements of various kinds of objects including vehicles (Quiroga & Bullock, 1998), animals (Laube et al., 2007, bank notes (Brockmann, Hufnagel, & Geisel, 2006) and typhoons (Terry & Feng, 2010), but the majority of research has been devoted to human movement in different contexts and at various scales. Some examples are the movement of athletes on a pitch (Laube, Imfeld, & Weibel, 2005), tourists on a regional (Ahas et al., 2008) and local scale (Kemperman, Borgers, & Timmermans, 2009; O'Connor, Zerger, & Itami, 2005;Shoval & Isaacson, 2007a), and customers in a supermarket (Hui, Fader, & Bradlow, 2009). In these contexts, advanced tracking technologies complement more traditional qualitative methods, such as shadowing (Quinlan, 2008) and collecting travel diaries (Axhausen et al., 2002).Within research on human behaviour, particular attention has been devoted to the collective behaviour of crowds at mass events such as street parades, festivals, public assemblies, sporting events, and exhibitions (Batty, Desyllas, & Duxbury, 2003;Helbing, Johansson, & Al-Abideen, 2007;Zeitz et al., 2009). Tragic events such as the recent stampede during the 2010 edi...

One of the concerns that has aroused much scholarly attention in transport geography lately is the extent to which public transport provision enables the less privileged population segments, especially those without privately owned motorized vehicles, to participate in activities that are deemed normal within the society they live in. This study contributes to this line of inquiry by proposing a methodology for identifying public transit gaps, a mismatch between the socially driven demand for transit and the supply provided by transit agencies. The methodology draws on the latest accomplishments in the field of modeling time-continuous, schedule-based public transport accessibility. Accessibility levels to key destinations are calculated at regular time intervals, and synoptic metrics of these levels over various peak and off-peak time windows are computed for weekdays and weekends. As a result, a temporally reliable picture of accessibility by public transport is constructed. The obtained index of public transport provision is compared to a public transport needs index based on the spatial distribution of various socio-demographics, in order to highlight spatial mismatches between these two indices. The study area consists of Flanders, which is the northern, Dutch-speaking region of Belgium. The results indicate that mainly suburban areas are characterized by high public transport gaps. Due to the time-variability of public transport frequencies, these gaps differ over time.

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