Visitors’ diversified motivations and behavior – the case of the pilgrimage center in Krakow (Poland)

The article presents the visitors’ motivations and behavior at the pilgrimage center in Krakow (Poland). Here, the relation between these elements, i.e. whether their motivations have a correlation with what buildings they visit, is emphasized for the first time. The most important motivations for visits were religious and tourist ones, often rated equally high by the same respondents. They visited religious, cultural and tourist buildings and facilities. The stay of visitors with religious motivations was not limited to religious practices, but was extended by tourist behavior. Similarly, visitors with tourist motivations visited religious buildings and participated in religious practices. However, they visit tourist and cultural facilities more often. Additionally, the three groups of respondents were categorized and, on the basis of importance of the religious and tourist motivations, three types were distinguished, i.e. pilgrims, religious tourists and tourists. Their characteristic has been expanded by the analysis of their behavior. Nowadays, visitors’ motivations and behavior at pilgrimage centers include those typical for pilgrims and tourists in the traditional meaning. In addition to their religious function, these sites offer cultural and tourist facilities. The article highlights the dedifferentiation approach to visitors’ motivations and behavior, and in respect of the spatial organization of pilgrimage centers.     

Mergers and service quality in the airline industry: A silver lining for air travelers?

We examine the relationship between mergers in the US domestic market and service quality, as measured through late flights, mishandled bags, involuntary boarding denials and flight cancellations. We find that in the immediate years following a merger, service quality generally deteriorates, and that the drop in service is due simultaneously to the merger and the increased concentration of the market. Thus, recent mergers in the US, including Delta and Northwest, United and Continental, Southwest and AirTran, have likely resulted in increased market concentration and decreased service levels. From a public policy perspective, our results point to the importance of regulators monitoring airline actions, such as mergers and acquisitions, that serve to increase the concentration of markets, and may also result in decreased service quality.     

Transport mode choice in South East Asia: Investigating the relationship between transport users’ perception and travel behaviour in Johor Bahru,Malaysia

The worldwide increase in private car dependency poses a set of significant environmental, economic and social sustainability challenges that continue to undermine the urban quality of life. Rapid motorisation, particularly in South East Asia (SEA), has emerged as a global concern given the region’s cumulative population, rate of industrialisation, and large-scale urbanisation. Thus, there is a compelling need to enhance our understanding of the underlying dynamics of how people perceive and use transportation such that transport planning is better placed to address the current, unsustainable travel patterns in SEA. Despite this need, there has been relatively limited SEA-based research that has endeavoured to examine travel perceptions and transport mode choice from a non-instrumental perspective. This research redresses this deficit by investigating the relationship between transport users’ perceptions and travel behaviours within SEA, with a particular focus on psychosocial drivers of transport mode choice interfaced with more traditional instrumental measures.Spatially stratified survey data have been collected in a case study area, Johor Bahru, Malaysia, comprising users from different transport user groups. Employing regression modelling, drivers of individual’s travel behaviour are examined. Results highlight the merit in recognising the role of non-instrumental motives alongside instrumental motives to explain transport mode choice. We conclude by highlighting that transport mode choices are motivated by a range of locational, socio-demographic, psychological and cultural determinants. The current research has contributed to a better understanding of transport mode choice in Johor Bahru and provides a foundation for future SEA-based travel behaviour research. Studies in this area can inform more sustainable travel behaviour in the SEA region.     

Proximity changes to what and for whom? Investigating sustainable accessibility change in the Gothenburg city region 1990–2014

This paper operationalizes the concept of sustainable accessibility by emphasizing the environmental and social dimensions of sustainability from a spatial perspective. In doing so, we develop a heuristic model that focuses on the crucial dimensions of who gets access to what by using sustainable means of movement. We apply our conceptual approach in an examination of trends in sustainable accessibility for different social groups living in Gothenburg, Sweden between 1990 and 2014. On the basis of welfare-related and time-geographical considerations, we investigate accessibility by proximity for low- and high-income earners, people with small children, and elderly people. We investigate to what extent proximity to fundamental facilities increases or decreases over time, indicating changing conditions for sustainability. The results show that opportunities for living a local life and achieving accessibility via proximity differ socially. Low-income earners and the elderly generally live closer to the facilities important for daily life than do high-income earners and parents of young children. We also show that the opportunities for various social groups to obtain access by proximity change over time. For example, we observe a trend in which over time older people face reduced opportunities to reach daily facilities in their local neighborhoods.     

Searching for a lost aura: a Naxi Dongba’s spatial practices and space remaking in touristic commoditization

This paper explores how space remaking of tourist destinations erases aura of place. Two questions are discussed: (1) where does the aura of a tourism destination originate and (2) why/how is the aura of a tourism destination erased. Ethnographic research was conducted in 2011, 2012, and 2016, in Lijiang, Yunnan Province, focusing on the life story of He Zhenwei, a Naxi Dongba, and the spatial practices of his daily life in his workplace, home, and town. It indicates that more attention is paid to representations of space than to the aura of place in the space-making of tourist destinations. I argue that this kind of space-making tends towards the disjunction of the inherent systems of symbols of physical space, resulting in the loss of the aura of place. The most innovative aspect, in which I draw on Lefebvre’s space theory and Goffman’s theatrical stage, is the juxtaposition of ritual space, life space, and staged space, which elucidates the correlation between meaning-remaking of tourist destinations and the aura of indigenous cultures. The commoditization of heritage tourism is subject to the pursuit of the ‘Other image’ of culture as well as landscaping of place which gradually leads to the annihilation of aura.     

Private motorised urban mobility in China’s large cities: the social causes of change and an agenda for future research

The growth of private motorised urban mobility has become a key issue in relation to environmental quality in China’s cities. This paper reports on a nationwide study of the changes in car use in the 2000s, conducted in eleven large cities. This may assist us in filling the gaps in our existing knowledge, which is based on individual city cases. It is apparent that China’s large cities are embracing a new era of the automobile at an unexpected speed and scale. However, at the same time, it seems that a ‘peak’ in car use has occurred in Shanghai and Beijing, as either the absolute number of VKT per capita has dropped or its growth has slowed in these cities. The changes in urban mobility are deeply affected by social and economic transition factors. The paper provides an in-depth analysis of the effects of increasing incomes and the growing middle class, changing lifestyles and the emerging consumer society, the appearance of the e-Society and an increasingly ageing society. In particular, the growing demand for car use by the younger generation (G2), women and elderly people for the purpose of social activity has become an important force behind the increase in overall VKT. The paper concludes with a discussion of current theoretical perspectives and the issues which should be addressed in future research on the social aspects of private motorised urban mobility in China.     

Disentangling the tourism sector’s fragmentation: a hands-on coding/post-coding guide for interview and policy document analysis in tourism†

Qualitative tourism research is inevitably multidimensional. The fragmentation of the tourism sector across policy domains, scales, space and stakeholders leads to ‘blurry’ and aggregated datasets. Yet, tourism studies have a weak record in describing how results emanate from raw qualitative data. This paper presents a coding/post-coding scheme that proved robust in disentangling multidimensional tourism datasets in a middle-range research project that necessitated reflecting on the position of the researcher and the literature study during the data analysis. It describes the pragmatic decisions taken to organise the qualitative data from a research project on cross-border tourism and regional development processes. The paper also functions as a reflexive account of how this scheme came into existence. It contributes to the tools available to practically acknowledge the fragmentation of the tourism sector and the resulting multidimensional qualitative data, and calls for a more open accounting of the data analysis process and the underlying research values in tourism studies.     

Optimal traffic calming: A mixed-integer bi-level programming model for locating sidewalks and crosswalks in a multimodal transportation network to maximize pedestrians’ safety and network usability

We study the effect that installing sidewalks and crosswalks, as traffic calming facilities, has on the safety and usability of a transportation network with automobile, public transit and walking as modes of transportation. A mathematical programming model is proposed for this problem whose objective is to minimize the safety hazard for pedestrians and the total transportation cost of the network. We utilize a customized greedy heuristic and a simulated annealing algorithm for solving the problem. The computational results indicate that installing sidewalks and crosswalks at proper locations can reduce the overall transportation cost and improve pedestrians’ safety.     

New York City’s congestion pricing experience and implications for road pricing acceptance in the United States

Public acceptance is widely recognized as a major barrier to widespread adoption of road pricing in the United States and internationally. Using New York City as a case study, this paper analyzes how Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 2007 congestion pricing proposal gained widespread public support but was ultimately blocked in the State Legislature. The paper assesses the implications of New York’s experience for pursuing congestion pricing and mileage-based taxes in the United States. A central conclusion from this analysis is that gaining approval of pricing will require changing how motorists view the effect of pricing on them personally. Given the power of even small groups of auto users to block pricing through the political process, pricing proposals need to be perceived as benefiting drivers individually and not simply society at large. The paper discusses approaches to road pricing in light of New York City’s experience.     

The geography of car ownership in Mexico City: a joint model of households’ residential location and car ownership decisions

Suburbanization and car-ownership have increased rapidly in developing-world cities over the past half-century. This study examines the relationship between income, car ownership, and suburbanization across geographies and households in metropolitan Mexico City. Neither car-ownership trends by geography nor a mixed logit model of 43,000 households’ joint car-ownership and residential-location decisions suggest that car ownership and suburbanization are moving hand-in-hand. Instead, wealthier households tend to live in central locations and own and drive cars, while poorer households tend to live further from the urban center and rely more heavily on transit. If a random household’s income doubles, that household is around 44% more likely to get an additional car and 29% more likely to live in the urban center. Given the sticky nature of housing supply and the current model of peripheral housing production, aggregate responses to higher income are more difficult to predict, as they will almost certainly be offset by higher prices. Nevertheless, the findings suggest that higher income and car ownership do not tend to encourage a move to larger houses on larger suburban lots in Mexico City.