Research On Jobs-housing Relationship And Commuting Performance In Megacities

With the urban sprawl,population growth and motorized travel,spatial mismatch of jobs-housing and commuting have become the worldwide urban management problem.Studies on the jobs-housing relationship and commuting performance in megacities are helpful to deeply understand the root causes of urban commuting problems,and is of great significance to optimize urban spatial structure.The framework of excess commuting is an important research paradigm to evaluate the jobshousing relationship and commuting performance.However,most of existing studies have been carried out in developed countries,very few studies in Chinese cities.Additionally,there are four shortcomings within existing studies: the lack of comprehensive evaluation of commuting performance,neglect of group heterogeneity,especially in dual dimensions of education and occupation,the lack of controlling for the impact of jobs-housing relationship at macro level on commuting,and there is few simulation studies on the optimization of jobs-housing relationship.Based on the data from the 1% National Population Sampling Survey in 2015,firstly,this study describes the characteristics of jobs-housing relationship,commuting behavior and commuting performance for whole samples.Secondly,based on the single dimension of education and occupation and the dual dimensions of educationoccupation,group heterogeneity of commuting performance is analyzed from the perspectives of average travel distance and spatial organization.In addition,multivariate regression models are employed to explore the influence of jobs-housing relationship on commuting performance,and the difference in the influence among each education-occupation groups.Finally,scenario simulation studies on jobs-housing relationship optimization and commuting performance are carried out.The main findings are as follows:First,commuting performance in Shanghai is relatively high,and there is obvious group heterogeneity in education,occupation and other dimensions.Compared with other big cities at home and abroad,Shanghai’s commuting performance is relatively high,but there is still a lot of jobs-housing relationship optimization potential.Welleducated and high-skilled workers have longer commuting distance and lower commuting performance than poor-educated and low-skilled workers.Meanwhile,compared with the single dimension analysis,the education-occupation analysis can reflect urban commuting problems more deeply and accurately.Second,long commutes are not necessarily inefficient and disorderly,and short commutes are not necessarily efficient and orderly.In the education-occupation analysis,although the actual average commuting distance in manufacturing sector is longer than that in social service sector,its commuting spatial organization is more structured and orderly.In addition,the absolute value of excess commuting is smaller and the potential commuting range in manufacturing sector is wider,so the commuting performance in manufacturing sector is higher than that in social service sector.In real life,the average commuting distance and the commuting spatial organization have important impacts on the operation of urban transportation system and road congestion.It may lead to the misleading perception about urban jobs-housing relationship and commuting performance,if evaluating commuting performance only from the perspective of average commuting distance with ignoring commuting spatial organization.Third,the jobs-housing relationship has a significant impact on commuting performance,but there are differences among each education-occupation group.In addition to the jobs-housing relationship at the micro-level---jobs-housing balance,the jobs-housing relationship at the macro-level---jobs-housing separation also has an impact on residents’ commuting behavior.The former has a greater impact on the loweducated workers,while the latter has a greater impact on the high-educated workers.Fourth,compared with relocating jobs,relocating workers is easier to optimize jobs-housing relationship and improve commuting performance.Due to the influence of scale economy and agglomeration economy,the spatial distribution of jobs is more concentrated than that of workers.Therefore,it is easier to achieve jobs-housing balance and reduce observed commuting level by relocating workers.The potential contributions of this paper are as follows: on the analysis perspectives,different from previous studies only based on average commuting distance,this paper explores commuting efficiency and commuting orderly from the average commuting distance and spatial organization,respectively,which is more conducive to deepening the academic circle’s complete cognition of urban jobs-housing relationship and commuting performance.On the analysis contents,different from previous studies that only evaluating commuting performance for total samples and regions,this paper explores the group heterogeneity and spatial heterogeneity,especially the cross-analysis of education and occupation.On the formation mechanism,unlike previous studies lacking consideration of jobs-housing relationship at the macrolevel,this paper also examines the impact of jobs-housing relationship at both the micro and macro level on commuting performance and the difference in the impact among different groups.On the policy implications,this paper can provide more direct and beneficial policy reference value for urban planning and refinement governance by simulation studies on jobs-housing relationship optimization and commuting performance.These findings in this paper can deepen our understanding of the relationship between urban commuting and jobs-housing relationship and the socioeconomic attributes of residents.Meanwhile,they have important policy implications for the implementation of green low-carbon city construction and jobs-housing balance.The jobs-housing balance has a significant impact on commuting performance.Urban planning can guide green and low-carbon travel of urban residents from the perspective of optimizing jobs-housing balance,but jobs-housing allocation at the macro-level is also an important factor affecting residents’ commuting,especially those well-educated workers.Therefore,in the process of urban planning practice,attention should be paid to the coordination of residential and employment functions at macro and micro levels,so as to ensure the realization of commuting optimization.