Ho-Yin (Tommy) Chan

Towards resilient cities, communities and individuals: Cutting across the top-down-bottom-up dichotomy through citizen initiatives in everyday transport practices and planning

Tommy is a DPhil student at the Transport Studies Unit (TSU) and St Anne's College. He has recently completed an MA in Transport Policy and Planning at the University of Hong Kong and holds a BEng (Hons) in Civil Engineering from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Previously, he has worked as a traffic engineer and academic researcher in Hong Kong. His doctoral research at TSU will focus on transport resilience within the context of citizen initiatives in Hong Kong.

Tommy's research can be situated at the intersection of transport geography, urban planning, and traffic engineering. Empirically the focus is usually on the everyday mobilities of people and can be organised around five general concerns:

• Governance of resilience and changes in transport - including the power dynamics between different government actors, private businesses, NGOs and citizens;
• Socio-spatial inequality - in relation to actual and potential mobilities and the health implications of mobility under both daily and disruptive (e.g., COVID) situations;
• Emerging data analysis - how multi-source data including Big (e.g., Wi-Fi, GPS, smartcard, GIS), Small (e.g., questionnaire, interview, focus group) and Thick (e.g., longitudinal) Data reshape our understanding of travel behaviours and can contribute in efficient and sustainable mobility management and planning;
• Transport modelling - Network modelling, choice modelling, spatial-temporal modelling, statistical modelling, that consider movement/flow of goods and people, and their applications to transport planning and operation;
• (Geo)visualisation - (geo)visuals or non-verbal representations, schematic maps, interactive maps, and the implications to geography education.

Doctoral Research

Tommy's doctoral research aims to investigate the potential of citizen initiatives in providing some opportunities for more collaborative and relational approaches that cut across top-down/bottom-up dichotomies for resilience planning. The study recognises discourses on diverse resilience methods in the notion of engineering and socio-ecological resilience, and how they are used by individuals and organisations from varied backgrounds, functioning at various scales and with various aims and meanings. While resilience planning is often made to be apolitical so as to aspire for consensus, the meaning as well as practice of resilience is shaped by competing and unequally powerful actors in the city and beyond. Conflicts over values could be suppressed and hidden, however, not resolved by the appearance of neutrality. In order to defuse the deepening tension that threatens the longer-term functioning of integrated planning approaches for sustainable development, the assumptions underpinning different perspectives of resilience planning must be made explicit by paying greater attention to issues of place, culture, justice, and identity.

• Cheung, K. Chan, H. and Erduran, S. (2023) Communicating science in the COVID-19 news in the UK during Omicron waves: Exploring representations of nature of science with epistemic network analysis. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.
• Zhu, D., Sze N., Feng, Z., Chan, H. (2023) Waiting for signalized crossing or walking to footbridge/underpass? Examining the effect of weather using stated choice experiment with panel mixed random regret minimization approach. Transport Policy.
• Chan, H., Cheung, K. and Erduran, S. (2022) Science communication in the media and human mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic: a time series and content analysis. Public Health.
• Chan, H., Ip, L., Mansoor, U. and Chen, A. (2022) Pedestrian route choice with respect to new lift-only entrances to underground space: Case study of a metro station area in hilly terrain in Hong Kong. Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology.
• Chan, H., Ma, H. and Zhou, J. (2022) Transit usage in social shocks: A case study of station-level metro ridership in anti-extradition movements in Hong Kong. Transportation Research Record.
• Chan, H., Xu, Y., Chen, A. and Liu X. (2022) Impacts of the walking environment on mode and departure time shifts in response to travel time change: Case study in the multi-layered Hong Kong metropolis. Travel Behaviour and Society.
• Chan, H., Xu, Y., Chen, A., Liu, X., and Cheung, K. (2022) Drawing metro maps in concentric circles: a designer-in-the-loop approach with visual examples. Transactions in GIS.
• Chan, H. and Zhou, J. (2022) Research notes: Social movement revealing opportunities for grassroots transport initiatives: Lessons from Hong Kong. Journal of Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies, 14: 50-70.
• Xu, Y., Chan, H. and Chen, A. (2022) Automated generation of concentric circles metro maps using mixed-integer optimization. International Journal of Geographical Information Science.
• Xu, Y., Chan, H. and Chen, A. (2022) Proactive resilience building through route diversity: A close look at the metro system from the travelers' perspective. Findings.
• Xu, Y., Chan, H., Chen, A and Liu, X. (2022) Walk this way: Visualizing accessibility and mobility in metro station areas based on a 3D pedestrian network. Environment and Planning B.
• Xu, Y., Cheng, D., Chan, H., and Chen, A. (2022) Visualizing the impact of COVID-19 vaccine passports on pedestrian access to metro stations in Hong Kong. Regional Studies, Regional Science.
• Chan, H., Chen, A., Li, G., Xu, X. and Lam, W. (2021) Evaluating the value of new metro lines using route diversity measures: The case of Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway system. Journal of Transport Geography, 91. 102945.
• Chan, H., Chen, A., Ma, W., Sze, N. and Liu X. (2021) COVID-19, community response, public policy, and travel pattern: A tale of Hong Kong. Transport Policy, 106: 173-184.
• Chan, H., Ma, H. and Zhou, J. (2021) Public transportation and social movements: Learning from the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Bill Protests. Transportation Research Record, 2676(2): 553-566.

A full list is available via Google Scholar.