Urban Transport Social Needs in China: Quantification with Central Government Transit Grant

Social inclusion requires relative measures to be put in place for improvements in public transit to meet the transport social needs of social disadvantaged groups. Much consensus is achieved in principle, but in practice finance has become a consistent thread that cuts across all of these measures. In order to identify the demand of central government transit grant for addressing this issue in China, this paper develops an approach to quantify the transport social needs, the measurement of which is composed of two indexes. One index denoting the transit ridership derived from social disadvantaged population is constructed with the Primary Component Regression (PCR). The other is an index of spatial dimension that represents the accessibility to public services. The transport social needs in China turn out to be 37.63 billion trip-kilometers in 2010, while the corresponding central government grant is supposed to be 18.81 billion yuan. Another contribution of this work is the proposed allocation procedure of the central government transit grant, which is a need-based approach and conducts with categorization of city. The result shows that this procedure tends to offer more central government grant to small and low-density cities, which were put in unfavorable situation in case of local transit investment. As such, this method is proved to bring about a more equitable distribution of public transit funding.