Scissors Difference of Socioeconomics, Travel and Space Consumption Behavior of Rural and Urban Households and Its Impact on Modeling Accuracy and Data Requirements

It is believed that the “scissors difference” of socioeconomics between rural and urban households in typical municipalities of China is significant. This may result in differences in their behavior and has important implications for urban land use and transportation planning policies, as well as related modeling accuracy and data requirements. However, detailed analyses regarding such “scissors differences” between rural and urban groups in China have not been done before. In this study, travel survey data collected from the City of Wuhan in 2008 is used to study if rural and urban households are statistically different in terms of household income, household size, space consumption, highest household mobility and travel distance. A set of statistical tests, such as the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, Mann–Whitney U test and Kruskal–Wallis H test, are applied to the study data. The study results show that the “scissors difference” is found to be statistically significant in terms of household size (HS), household income (HI), building area (BA) consumed and household mobility (except for travel distance) between rural and urban households. Conversely, analyses applied to travel distance of urban and rural household subgroups (categorized by HS and HI) reveal that the urban and rural counterparts show almost exactly opposite behavior. The study results also suggest that such differences should be explicitly considered in relevant modeling exercises by separately setting up urban and rural household groups, but the number of household groups used should be determined based on a balance between modeling accuracy and data required/modeling workload.