Mr Tommy Chan

Biography

Tommy is pursuing a DPhil at the Transport Studies Unit (TSU) and St Anne's College, University of Oxford. His doctoral research at TSU will delve into transport resilience, specifically within the context of citizen initiatives in Hong Kong. Simultaneously, during his appointment at the University of Westminster, Tommy works as a Research Associate with Dr. Enrica Papa on the Ex-TRA project – Experimenting with City Streets to Transform Urban Mobility. The project's objective is to create a street experiment toolkit that gauges how communities perceive and adapt to changes in street usage. Notably, Tommy secured seed funding from the Knowledge Exchange and Quality-Related Research Fund in the School of Architecture and Cities at the University of Westminster. The seed project SurveyXperience: A Prototype Tool for Holistic Street Assessment aspires to employ a mixed-methods approach, seamlessly blending quantitative and qualitative data sources. This strategy aims to provide a more comprehensive understanding of subjective topics related to street usage and community values.

Research Interests

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.

Research Groups / Centres

• Transport and Mobilities