As urbanization accelerates across the globe, public transport accessibility emerges as a cornerstone of sustainable and inclusive city development. The importance of this issue is underscored by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 11, which aims to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. While headlines often celebrate remarkable advances in urban transit, particularly in rapidly growing countries like China, a deeper inspection reveals significant disparities behind aggregate statistics. New research exposes stark inequalities in public transport accessibility within villages surrounding China’s major cities, challenging the rosy picture painted by recent global reports.
The 2023 UN SDG report lauded Chinese cities for boasting public transport convenience for over 80% of their populations. However, the analysis conducted by Chen, Li, Liu, and colleagues paints a more nuanced and less optimistic portrait, especially when focusing on villages at urban peripheries. Their work demonstrates that despite aggregate improvements, only two major Chinese cities’ villages consistently meet internationally recognized benchmarks for public transport accessibility. Meanwhile, the lowest-performing cities have village-level access rates plummeting to a mere 34%. This disparity underscores the limitations of broad metrics that may obscure localized transport deficiencies.
Accessibility to public transport is often measured by proximity and convenience benchmarks, such as the often-cited “10-minute” access standard, which denotes the maximum time a resident should take to reach a transit stop. Although this metric provides a useful rule of thumb, Chen and colleagues raise critical concerns about its narrow scope. Villagers’ total travel burden is affected not only by the time to the transit stop but also by subsequent commute durations, fare structures, and the frequency and reliability of services. By focusing exclusively on a simplistic distance-or-time-to-stop measure, urban planners risk overlooking multifaceted barriers faced by rural and peri-urban populations.
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One of the most striking revelations in the study is the relationship between public transport improvements and population dynamics in these rapidly changing environments. Villages near major cities frequently experience significant demographic shifts, including population growth, migration, and aging. However, bus station placements and route designs often fail to align with these evolving patterns, resulting in service provision that is both outdated and inequitable. In some cases, newly constructed bus stations are located inconveniently relative to where most villagers live, reducing the practical usability of public transport despite nominal proximity.
The temporal dimension of commuting also presents challenges. Although the research notes some improvements in commute times toward urban centers, these gains are heavily mediated by population changes. In growing or densifying villages, congestion and overcrowding can negate travel time improvements, making the real-world experience worse than suggested by headline numbers. Furthermore, access to urban employment, education, and healthcare centers remains uneven, exacerbating social exclusion for residents of under-served villages.
Equally concerning is the evolving fare landscape. While average fares to city centers generally declined in many studied cities, the proportion of villagers required to pay higher fares increased noticeably in certain cases. High fare routes disproportionately impact lower-income rural populations, raising affordability as a critical barrier alongside accessibility. This divergence between fare reductions and coverage suggests that transport planners may be prioritizing cost efficiencies over equitable service provision, to the detriment of marginalized communities.
The study’s detailed geographic and demographic analyses highlight how additional travel time, increased fares, and shifting population structures interact to frustrate efforts toward truly inclusive transport systems. Villagers who must endure long walks to bus stops, extended total travel times, and elevated costs effectively face compounded exclusion from essential urban services. These multi-layered burdens often remain invisible within aggregate statistics, which focus on mean travel time or overall coverage rather than lived experiences.
Such findings call into question the widespread reliance on simple performance metrics, like the “10-minute” rule, in evaluating transport inclusivity. Although these metrics are easy to communicate and benchmark against, their narrow parameters can lead to suboptimal and even detrimental planning decisions. For example, a new bus station located within a 10-minute walk from a settlement edge but far from the majority of residents may fulfill the metric but worsen real access. Without incorporating population distribution, service frequency, fare structures, and overall commute burden, planners risk perpetuating existing inequalities under the guise of improvement.
The authors advocate for a more nuanced, population-responsive approach to transportation planning that embraces complexity rather than glossing over it. This approach would consider dynamic demographic trends, travel time at multiple journey stages, fare affordability, and equity implications in tandem. Innovative use of mobility data, participatory planning processes, and advanced accessibility modeling tools could enable more granular and responsive transit designs that better serve vulnerable rural populations amid rapid urban transformation.
Furthermore, safeguarding the inclusivity aims of Sustainable Development Goal 11 demands proactive policy interventions that prioritize rural and peri-urban communities on par with urban centers. Chinese cities, and others worldwide experiencing rapid growth, must recognize that transport equity hinges not solely on expanding infrastructure or increasing service frequencies but on tailoring solutions to diverse community needs and contexts. In doing so, they can forestall the risk of creating “transport deserts” in villages that, despite their proximity to urban prosperity, remain marginalized by policy blind spots.
Internationally, these findings resonate beyond China’s borders. Many emerging megacities face similarly complex interactions between shifting populations, unequal service provision, and affordability challenges. Rethinking transit access through comprehensive, human-centered frameworks may prove critical to ensuring urban sustainability goals are met globally. This research illustrates both the potential and pitfalls of current benchmarking approaches and provides a clarion call for more equitable transit planning.
In the face of accelerating urbanization, public transport must evolve from an aggregate indicator into a finely tuned mechanism for social inclusion. Accessibility improvements should be measured not only in terms of spatial metrics but also in terms of who benefits, how, and at what cost. As data availability and analytical capacities expand, it is increasingly feasible to embrace these complexities in planning decisions. Policymakers and practitioners should harness these tools to bridge rural-urban divides, ensuring inclusive mobility for all inhabitants of our cities and their hinterlands.
This study also highlights the critical intersections between transport, socio-economic equity, and environmental sustainability. Effective public transit can reduce reliance on private vehicles, curbing emissions and easing traffic congestion. However, unless designed inclusively, transit expansions risk reinforcing existing inequalities by disproportionately benefiting urban elites while neglecting peripheral vulnerable populations. Balancing these competing priorities demands careful, evidence-driven planning as exemplified by Chen and colleagues’ approach.
Ultimately, the path to sustainable urban development requires reconceptualizing public transport accessibility as a dynamic, multi-dimensional challenge. It is not enough to increase the number of bus stops or reduce nominal commute times. The lived reality of diverse residents—especially those in villages around major cities—must guide policy and practice. Only by doing so can we fulfill the promise of SDG 11 and drive truly inclusive, resilient cities for future generations.
In summary, while the headline statistics point to impressive gains in Chinese urban public transport accessibility, closer scrutiny reveals significant shortcomings in rural and peri-urban villages. These areas face multifaceted barriers including insufficiently responsive service placement, rising fare burdens, and population-driven mismatches between needs and provision. The conventional “10-minute” metric falls short of capturing these complexities and risks obscuring persistent inequities. A reoriented, population-sensitive planning framework—embracing detailed demographic and journey-level data—is urgently needed to ensure that transport systems serve all residents equitably and sustainably. As urban populations grow and diversify, such an approach is vital to realizing truly inclusive urban futures.
Subject of Research:
Public transport accessibility and equity in villages surrounding major Chinese cities.
Article Title:
Public transport accessibility in villages in and around major Chinese cities.
Article References:
Chen, Z., Li, X., Liu, B. et al. Public transport accessibility in villages in and around major Chinese cities. Nat Cities (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-025-00277-z
Image Credits:
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Tags: China public transport statisticsdisparities in transport accessinclusive city developmentpublic transit in Chinese villagespublic transport accessibility benchmarksrural public transport accessibilitysustainable urban transport solutionstransport convenience in major citiesUN Sustainable Development Goal 11urban periphery transport issuesurbanization and transport inequalityvillage-level transit challenges
