To promote sustainable urbanization and combat the economic, environmental, energy and safety issues that go with rapid motorization, the Ministry of Transport in China has introduced the “Transit Metropolis” program with a substantive amount of funds devoted to the implementation of the program in local governments. This represents the largest ever central government-led effort addressing transit metropolis development in the world. How has the program been implemented locally? Have the selected demonstration cities followed the same principle or taken comparable measures to implement their version of the transit metropolis? What is their performance? These questions remain unknown in the current literature. This article answers the above questions through a literature review, interviews and comparative case studies in Shenyang and Dalian, two large cities in Liaoning Province. It shows that both cities have successfully achieved the target levels for building a transit metropolis. Similarities between the two cities can be found their absence of any policies on automobile restriction and the presence of enormous efforts in transit network expansion and optimization. Differences lie in the fact that Shenyang has been more conventional in developing the transit metropolis, while Dalian has been more innovative and flexible in policy implementation. When comparing our empirical findings with the experience of creating transit metropolis elsewhere in China and in foreign countries, we find that policies and regulations restricting car use and calming traffic are not necessary conditions for successful transit metropolises; however, the attractiveness of transit infrastructure, combined with aesthetic and well-decorated street network is essential for a modal shift for transit. We also find that the perception on the transit metropolis in China more emphasizes transit service improvement, while the concept in Western countries more focuses on the shift of land use patterns that lean more towards influencing transit behavior. @en

Theory on the strategic use of knowledge in planning large infrastructure projects is comparatively well-developed in the fields of public policy and urban/transport planning for Western democracies. But how policymakers make use of knowledge and what position policy analysts hold in non-Western countries still remains largely unknown territory in the literature. This article begins to explore this topic by studying two urban transport projects in the Chinese city of Dalian. Based on empirical evidence, the article concludes with a number of preliminary but notable differences between Western countries and China in terms of the administrative mechanisms underlying the strategic use of knowledge in policymaking. We found that Chinese institutional incentives with regard to cadre evaluation and promotion channels largely constitute the motivation of politicians to use knowledge strategically. Additionally, the wider social and administrative cultures in China, including a command-and-control tradition and a high level of power distance create a basis for the strategic use of information as well as the manipulation of analytical data.@en