Unequal urban capacities for mobility adaptation under fuel-price shocks
Abstract
What a city makes reachable depends less on what it contains than on who can still afford to move when travel costs rise. We leverage the 2026 US-Iran oil shock as a natural experiment, applying a hierarchical panel regression discontinuity design to 1.7 trillion point-of-interest visits across 122,000 neighbourhoods in China and the United States. Mobility range declined in nearly three-quarters of neighbourhoods, but responses varied systematically with pre-shock urban conditions. Exposure to energy-intensive travel explained the largest share of modelled heterogeneity in both countries, while adaptive capacity and activity composition further shaped how travel was reorganized. Longer baseline travel intensified contraction, whereas greater car dependence constrained adjustment. Crucially, similar mobility outcomes arose from different processes: some neighbourhoods maintained travel by absorbing higher costs, whereas others appeared structurally locked into travel they could not reorganize. Fuel-price shocks, therefore, act as urban stress tests, revealing which neighbourhoods a city keeps connected.
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BibTeX
@misc{zhang2026unequal,
title = {{Unequal urban capacities for mobility adaptation under fuel-price shocks}},
author = {Zihao Zhang and Yuanbo Zhang and Xiaolei Ma and Yuan Liao},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2608.12281},
eprint = {2608.12281},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12281},
note = {CC BY-SA 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Unequal urban capacities for mobility adaptation under fuel-price shocks
AU - Zihao Zhang
AU - Yuanbo Zhang
AU - Xiaolei Ma
AU - Yuan Liao
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2608.12281
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12281
AB - What a city makes reachable depends less on what it contains than on who can still afford to move when travel costs rise. We leverage the 2026 US-Iran oil shock as a natural experiment, applying a hierarchical panel regression discontinuity design to 1.7 trillion point-of-interest visits across 122,000 neighbourhoods in China and the United States. Mobility range declined in nearly three-quarters of neighbourhoods, but responses varied systematically with pre-shock urban conditions. Exposure to energy-intensive travel explained the largest share of modelled heterogeneity in both countries, while adaptive capacity and activity composition further shaped how travel was reorganized. Longer baseline travel intensified contraction, whereas greater car dependence constrained adjustment. Crucially, similar mobility outcomes arose from different processes: some neighbourhoods maintained travel by absorbing higher costs, whereas others appeared structurally locked into travel they could not reorganize. Fuel-price shocks, therefore, act as urban stress tests, revealing which neighbourhoods a city keeps connected.
ER -