Shouting “chin min yau lok” (stop at the front) in a minibus: Transportation assimilation among immigrants in Hong Kong

Abstract

Transportation socialization as a rising field of study has gained much attention in traditional immigration countries, such as the United States and European countries. Treating transportation behaviors as a routine activity, previous studies mainly looked at the discrepancy in transportation choices between immigrants and natives, for example, automobile usage in the U.S. By examining immigrants’ minibus ridership in Hong Kong (a unique local public transportation service) and extending the previous theoretical thread on spatial assimilation, this study expands the social and geographical scope of transportation assimilation to a non-traditional immigration region and further tests the applicability of general immigration theory on transportation socialization. Capitalizing on a large sample of pooled census data, we are the first to explore the changing pattern of immigrants’ transportation socialization in Hong Kong and Asia. By looking at the transportation assimilation through individual and locational level factors, we found the pattern in Hong Kong to be generally in line with the previous studies in traditional immigration countries on the individual level but not on the locational level.