Understanding the Spatial Alignment Between Public Rental Housing and Metro: Evidence from Zhengzhou, China

The population for each PRH community was estimated by multiplying the number of households by the citywide average household size of 3.46 persons per household, obtained from Zhengzhou's Seventh National Population Census. While we acknowledge the limitation of not having household-level census data for PRH, our field survey provided ancillary support for the population estimation framework. Through informal conversations with property management staff at 22 of the surveyed communities, we confirmed that the reported number of households for each community was consistent with management records. This at least verifies the reliability of the 'household count' component of our population estimation.Metro network and passenger flow data. Data on metro lines and station locations were sourced from the AMap application programming interface for October 2024, ensuring alignment with the operational network during the study period. Passenger flow data was provided by the Zhengzhou Metro Corporation and consists of anonymized smart card transaction records from September 1 to 30, 2024. These records contain card IDs, entry and exit station names, and timestamps. From this, we extracted the inbound passenger flow for each station during the weekday morning peak period (7:00–9:00 AM) and calculated the average daily inbound flow for this period for each station. This passenger flow data is critically used in our model to quantify station-level congestion and its impact on waiting time.Transportation network data. The road network data for Zhengzhou was sourced from the 2023 version of the electronic map database. It includes vector data for primary roads, secondary roads, branch roads, and inter-urban highways. This dataset provides the fundamental network structure for conceptualizing travel paths.