2026 Prize Recipient

Weikang Kong (MCP'27)

The Witte-Sakamoto Family Prize in City and Regional Planning

Weikang Kong is a Master of City Planning candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, concentrating in Sustainable Transportation and Infrastructure Planning.

Seeing transportation as a manifestation of how cities function, he believes that understanding how people and everything move is essential to understanding the city itself. His work combines spatial analysis, transportation data, policy evaluation, and visualization to make overlooked mobility challenges more visible and actionable. His projects have examined late-night transit accessibility for shift workers in Philadelphia, pathways toward a universal graduate student transit pass, and the use of food-delivery operations data to identify street-level micro-mobility friction.

At Penn, Weikang is conducting research with Professor Erick Guerra on how temporary SEPTA service reductions affect traffic condition across Philadelphia. He has also worked with Professor Gilles Duranton to explore how generative AI can support the education of spatial data analysis. In summer 2026, he interned with Stantec's transportation team, where he analyzed toll-road traffic patterns, congestion, and pricing-related questions to support transportation planning and decision-making.

Weikang holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Urban Planning from Tongji University and completed an honors minor in mathematics. His long-term goal is to connect transportation planning, data science, and technology to build more accessible, equitable, and responsive mobility systems.

Weikang Kong

Website

  • Late-night commute demand and transit accessibility are compared at 3:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m., revealing how access to night-shift jobs contracts during deep overnight hours.
  • A demand–service mismatch analysis identifies Philadelphia neighborhoods where late-night commute demand remains high but transit access is limited.
  • Reconstructed food-delivery courier speeds across the street network show how micromobility performance changes from midnight to midday and evening peak periods, with recurring slowdowns in the central service area.
  • High-speed exposure and peak-period slowdown are combined into a Composite Safety Stress Index to screen street segments for further safety, curb-management, and design investigation.
  • A 3D crash-density visualization highlights the spatial concentration of roadway safety hotspots along Roosevelt Boulevard in Philadelphia.