Dynamic Analysis on Public Concerns in Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge: A Topic Modeling Approach

Public concerns are essential for megaproject success, meanwhile highly influencing on the stakeholder performance. To understand the dynamics of public concerns in the project duration is beneficial for decision-makers to identify the risks and improve their adaptability in an uncertain project environment. This study employed the topic over time (TOT) based model to detect the major public concerns with the 1,748 official documents on Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge from 2003 to 2018, including the planning, construction, and delivery stage. As a result, 16 public concerns were detected, and the popularity trend of each concern was revealed year by year. Moreover, one scoring system was built to explore the relevant stakeholders for each public concern in the timeline. Considering the popularity trend and stakeholder relevance, a managerial map was designed to visualize the criticalness of each public concern in different stages of megaprojects. Finally, the “Mirror Z” approach was proposed for decision-makers to determine the management priority for identified public concerns. The finding showed the public concerns cover the wide-range issues including the government cooperation, environmental impacts, commercial development, alignment options, financing arrangements, operational arrangements, design, and construction, even radiating to the sustainable development of local towns and infrastructure. The management priority is varied according to the managerial map in each stage. The dynamic study proposed a method to comprehensively reveal the changes in public concerns, which provides useful guidelines for future mage transport projects. The text-mining based approach also benefits the scholars to obtain empirical clues from a large group of unstructured text documents in the domain of the megaproject research.