1 Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 2418, Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, Washington, D.C., 2014, pp. 1–10. DOI: 10.3141/2418-01 Jobs–housing studies have rarely used smart card data provided by public transportation agencies or focused on bus commuters. In this study, massive smart card data were used to estimate 216,844 bus commuters’ workplace and residence locations in Beijing. These data enabled a jobs–housing study of bus commuters in the metropolis with a much larger sample size than in most other studies. The study found that Beijing’s bus commuters had a shorter actual required commute (ARC) and a shorter minimum required commute (MRC) than com- muters in four other auto-dependent Western cities with comparable population and land use size. The study also indicated that Beijing’s bus commuters had a longer ARC and a longer MRC than commuters of all modes in Guangzhou, a metropolis in southern China half the size of Beijing. Consultations with local experts, field surveys, and informa- tion provided by online housing search engines were used to supplement the smart card data. The study established five land use prototypes of jobs–housing imbalance and proposed countermeasures to address the imbalance. Car dependence, traffic congestion, long commutes, and associated air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions have become notable phenomena that characterize many populous cities. Planners, policy analysts, and public agencies have advocated or even incentivized jobs–housing balance as a way to reduce peak period travel and optimize commutes, in particular, commutes by driving alone (1–6). Not surprisingly, various factors contribute to jobs–housing balance or imbalance among social groups in various locales. In the United States, for instance, suburbanization of jobs, housing segregation, inefficient public transportation services, race, and automobile mis- match may all more or less contribute to jobs–housing imbalance (or spatial mismatch) for low-income minorities and new immigrants (7–10). In China, the disappearance of work unit (Danwei) compounds and the introduction of the commercial housing market have led to the increasing jobs–housing imbalance of workers in large cities such as Beijing and Guangzhou (11–15). A large body of literature has focused on jobs–housing balance and related topics such as excess commuting and commuting efficiency. Horner (16) and Ma and Banister (17 ), for instance, have provided a good review of such literature in the Western context. Many studies of jobs–housing balance have dealt with total commuting flow and treated workers and jobs or the workplace as homogeneous (18). This is especially true of two seminal studies (19, 20) and others that have extended the two studies in different contexts (4, 21–23). To increase the policy relevance of research on jobs–housing imbalance, researchers have paid attention to worker, workplace, and employer heterogeneity. Crane (24), Gordon et al. (25), and Kim (26) have shown that employees can be owners or renters and this status affects their commuting distance, that is, jobs–housing balance. Although not directly dealing with jobs–housing balance, Kwan found that individual and household activity schedules and time budgets are critically important for influencing people’s spheres of activity (27 ). Giuliano and Small studied jobs–housing balance among workers in various occupations and found that service workers have the shortest average commutes (28). However, few researchers have looked at the jobs–housing balance of commuters by mode, that is, mode choice heterogeneity. This gap in the literature may have occurred for three reasons. First, con- ducting and processing surveys to obtain reliable information about individual-level jobs–housing balance and mode choice has not been cheap and has become increasingly expensive. In the United States, for instance, the cost of obtaining this information was $195 per household in 1995 and $411 per household in 2001 (based on a letter from the Committee to Review the Bureau of Transportation Statis- tics’ Survey Programs, to Ashisen Sen, U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on June 18, 2002, which is available at http://onlinepubs. trb.org/onlinepubs/reports/nhts.pdf). Second, driving is the dominant commute mode in most developed countries and thus comparatively more attention has been given to the jobs–housing balance of driving commuters in these countries, where most relevant studies have been conducted. Third, although com- muters who use different mode choices could face different degrees of jobs–housing imbalance (7 ), little research has been done on the causes and implications of these differences. In developing countries such as China, the study of jobs–housing balance of bus commuters is still quite relevant. A significant percentage (tens of millions) of resi- dents commutes by bus, even in leading cities. In Beijing, for instance, more than five million, or 28%, of the residents commuted by bus as of 2010 (based on the 2011 annual report of Beijing’s Transpor- tation Development, in Chinese, internally circulated report, Beijing Transportation Research Center). Given the large volume of bus commuters, there is a need to study the jobs–housing balance of bus commuters in developing countries. This study used smart card data processed by the Beijing Institute of City Planning to investigate the characteristics of the jobs–housing balance of bus commuters in Beijing. The study adopted the concepts Jobs–Housing Balance of Bus Commuters in Beijing Exploration with Large-Scale Synthesized Smart Card Data Jiangping Zhou and Ying Long J. Zhou, Department of Community and Regional Planning, Iowa State University, 146 College of Design, Ames, IA 50011. Y. Long, Beijing Urban Planning and Design Institute, 60 Nanlishi Road, Xicheng, Beijing 100045, China. Corresponding author: J. Zhou, zjp@iastate.edu.