Transport Policy - Science topic

Dear Prof. Simoni!

Thank you for sharing the info. I will forward this opportunity to SimAnalytics Ltd.:

- I know co-founder Head of Research Dr. Lauri Lättilä, he is a former teammate and co-author of mine.

Sincerely, Bulcsu Szekely

UITP, the International Association of Public Transport, has just released this very helpful factsheet summarizing best practices for public transport operators to deal with Covid 19 and similar infectious diseases. The guidelines reflect practical experiences and are rooted in reality. https://www.uitp.org/sites/default/files/cck-focus-papers-files/Corona%20Virus_EN.pdf

See these papers:

Check out their methods of comparison.

Hope it helps

Thank you a lot for your quick reply Asim! I've worked before with GIS and I think it's great to visualize different modes of transport, their interrelations, conflict or expansions points etc. but I was more looking towards a tool/concept to organize the actors who have a substantial impact on policy planning & implementation (political & economical institutions, civil servants...). I was thinking more of ANT mapping, but with the emphasis on power relations. I have never done it before so I was hoping for some hints, examples or recommendations.

Research conducted over the years in California has found that walking distance depends on whether it takes place at the origin (residential) end of a trip or at the destination (employment or other) end. Cervero found, for example, that walking distance from rail station to office followed a steeply dropping curve; offices adjacent to rail stations saw 20-30% of employees arriving by rail; at 100m, that figure was about 15%; at 250m it was down to 5%, and at 400m it was down to 2.5%, an order of magnitude difference with adjacent properties (it is worth noting that no mode choice component of any Regional Travel Model in the US with which I am familiar bothers to take these differences into account; the San Diego model, for example, assigns a single average walking score to any employment site located within a Transportation Analysis Zone whose centroid is within a specified straight-line distance from the station, leading to gross distortions in ridership projections).

The question, here, though, is about residential access. Other research in California, I recall, showed a straight, gently sloping line, with maximum ridership generated adjacent to the station and ridership declining until a distance of about 800m. Additional research has shown that people report a willingness to drive up to 2 miles to access a park-and-ride facility; beyond that, willingness to drive drops off significantly.

As I hadn't heard anything by last week, I contacted the publisher, Elsevier. It turned out that the paper never had been sent to any referees at all (!) Luckily the editor managed to get to fast reviews and I'm now in the process of revising it. The lesson is, do not assume that anything is happening if you don't hear anything in months.

we all have got great information. Thank you for asking such an interesting question.

Dear Guo,

Very interesting question. We have done a research on this topic measuring social and spatial inequalities change in urban area after a new transport measure. See Souche, Mercier, Ovtracht in Urban Studies 2016 (you can find the paper in my page researchgate) . We have use the same methodology for evaluating the impact of a new subway line (but not published). Best. Stephanie

Well, TOD per se is a huge thing.  Do you want to work on BRT effect on sustainability, economic benefits, land uses and urban growth patterns, traffic congestion or environmental degradation? The chosen component will define your methodology.  

"Transit Oriented Development: Making it Happen" by Curtis and Lenne is a good read. 

I think that transport costs matter for all island economies, but to different extent. It depends on specialization. If economy is a tax haven (see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_British_Virgin_Islands ) and rich are saving money in its banks, transport cost will not matter. If it is a unique touristic resort - like Galapagos - tourists will come even if its is expensive to travel.

But probably you are thinking more about Azores for Portugal or Canaries islands for Spain. If a high fraction of GDP is just normal production, agricultural or natural resources, then transport cost matter. And public policies (like transport subsidy) may matter a lot.

I think BRT is significantly lower infrastructure and operating costs and greater potential network flexibility. One book you can read call Bus rapid transit: a review of recent advances by Lloyd wright on 2011. 

Historically speaking, another policy aspect to look into is state support of national airlines for the purpose of building a national identity. In the process of improving air transport infrastructure, image-building objectives could be fulfilled--or at least that's what the objective was. I link to an article discussing such efforts in Southeast Asia.

Hello!

Regulations depend on problem scale.  Some regulations neccessary in big cities are useless in small cities.  I understand you cope mainly with freight transport - the questions for regulations to be asked are:

- limiting freight mobility, in other words instead of one truck delivering coca-cola and another delivering pepsi cola to the same shop in a city center you might put limits so that both products travel from a logistic center in the city outskirts in one truck, reducing the truck's burden on the city.  This is done by quotas for trucks or for shops.  Swiss have a lot of experience with that

- limiting time, for example outside peak hour.  In Leszno in city center their is a paid parking zone, deliveries can park free of charge until 11AM, later if the deliver, they have to pay for parking during delivery

- regulations where the delivery van or truck can stop.  Drivers will want to park as close as possible, but there can be limits put to that.  On the other hand you should make sure the van can park within a reasonable distance, otherwise you can be sure the driver will brake the rules

- for trucks regulations concerning which street they use to reach their destination.

If you have questions or want to work with details, send me an email to: jeremi.rychlewski@put.poznan.pl ... and be patient.

Does the Journal of Transport History (Manchester University Press) give anything useful?

'Ways of the World' by M.G. Lay (ISBN 1 875368 05 1) includes references to the US and miscellaneous examples from around the world.  Otherwise, most of my library refers to Britain or Australia.

Many aspects of discrete choice are made more difficult when there are correlations between the choices / attributes of the options (often results in probit rather than more elementary logit formulation). Thus, for example the presence of more buses may lower traffic count, but the stop / start pattern of transit could make the free flow travel time only an approximate measure of the link performance.

I recommend "Route Choice: Wayfinding in Transport Networks" by P.H.L. Bovy and E Stern published by Kluwer in 1990. The section called "elements" around p 100 is very good on the issue you raise. I'd say that the bottom line would that congestion (no matter what form it takes) is going to provoke modification of routes, and that the resulting equilibrium traffic assignment follows fundamental traffic engineering principles (user equilibrium). Whether you can get some additional quality into the behavioral predictions by altering the mix of vehicle types is probably going to take some further digging.

I can suggest you an interesting document made by the Spanish Social Services Ministry. It has chapter focused on accesibility and transport. The only problem is that is in Spanish...

Fines is the most effective method to improve road safety these days in my country.

In my earlier response the Reference was incomplete.

Reference

Coyle, JJ , E.J. Bardi and R.A. Novack 1999 Transportation 5e. South Western.

Also see:

Hoyle, B.S. 1973 Transport and Development. Macmillan

Uk highways agency have a road safety audit before construction during construction and after construction of a scheme

Take a look at this selection of articles on cycling, from Taylor & Francis (free access until 30th June 2014). Hope you could find some useful inspirations.

Maybe my paper can help