Understanding public response to a congestion charge: A random-effects ordered logit approach

Public acceptance is consistently listed as having an enormous impact on the implementation and success of a congestion charge scheme. This paper investigates public acceptance of such a scheme in Australia. Surveys were conducted in Brisbane and Melbourne, the two fastest growing Australian cities. Using an ordered logit modeling approach, the survey data including stated preferences were analyzed to pinpoint the important factors influencing people’s attitudes to a congestion charge and, in turn, to their transport mode choices. To accommodate the nature of, and to account for the resulting heterogeneity of the panel data, random effects were considered in the models. As expected, this study found that the amount of the congestion charge and the financial benefits of implementing it have a significant influence on respondents’ support for the charge and on the likelihood of their taking a bus to city areas. However, respondents’ current primary transport mode for travelling to the city areas has a more pronounced impact. Meanwhile, respondents’ perceptions of the congestion charge’s role in protecting the environment by reducing vehicle emissions, and of the extent to which the charge would mean that they travelled less frequently to the city for shopping or entertainment, also have a significant impact on their level of support for its implementation. We also found and explained notable differences across two cities. Finally, findings from this study have been fully discussed in relation to the literature.     

Characteristics analysis for travel behavior of transportation hub passengers using mobile phone data

The travel behavior of passengers from the transportation hub within the city area is critical for travel demand analysis, security monitoring, and supporting traffic facilities designing. However, the traditional methods used to study the travel behavior of the passengers inside the city are time and labor consuming. The records of the cellular communication provide a potential huge data source for this study to follow the movement of passengers. This study focuses on the passengers’ travel behavior of the Hongqiao transportation hub in Shanghai, China, utilizing the mobile phone data. First, a systematic and novel method is presented to extract the trip information from the mobile phone data. Several key travel characteristics of passengers, including passengers traveling inside the city and between cities, are analyzed and compared. The results show that the proposed method is effective to obtain the travel trajectories of mobile phone users. Besides, the travel behavior of incity passengers and external passengers are quite different. Then, the correlation analysis of the passengers’ travel trajectories is provided to research the availability of the comprehensive area. Moreover, the results of the correlation analysis further indicate that the comprehensive area of the Hongqiao hub plays a relatively important role in passengers’ daily travel.

     

Spreading distinctive insignia benefits from mobile service: evidence from a mobile application of transportation

ABSTRACT

Mobile commerce (m-commerce) faces a growing array of client devices for which applications are designed. Applications developed for general consumer use must be compatible with a wide range of devices. This research investigates how perceived usefulness and enjoyment affect intention to use a mobile application service (T-Express). In this study, we formulate a commitment model from the perspective of the social identity and technology acceptance perspective. Empirical data were collected by conducting a field survey of users of T-Express from Taiwan High Speed Rail Corporation (THSRC) stations in Taiwan. The main findings of the study are that wireless technology provides great value to businesses when it allows consumers to access real-time data to make timely decisions that either decrease costs or increase revenues; and to achieve a higher intention to use mobile applications, there should be a clear communication process between mobile application and passenger. Our findings indicate that one of the more overt illustrations of the power of packaging symbolism involves package design strategies that serve to provide a radical new upscale positioning for the THSRC brand.     

Biases in response over time in a seven-day travel diary

Data from multi-day travel or activity diaries might be biased if recording inaccuracies and tendencies for respondents to skip certain types of trips or activities increases (or decreases) from day-to-day over the diary period. One objective of the research reported here is to test for such temporal biases in a seven-day travel diary. A second objective is to calculate correction factors which can be applied to the data in the case that biases are found. The analyses were conducted using regression and analysis-of-variance techniques. The variables investigated included total trips per day, total travel time per day, and trips per day by various modes (such as walking, car driver and car passenger). Results showed that most biases per capita statistics are due to increases over time in the percentage of respondents reporting no travel at all for an entire day. However, even after accounting for this bias by measuring statistics in terms of per mobile person, there remains a decrease over time of about 3.5 percent per day in the reporting of walking trips. This appears to be the main factor in the overall bias of about one percent per day in total trips per mobile person per day. No significant differences were found among population segments in terms of the levels of their biases.     

Subjective well-being in China: how much does commuting matter?

With rapidly increasing urbanization and motorization in China, the effect of commuting on residents’ subjective well-being (SWB) is likely growing. We used 13,261 individual, 124 city, and 401 neighbourhood samples from the 2014 China Labour-Force Dynamics Survey (CLDS 2014) and applied multilevel mixed-effects ordered probit regressions to investigate the relationship between commuting and SWB. We found huge differences between urban and rural areas in relation to commuting. Urban respondents’ daily average commuting time was 0.56 h while rural respondents’ daily average commuting time was 0.41 h. Further, the daily average commute time for residents living in cities with high urbanization rates (> 70%) was longer than for those living in cities with low urbanization rates (< 70%). The subjective well-being of residents who commute by walking or cycling was significantly lower than that of those who commute by other transportation modes. The regression results indicated that the longer the commute time, the lower the subjective well-being. Among residents who live in rural areas or cities with low urbanization, subjective well-being was more easily affected by commuting time. Commuting time was also found to influence residents’ job satisfaction and family life satisfaction, which in turn influence SWB. China’s current development mode ignores the traffic needs of vulnerable groups. Therefore, future traffic construction should increase its prioritization of these vulnerable transportation groups.

     

Tracking individual travel behaviour using mobile phones without information from base stations

Data collection methods that use mobile phones have been developed for tracking, monitoring, and analyzing travel behaviour. Previous methods using a Personal Handy Phone System (PHS) assumed that the location data of base stations were known. This paper shows a positioning method for a mobile object when base station location data are unavailable. Instead of base stations, signal strength vectors (reference vectors) are observed at many places in a target area. Mobile objects also observe a signal strength vector (target vector). A similarity index of reference and target vectors is used to calculate the location of a mobile object. This method tracked the ambulatory behaviour of tourists in an urban setting.     

Behavioral monitoring of public transport users through a mobile communication system

There are various activities now taking place in ITS research and development in Japan. Advanced information and communication technologies have been applied to improve public transport systems, as well as automated highway systems. In the first part of this paper, we show three examples of public transport systems recently developed in ITS environment. These transport systems are operated in local cities and towns in Japan: the travel information system for tram users in Hiroshima, the demand responsive bus system in Nakamura and the co‐operative use of electric vehicle in Ebina. In the second part of the paper, we explain how we have monitored individual passenger on public transport using cellular phones for location positioning. Location positioning technology for mobile object is essential for the operation and management of ITS supported public transport systems. Furthermore, such accurate and detailed positioning data can be utilized for travel behaviour analysis in demand modeling. The mobile instrument and monitoring systems shown in this paper can be combined with any of the case studies of ITS application to public transport systems.     

Allowing for heterogeneous decision rules in discrete choice models: an approach and four case studies

The study of respondent heterogeneity is one of the main areas of research in the field of choice modelling. The general emphasis is on variations across respondents in relative taste parameters while maintaining the assumption of homogeneous utility maximising decision rules. While recent work has allowed for differences in the utility specification across respondents in the context of looking at heterogeneous information processing strategies, the underlying assumption that all respondents employ the same choice paradigm remains. This is despite evidence in the literature that different paradigms work differently well on given datasets. In this article, we argue that such differences may in fact extend to respondents within a single dataset. We accommodate these differences in a latent class model, where individual classes make use of different underlying paradigms. We present four applications using three different datasets, showing mixtures between “standard” random utility maximisation models and lexicography based models, models with multiple reference points, elimination by aspects models and random regret minimisation models. In each of the case studies, the behavioural mixing model obtains significant gains in fit over the base structure where all respondents are hypothesised to use the same rule. The findings offer important further insights into the behavioural patterns of respondents. There is also evidence that what is retrieved as taste heterogeneity in standard models may in fact be heterogeneity in decision rules.     

Understanding travellers’ preferences for different types of trip destination based on mobile internet usage data

New mobility data sources like mobile phone traces have been shown to reveal individuals’ movements in space and time. However, socioeconomic attributes of travellers are missing in those data. Consequently, it is not possible to partition the population and have an in-depth understanding of the socio-demographic factors influencing travel behaviour. Aiming at filling this gap, we use mobile internet usage behaviour, including one’s preferred type of website and application (app) visited through mobile internet as well as the level of usage frequency, as a distinguishing element between different population segments. We compare the travel behaviour of each segment in terms of the preference for types of trip destinations. The point of interest (POI) data are used to cluster grid cells of a city according to the main function of a grid cell, serving as a reference to determine the type of trip destination. The method is tested for the city of Shanghai, China, by using a special mobile phone dataset that includes not only the spatial-temporal traces but also the mobile internet usage behaviour of the same users. We identify statistically significant relationships between a traveller’s favourite category of mobile internet content and more frequent types of trip destinations that he/she visits. For example, compared to others, people whose favourite type of app/website is in the “tourism” category significantly preferred to visit touristy areas. Moreover, users with different levels of internet usage intensity show different preferences for types of destinations as well. We found that people who used mobile internet more intensively were more likely to visit more commercial areas, and people who used it less preferred to have activities in predominantly residential areas.     

A long panel survey to elicit variation in preferences and attitudes in the choice of electric vehicles

This paper describes the methodology we set up to gather appropriate data to study the impact of real life experience with electric vehicles (EVs) over a relatively long period of time on individual preferences and attitudes. We used stated choices (SC) to elicit individual preferences because EVs and their associated charging infrastructure are not yet fully integrated onto the market. Furthermore, to measure the extent to which the experience of using an EV may affect individual preferences and attitudes, we set up a “long panel” survey, where data was gathered before and after individuals experienced an EV in real life during a three-month period. We also measured attitudinal effects (AE) that might affect the choice of an EV by individuals. To our knowledge, this represents the first example of a “long panel” SC/AE and the first attempt to measure the formation of preferences and attitudes for this emerging product. Our results show that preferences and attitudes are indeed affected by real life experience. In the SC experiment, the respondents only chose the EV half as often as compared to the situation where they had not yet tried it. Furthermore, we measured a change in attitude for statements regarding the use of EVs. On the whole, respondents got a more positive view of the EV driving performance and this change is significantly greater for women than for men. However, respondents expressed more concern about being able to maintain current mobility with an EV. The data gathered in this survey should also serve to analyse the changes generated by direct experience with EVs, and eventually to formulate and estimate advanced discrete choice models that allow insights into factors relevant for improved understanding of market behaviour.     

Combining web and face-to-face in travel surveys: comparability challenges?

Response rates for household travel surveys are tending to fall, and it seems unlikely that this trend will be reversed in the future. In recent years, travel data collection methods have evolved in order to obtain reliable data that are sufficiently detailed to feed increasingly complex models, and in order to integrate new technologies into survey protocols (Internet, GPS??). Combining different media is an obvious low-cost way of improving data quality as it increases the overall response rate. But the question of the comparability of data over time and between different survey modes remains unresolved. This paper makes a comparative analysis between the travel behaviours of web-based survey respondents and respondents to a face-to-face interview. The data were obtained from the 2006 Lyon conurbation household travel survey. Our analysis shows that the Internet respondents reported fewer trips per day than the face-to-face respondents (3.00 vs. 4.04 daily trips), and that the differences between the two groups varied according to the travel mode and trip purpose. While part of this difference can be explained by socioeconomic disparities (the Internet respondents had a specific profile) we cannot exclude the possibility of under-reporting due to the web medium.     

Location privacy preferences: A survey-based analysis of consumer awareness,trade-off and decision-making

With the advent and rapid dissemination of location-sensing information technology, the issue of location information privacy is receiving growing attention. Perhaps of greatest concern is ensuring that potential users of mobile Information and Communications Technologies (e.g., Location-Based Services and Intelligent Transportation Systems) are comfortable with the levels of privacy protection afforded them, as well as with the benefits they will receive in return for providing private location information. This paper explores the concepts of privacy risks, benefits, willingness to trade, and compensation in relationship to mobile and locational technologies using a stated preference survey to ascertain areas of interest in determining the trade-offs that consumers will be willing to make in return for mobility enhancements. Analysis of the survey leads to findings that while respondents believe that sharing data in the mobile environment may pose privacy risks, they do not generally take steps necessary to address these risks; that privacy preferences are impacted by a range of factors, including both personal and contextual considerations (such as factors arising from their specific situation at the time of information seeking); and that willingness to trade private location data is dependent upon a number of factors related to context, personal characteristics, expected benefits and degree of trust in the collecting organization.     

The carbon footprint of business travel in the knowledge-intensive service sector

We explore the travel needs and patterns, and the corresponding carbon footprint, of small service organizations during different phases of knowledge-intensive business processes, and compare the results with the priorities given to travel-related goals by staff. We apply a combination of focus group data, mobile positioning, and individual follow-up interviews as study methods. The need for physical travel is determined by a combination of the perceived potential for knowledge creation and transfer offered by each trip, the strength of interpersonal relationships in business networks, and the significance of the travel goal in terms of economic sustainability. The priorities given to travel goals reflect the environmental load of business travel only in domestic contexts, where executing core business processes accounted for the highest carbon footprint. We propose the ways in which the management of business interactions could take into account sociotechnical environment and social recognition of low-carbon communication and travel modes.     

广西高速公路信息中心应急救援系统简介

文章介绍了在广西壮族自治区高速公路管理局所辖路段,利用移动通信与定位技术、地理信息技术,建设集呼救点定位、紧急救援调度、公众出行信息服务等功能于一体的信息中心应急救援系统的方法。     

The role of alternative fuel vehicles: Using behavioral and sensor data to model hierarchies in travel

Greater adoption and use of alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs) can be environmentally beneficial and reduce dependence on gasoline. The use of AFVs vis-à-vis conventional gasoline vehicles is not well understood, especially when it comes to travel choices and short-term driving decisions. Using data that contains a sufficiently large number of early AFV adopters (who have overcome obstacles to adoption), this study explores differences in use of AFVs and conventional gasoline vehicles (and hybrid vehicles). The study analyzes large-scale behavioral data integrated with sensor data from global positioning system devices, representing advances in large-scale data analytics. Specifically, it makes sense of data containing 54,043,889 s of speed observations, and 65,652 trips made by 2908 drivers in 5 regions of California. The study answers important research questions about AFV use patterns (e.g., trip frequency and daily vehicle miles traveled) and driving practices. Driving volatility, as one measure of driving practice, is used as a key metric in this study to capture acceleration, and vehicular jerk decisions that exceed certain thresholds during a trip. The results show that AFVs cannot be viewed as monolithic; there are important differences within AFV use, i.e., between plug-in hybrids, battery electric, or compressed natural gas vehicles. Multi-level models are particularly appropriate for analysis, given that the data are nested, i.e., multiple trips are made by different drivers who reside in various regions. Using such models, the study also found that driving volatility varies significantly between trips, driver groups, and regions in California. Some alternative fuel vehicles are associated with calmer driving compared with conventional vehicles. The implications of the results for safety, informed consumer choices and large-scale data analytics are discussed.     

Integrating vehicle positioning data in quality control programs in public transit: a European perspective

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to show how vehicle positioning data collected through global positioning systems (GPS) or similar applications can be used in quality control programs of public transit operators to better assess the quality and performance of transportation services, and improve them. The paper describes the concept of the integration between quality control programs and vehicle monitoring systems, presents a case study where the concept has been successfully implemented, and discusses the benefits from the adoption of such an approach. The implementation of the concept is characterized by efficiency, accuracy, reliability, and optimization: efficiency in terms of data flow; accuracy and reliability in terms of quality and performance indicator values; and optimization in terms of optimum use of the available information technology infrastructure. The paper places particular emphasis on aspects relating to the interface between urban transportation services, vehicle positioning technology, and policy-making.     

Residential built environment and walking activity: Empirical evidence of Jane Jacobs’ urban vitality

This study intends to empirically verify Jacobs’ urban vitality theory, which was based on the observations of her New York City neighborhood in the mid-20th century. To examine the relationship between the residential built environment and walking activity, we used telephone survey data consisting of 1823 valid samples from across Seoul, a city characterized by a high population density and a well-established public transportation system. Respondents were asked questions about their residential location, their demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, and their walking activities. This study then used geographic information systems to measure objective indicators of built environment variables within 500-meter buffer areas based on the home addresses of the respondents. Then, this study constructed multilevel regression models with walking activity as the dependent variable. Our results indicated that walking activity is associated with Jacobs’ six conditions for urban vitality, including land use mix, density, block size, building age, accessibility, and border vacuums.     

The role of individual characteristics in car ownership shortly after relationship dissolution

The dissolution of a relationship is a life event that often coincides with many other changes in life, such as a decline in income level or household size or a change in place of residence. This study aims to provide more insight into the ways in which circumstances shortly following the disruption of a relationship affect travel behaviour. Register data that combines information on the Dutch population, income and vehicle registration are used to understand how personal situations that are closely related to relationship disruption affect car ownership. The study shows that several characteristics of singles and single partners shortly after a breakup negatively affect car ownership. For instance, a relatively low income level, unemployment, living in a city or a residential move all affect car ownership negatively. This study focuses on the role of circumstances shortly after relationship disruption, demonstrating the importance of such an event.