Use of the analytic hierarchy process to evaluate transit fare system

The transportation fare system influences the mobility of a region and the life quality of its inhabitants. This study aims to evaluate a region's optimal fare system by using the analytic hierarchy process, based on a survey among transportation experts, divided into three categories: operators, professors/consultants and government officials. The results are presented divided by category and overall, and the performance of the most important relative criteria to establish a fare system is determined. The most important criterion according to all the selected experts was the fare price, with 21.5%. The fare system determined as the best was distance/zone (31.1%) and the worst was a flat fare system (7.2%). In addition, we show the influence of the fare price criterion in each fare system through sensitivity charts and highlight its importance for all three groups of experts to evaluate the fare system.     

Where to dispose of urban green waste? Transportation planning for the maintenance of public green spaces

Urban green spaces provide various social and environmental benefits that strongly improve the quality of life in a city. Municipalities are responsible for maintaining their green spaces in order to preserve these potentials. This paper supports municipalities in planning the transportation and disposal logistics of the green waste that is produced by the maintenance activities. The approach combines ecological issues like the seasonality of green waste generation and different types of biomass with economically driven decision making. We show how to determine cost efficient transportation plans for the disposal logistics and how to capture the seasonality of green waste generation when booking capacities at disposal facilities. It is also shown how a municipality can select the disposal facilities to cooperate with in a competitive environment where facilities offer capacities at differing conditions, as is the case for disposal sites that dump the green waste and for conversion plants that use the biomass for producing renewable energy. We illustrate the approach using case data of a major city in Germany.     

Emergence of resilience as a framework for state Departments of Transportation (DOTs) in the United States

State Departments of Transportation (DOTs) in the United States are responsible for a large portfolio of transportation modes and services, including passenger and freight systems. These responsibilities include operations under routine conditions and during incidents and events that result from various natural and human-caused hazards. During unexpected events, disruptions and reductions in service result in requiring the reallocation and reassignment of personnel, modal, and economic resources. To better prevent and respond to the effects of service disruptions, the concept of resilience has emerged as an important framework, within which, DOTs across the United States are using to plan for the occurrence of threats. In this paper, the key findings of recent reviews of literature and practice related to resilience among state DOTs in the United States are summarized. The review effort focused on a range of risks faced by transportation agencies including climate change, terrorism, cyber-attacks, and aging infrastructure and the ways in which DOTs are confronting them in practice. The topics of this paper range from the fundamental, including definitions of transportation resilience; to the more complex such as examinations of risk, vulnerability and threats; to the most sophisticated topics including administrative-level efforts to conceptualize evolving transportation planning and policies within a resilience framework.     

The underground economy: Tracking the higher-order economic impacts of the São Paulo Subway System

Over one million workers commute daily to São Paulo City center, using different modes of transportation. The São Paulo subway network reaches 74.2 km of length and is involved in around 20% of the commuting trips by public transportation, enhancing mobility and productivity of workers. This paper uses an integrated framework to assess the higher-order economic impacts of the existing underground metro infrastructure. We consider links between mobility, accessibility and labor productivity in the context of a detailed metropolitan system embedded in the national economy. Simulation results from a spatial computable general equilibrium model integrated to a transportation model suggest positive economic impacts that go beyond the city limits. While 32% of the impacts accrue to the city of São Paulo, the remaining 68% benefit other municipalities in the metropolitan area (11%), in the State of São Paulo (12.0%) and in the rest of the country (45%).     

Demi-flexible operating policies to promote the performance of public transit in low-demand areas

The efforts of providing attractive transport service to residents in sparse communities have previously focused on operating flexible transit services. This paper identifies a new category of transit policies, called demi-flexible operating policies, to fill the gap between flexible transit services and conventional fixed-route systems. The passenger cost function is defined as the performance measure of transit systems and the analytic work is performed based on a real-world flag-stop transit service, in which we compare its system performance with another two comparable systems, the fixed-route and flex-route services, at expected and unexpected demand levels in order to be closer to reality. In addition, the dynamic-station policy is introduced to assist the flex-route service to better deal with unexpectedly high demand. Experiments demonstrate the unique advantages of demi-flexible operating policies in providing affordable, efficient, and reliable transport service in low-demand operating environments and this work is helpful to optimize the unifying framework for designing public transit in suburban and rural areas.     

旅游交通规划成套技术探究

从行业、角度、目标和路径四大方面更新旅游交通规划理念,建立时空、资源、体验三大模块规划体系,达到旅游交通网络构建、功能拓展、配套完善的效果。在此规划体系基础上,根据不同地区特色,突出主题品牌设计,创新产品供给,紧密结合当地规划与落地方案,形成了丰富的规划应用成果,为交旅融合快速发展奠定理论基础。     

Integrated planning of static and dynamic charging infrastructure for electric vehicles

This paper investigates the optimal deployment of static and dynamic charging infrastructure considering the interdependency between transportation and power networks. Static infrastructure means plug-in charging stations, while the dynamic counterpart refers to electrified roads or charging lanes enabled by charging-while-driving technology. A network equilibrium model is first developed to capture the interactions among battery electric vehicles’ (BEVs) route choices, charging plans, and the prices of electricity. A mixed-integer bi-level program is then formulated to determine the deployment plan of charging infrastructure to minimize the total social cost of the coupled networks. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate travel and charging plans of BEV drivers and the competitiveness of static and dynamic charging infrastructure. The numerical results on three networks suggest that (1) for individual BEV drivers, the choice between using charging lanes and charging stations is more sensitive to parameters including value of travel time, service fee markup, and battery size, but less sensitive to the charging rates and travel demand; (2) deploying more charging lanes is favorable for transportation networks with sparser topology while more charging stations can be more preferable for those denser networks.     

Extending Time to Collision for probabilistic reasoning in general traffic scenarios

Vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems allow vehicles to share state information with one another to improve safety and efficiency of transportation networks. One of the key applications of such a system is in the prediction and avoidance of collisions between vehicles. If a method to do this is to succeed it must be robust to measurement uncertainty and to loss of communication links. The method should also be general enough that it does not rely on constraints on vehicle motion for the accuracy of its predictions. It should work for all interactions between vehicles and not just a select subset. This paper presents a method to calculate Time to Collision for unconstrained vehicle motion. This metric is gated using a novel technique based on relative vehicle motion that we call “looming”. Finally, these ideas are integrated into a probabilistic framework that accounts for uncertainty in vehicle state and loss of vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Together this work represents a new way of considering vehicle collision estimation. These algorithms are validated on data collected from real world vehicle trials.     

一种基于视频虚拟检测线的交通流参数检测方法

实时交通流参数检测在智能交通系统中起着重要的作用。参数检测有多种方式,其中基于图像处理的视频车辆检测方式近年来发展很快,由于它具有检测区域大、系统设置灵活等突出的优点,已成为智能交通系统领域的一个研究热点。车辆的检测基于车道,在每个车道设置两条虚拟检测线来检测交通流参数,虚拟检测线的作用类似于电磁感应线圈。系统通过对视频虚拟检测线的预处理将二维的数字图像转化成一维的检测信号,减小了运算量,降低了运算负荷。提出的基于视频虚拟检测线特征的交通流参数检测系统已经在PC机上用VC 6.0实现,并对不同典型天气条件下的交通流视频进行了实验,实验结果表明该系统具有较高的车流量统计精度。     

一种混合评价模型在综合客运枢纽客流组织服务水平评价中的应用

提出将模糊综合评判法与决策中的模糊层次分析法和熵技术结合，建立混合熵权模糊综合评价决策模型，用于城市综合客运枢纽的客流服务水平的评价。此模型兼顾主观偏好和客观实际，结果表明该模型具有合理性与有效性。