城市轨道交通无缝线路应力放散施工及运营保障措施

城市轨道交通无缝线路应力放散施工面临有效作业时间不充裕、对供电及信号等轨旁设备影响大、可能影响次日运营等困难。以北京地区某实际工程为例,采用细致筹备、"可视化"现场分工、全方位的专业保障等措施,安全高效地完成全线的无缝线路应力放散。并详细介绍了城市轨道交通运营期的无缝线路应力放散和调整施工组织及供电、信号系统保障措施。     

Identifying transit deserts for low-income commuters in Wuhan Metropolitan Area,China

The rapid expansion of many Chinese cities has put increasing pressure on existing urban transportation systems. Using Baidu users’ location data, this research analyzes the spatial patterns of the transit systems and commuter flows in Wuhan Metropolitan Area, China, and identifies transit deserts affecting low-income commuters. The results show that, first, most transit demand are generated by trips between neighboring communities, while large transit supply tends to occur between distant communities in the region. Second, about 11.21% of low-income commuters are affected by transit deserts in Wuhan Metropolitan Area. In detail, 61.30% of them commute within the city centers and 36.06% of them commute within the suburbs. Only about 2.64% of them actually travel between city centers and suburbs. Third, for low-income suburban commuters, transit deserts occur when they are surrounded by low-density transit infrastructure and low-frequency transit services, which makes it very difficult for them to connect to rest of the region. However, for low-income commuters residing in the city centers, transit deserts are mainly caused by the large numbers of transit-dependent people competing for limited transit supply in the areas. This research explores the relationship between transit systems and commuting demand in a major Chinese metropolitan area. The findings could help guide future transit system planning in China and beyond.     

Optimal bus fleet management strategy for emissions reduction

Transportation is a major cause for environmental degradation via exhaust emissions. For many transit-oriented metropolitan areas, bus trips often constitute a sizeable mode share. Managing the bus fleet, in particular updating buses to comply with the newer emissions standards, therefore, can have a substantial impact on transportation-induced air quality. This paper presents the approach of remaining life additional benefit–cost (RLABC) analysis for maximising the total net benefit by either early-retiring or retrofitting the current bus fleet within their lifespans. By referring to the net benefits for different bus types estimated by RLABC analysis, the most beneficial management scheme for the current bus fleet can be identified. Optimal bus fleet management (BFM) models based on the RLABC analysis for the operator and the government are developed. Then a government subsidy plan is produced to achieve win–win solutions, which will offer efficient and flexible management schemes. To illustrate the approach, the largest bus company in Hong Kong, which carries more than 23% of the total trips in Hong Kong, is taken as a case study example. Instead of adopting a fixed retirement plan, such as replacing buses at the age of 17 as is currently practised, the proposed method develops an optimal BFM scheme that progressively phases out buses or retrofits them. This study produces promising results to demonstrate the large benefit of this approach for optimal bus fleet management.     

Cost-effectiveness of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from High-Speed Rail and urban transportation projects in California

A rising trend in state and federal transportation finance is to invest capital dollars into projects which reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, a key metric for comparing projects, the cost-effectiveness of GHG emissions reductions, is highly dependent on the cost-benefit methodology employed in the analysis. Our analysis comparing California High-Speed Rail and three urban transportation projects shows how four different accounting framings bring wide variations in cost per metric tonne of GHG emissions reduced. In our analysis, life-cycle GHG emissions are joined with full cost accounting to better understand the benefits of cap-and-trade investments. Considering only public subsidy for capital, none of the projects appear to be a cost-effective means to reduce GHG emissions (i.e., relative to the current price of GHG emissions in California’s cap-and-trade program at $12.21 per tonne). However, after adjusting for the change in private costs users incur when switching from the counterfactual mode (automobile or aircraft) to the mode enabled by the project, all investments appear to reduce GHG emissions at a net savings to the public. Policy and decision-makers who consider only the capital cost of new transportation projects can be expected to incorrectly assess alternatives and indirect benefits (i.e., how travelers adapt to the new mass transit alternative) should be included in decision-making processes.     

Identifying preferences for public transport investments under a constrained budget

As urban areas face increasing demands for new transport infrastructure to promote a sustainable future with an increasing reality of constrained government budgets, the debate on whether we should focus on rail or bus-based investments continues unabated in many jurisdictions. Associated with the debate is an emotional (or ideological) bias by communities in favour of one mode, especially rail, which carries much sway at the political level as if there is no budget constraint. This paper presents a stated choice experiment to investigate this context as two unlabelled options described by 20 potential drivers of community preferences for improved public transport, where each choice scenario is conditioned on an estimated construction cost and a total annual transport infrastructure budget for the relevant geographical jurisdiction. This is followed by a labelling of each alternative to reveal whether the option is bus rapid transit (BRT) or light rail (LRT) and to establish whether this additional information influences preference revision. Data is collected in all eight capital cities of Australia in mid 2014. Mixed logit models with heteroscedastic conditioning in terms of the cost of the project infrastructure and whether the alternative is labelled BRT or LRT, provide new evidence on the nature and extent of community modal bias in a budget-constrained choice setting. The conclusions are twofold. On the one hand, if a fully compensatory choice rule is assumed (as is common in all previous modal comparison studies), LRT is predominantly preferred over BRT despite budgetary constraints, similarities in quality of service attributes and the opportunity to choose a greater network coverage for a given construction cost. However, when we allow for attribute non-attendance (a semi-compensatory choice rule), the modal bias is no longer a significant driver of preferences.     

Planning hierarchical urban transit systems for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions

Public transit systems with high occupancy can reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions relative to low-occupancy transportation modes, but current transit systems have not been designed to reduce environmental impacts. This motivates the study of the benefits of design and operational approaches for reducing the environmental impacts of transit systems. For example, transit agencies may replace level-of-service (LOS) by vehicle miles traveled (VMT) as a criterion in evaluating design and operational changes. In previous work, we explored the unintended consequences of lowering transit LOS on emissions in a single-technology transit system. Herein, we extend the analysis to account for a more realistic case: a transit system with a hierarchical structure (trunk and feeder lines) providing service to a city where demand is elastic. By considering the interactions between the trunk and the feeder systems, we provide a quantitative basis for designing and operating integrated urban transit systems that can reduce GHG emissions and societal costs. We find that highly elastic transit demand may cancel emission reduction potentials resulting from lowering LOS, due to demand shifts to lower occupancy vehicles. However, for mass transit modes, these potentials are still significant. Transit networks with buses, bus rapid transit or light rail as trunk modes should be designed and operated near the cost-optimal point when the demand is highly elastic, while this is not required for metro. We find that the potential for unintended consequences increases with the size of the city. Our results are robust to uncertainties in the costs and emissions parameters.     

Technical and environmental effects of biodiesel use in local public transport

Biodiesel use in local public transport could be especially significant in improving air quality in cities. The purpose of the experiments described in this paper was to evaluate the various (10, 20 and 50%) blends of biodiesel with diesel in the context of the engine and pollution aspects. As regards the experimental use of these findings on municipal buses, these experiments were the first reference in Hungary. The ages (15–20 years) and types of buses (Ikarus-280, Ikarus-260) used in the experiments are still common vehicles in Hungarian public transport. During our measurements, there was a significant difference between the change in fuel consumption of articulated and solo buses in traffic when compared to test bench measurements. The proportion of the engine performance reduction is nearly the same as that for biodiesel share in the blends. Most pollutants were decreasing (both at idle and full rpm), but this reduction is not directly proportional to the increase of the blending percentage. However, as for CO₂, emission increase was observed in the case of idle rpm in comparison to normal diesel operation, even though this phenomenon was not due to biodiesel use, but the catalytic converter and the fact that biodiesel was used for the first time in the engine concerned.     

Mathematically calculating the transit time of cargo through a liner shipping network with various trans-shipment policies

This paper derives the mathematical expressions for the transit time of cargo through a liner shipping network. Main efforts are devoted to deriving the calculation expressions of the connection time of cargo during trans-shipment. For the forward and many-to-one trans-shipment policies, we conduct a minor correction towards the expressions in existing studies to improve the completeness. Meanwhile, we propose an alternative but more straightforward calculation method for connection time which bypasses the complicated inductive argument in existing studies. Then we introduce two new trans-shipment policies: backward trans-shipment and one-to-many trans-shipment, and mathematically calculate the corresponding connection times. Numerical experiments also deliver some managerial insights into the effectiveness of backward trans-shipment in transit time control.     

Drivers of transit service loyalty considering heterogeneity between user segments

Users’ loyalty to public transit service is fundamental to promote its popularity in the transportation market. A four-step analytical framework is advanced to investigate the importance of service attributes that heterogeneous transit user segments place on their public transit service loyalty, measured in terms of overall satisfaction and re-use intention. Critical service attributes perceived by transit users that are relevant for loyalty enhancement are explicitly determined, which vary between user segments. It is suggested that the design of strategies aimed to promote the use of public transit by increasing user loyalty towards transit service be targeted at specific attributes that contribute most to loyalty and specific user segments whose original loyalty level is significantly different to others.     

The effect of crowding on public transit user travel behavior in a large-scale public transportation system through modeling daily variations

In this paper, the crowding effect in a transit vehicle is modeled in a time-expanded network that considers the daily variation in passenger flows. The study models the daily variation of in-vehicle crowding in a real large-scale transit system. A transit assignment for this real network is modeled and implemented by constructing a crowding cost function that follows the valuation of crowding and by using the reliable shortest path finding method. The direct application of the crowding model to a real network for the Utah Transit Authority indicates that crowd modeling with multi-user classes could influence public transportation system planning and affect the revenues of transit agencies. Moreover, the addition of the disutility factor, crowding, does not always appear to cause an increase in disutility for transit users.