Trajectories and transitions: mobility after parenthood

Transportation - Life events, such as childbirth or retirement, provide a crucial opportunity in which an individual’s habitual travel routines are disrupted and they may be especially...     

Coastal Tourist Interest in Value-Added,Aquaculture-Based,Culinary Tourism Opportunities

Despite increasing focus on sustainable aquaculture investment in the U.S. coastal zones, the aquaculture industry continues to face skepticism among consumers due to perceived negative environmental impacts, and health and food safety concerns. Partnering with culinary tourism and local food promotion efforts has potential for improving public outreach about the benefits of aquaculture, especially in coastal destinations where sustainable marine aquaculture and tourism are both occurring. Culinary tourism implies that local foods reflect the local livelihood and culture, and may be important to the tourist's experience. Aquaculture is becoming increasingly valuable to coastal destinations for assuring the steady availability of local seafood to meet demand and retaining commercial fisheries as a means to differentiate themselves to tourists. This study examined the role of subjective knowledge and attitude about aquaculture, and their effect on intention to participate in value-added culinary aquaculture tourism experiences. The study found that tourists' subjective knowledge and attitude about aquaculture influenced intentions to participate in culinary aquaculture tourism. In order for farmers or tour operators to be successful in diversifying with value-added culinary aquaculture, attention needs to be paid to educating consumers, which may be possible through strategic partnerships with tourism organizations, chefs, and restaurants.     

Factors influencing travel mode choice among families with young children (aged 0–4): a review of the literature

Life events, such as the birth of a child, disrupt habitual travel behaviour and provide a valuable opportunity to influence the adoption of sustainable transport practices. However, in order for sustainable travel practices to be adopted, an understanding is required of the factors that influence travel mode choice among families with young children. Research in this field is particularly timely given many in the millennial generation, a comparably large cohort, are approaching this life stage. This comprehensive literature review develops a framework of factors influencing travel mode choice among families with young children. The findings reveal a multitude of factors influence decisions about mode choice, and, in particular, encourage travel by car, when travelling with young children. The paper concludes with an agenda for future research about travel among families with young children, a largely overlooked group of transport users.     

A proposal for cost-related and market-oriented train running charges

This paper examines some key aspects of a charging system for promoting railway transport, including charges reflecting a clear relationship with costs (transparency) and charges reflecting the quality of the infrastructure manager's service. Train running charges recover track-related costs and can help to develop a charging system that meets these requirements. To orient train running charges to the market, a method for processing track maintenance and renewal costs is proposed whereby the quality of the service provided by an infrastructure is measured according to its utility to the railway undertaking. To achieve transparency, a single indicator is used for cost planning and the subsequent levying of costs on railway undertakings. The paper includes an example of how proposed train running charges would be calculated according to data from 14 European countries. The example shows that short-distance trains generate the lowest maintenance and renewal costs, followed by long-distance trains and freight trains.     

Cultural Models of the Coast in Australia: Toward Sustainability

Cultural models of the coast affect—and are affected by—our marine ethics, frameworks for coastal ownership, and management practices. The coast can be seen as an ecosystem with intrinsic values, a commodity that can be bought and sold, a community place where people meet, a landscape with aesthetic appeal, a productive system that generates profits, a property to be managed, or a spiritual realm that relates to proper order and reverence. Each of these cultural constructions interacts with the others and this can create conflicts over rights and responsibilities. Each construction has implications for who should manage the coast, to what ends, and by what means. This article explores the negative and positive implications of seven cultural models to the Australian coast and makes suggestions about the value of Australian Indigenous and sustainability perspectives to a durable human relationship with the coast. Examples are drawn from recent coastal developments in Australia, such as Native Title debates, the marine protected area process, and Coastcare.     

SCUBA Diver Specialization and Behavior Norms at Coral Reefs

SCUBA diving is an increasingly popular activity that provides a number of benefits to coastal communities. However, the sustainability of recreational diving on coral reefs is largely dependent on the health of reef ecosystems. Divers can minimize their impacts to coral reefs through responsible diving behaviors, which are in part guided by social norms. The behavioral obligation and sanction components of twelve diving behaviors were determined for Florida Keys divers throughout the course of a year. Recognizing that recreationists are not homogenous, these norms were compared according to diver specialization level. Specialized divers felt a stronger obligation not to touch corals and to pick up garbage from the sea floor than did less specialized divers. Specialized divers also reported they would feel greater embarrassment for losing buoyancy control, touching corals, taking pieces of dead corals, or touching marine mammals. The findings point to a connection between specialization level and social norms, and a relationship to ensuring continued reef health.     

Effect of critical incidents on public transport satisfaction and loyalty: an Ordinal Probit SEM-MIMIC approach

Transportation - Supplying public transport systems with high levels of service quality is fundamental for retaining users and attracting new ones. Policies that improve transit service quality...     

Parenthood and cars: A weakening relationship?

Transportation - A wide body of research supports the notion that the travel behaviour of families with children tends to be car dependent. Yet recent literature suggests a more varied set of...     

A Stated Preference Experiment for Measuring Service Quality in Public Transport

Abstract

This paper develops a Stated Preference (SP) experiment that provides a way to measure service quality in public transport. The paper introduces an empirical procedure for optimising the SP experiment. This procedure permits the identification of the choice alternatives defining the experiment by simulating the choices of a user sample. By using the data collected from an experimental survey, a Multinomial Logit model was calibrated. This model is a way of identifying the importance of service quality attributes on global customer satisfaction and calculating a Service Quality Index, which provides an operationally appealing measure of current or potential service effectiveness.     

Real-time traffic estimation using data expansion

This paper presents a method for estimating missing real-time traffic volumes on a road network using both historical and real-time traffic data. The method was developed to address urban transportation networks where a non-negligible subset of the network links do not have real-time link volumes, and where that data is needed to populate other real-time traffic analytics. Computation is split between an offline calibration and a real-time estimation phase. The offline phase determines link-to-link splitting probabilities for traffic flow propagation that are subsequently used in real-time estimation. The real-time procedure uses current traffic data and is efficient enough to scale to full city-wide deployments. Simulation results on a medium-sized test network demonstrate the accuracy of the method and its robustness to missing data and variability in the data that is available. For traffic demands with a coefficient of variation as high as 40%, and a real-time feed in which as much as 60% of links lack data, we find the percentage root mean square error of link volume estimates ranges from 3.9% to 18.6%. We observe that the use of real-time data can reduce this error by as much as 20%.