From theory to practice in road safety policy: Understanding risk versus mobility

This paper reviews theoretical issues surrounding transport safety modeling and the implications for road safety policy. The behavioral mechanisms that affect transport safety are typically not considered in safety modeling. These issues are discussed in the context of trade-offs between risk-taking, as perceived by travelers, and other mobility objectives and the attributes associated with them. This is an extension of other theoretical frameworks, such as risk compensation, and attempts to integrate some of the previous frameworks developed over the years. Various examples of behavioral adaptation to specific policies are discussed and linked to the framework. These issues are then discussed in the context of improvements to empirical work in this area and the linkage of theoretical frameworks to crash modeling, in particular the estimation and use of Crash Modification Factors. Conclusions suggest that there are many deficiencies in practice, from estimation of models to choice of effective policies. Progress is being made on the former, while the publication of practical guidance seems to have substantial lags in knowledge.     

The development of road and rail transport safety valuation in the United Kingdom

An extensive body of theoretical and empirical work has been undertaken in the UK since the middle of the last century on the estimation of values of safety for use in the appraisal of proposed transport projects, particularly road and rail. This research has focused largely on ‘willingness-to-pay’ based values in order to measure the strength of the travelling public's preference for marginal improvements in transport safety, relative to consumption of other goods and services. In terms of practical policy making, the research has resulted in a set of values for the prevention of statistical fatalities and non-fatal injuries that are applied not only in transport safety decision making, but also in other public sector contexts. This paper summarises the main findings of this research.     

Consistency in preferences for road safety: An analysis of precautionary and stated behavior

This study analyzes stated willingness to pay (WTP) for traffic safety, the use of traffic safety equipments, and the consistency between the two. Using data from a Swedish contingent valuation study we find that the estimated value of a statistical life (VSL) based on the respondents' rear-seatbelt usage is similar to the estimate found using the respondents' stated WTP. However, when estimating VSL based on the respondents' use of bicycle helmets we find a significantly higher VSL; the VSL from bicycle-helmet usage is 7 times higher than the estimate based on seatbelt usage. Moreover, we do not find any strong relationship between risk perception and usage, or individual stated WTP and usage. Hence, the main conclusion, based on our analysis, is that stated and observed WTP are not consistent.     

Analyzing road safety in the United States

This paper reviews road safety performance in the United States. The paper develops a framework for assessing dimensions of road safety, and analyzes the importance of economic factors, travel patterns, demographics, road/traffic/vehicle technology, driver behavior, and public policy. Issues and challenges for future road safety research are discussed.     

Analyzing aviation safety: Problems,challenges, opportunities

This paper reviews the economic literature relating to aviation safety; analyzes the safety record of commercial passenger aviation in the United States and abroad; examines aviation security as a growing dimension of aviation safety; and identifies emerging issues in airline safety and challenges for aviation safety research. Commercial airline safety has improved dramatically since the industry's birth over a century ago. Fatal accident rates for large scheduled jet airlines have fallen to the level where (along many dimensions) aviation is now the safest mode of commercial transportation. However, safety performance has not been evenly distributed across all segments of commercial aviation, nor among all countries and regions of the world. The finding that developing countries have much poorer safety records has been a persistent conclusion in aviation safety research and continues to be the case. Unfortunately, operations data are not available for many of the airlines that experience fatal accidents, so it is not possible to calculate reliable fatality rates for many segments of the worldwide aviation industry. Without more complete information, it will likely be difficult to make substantial improvements in the safety of these operations. Challenges to improving aviation security include: how much to focus on identifying the terrorists as opposed to identifying the tools they might use; determining how to respond to terrorist threats; and determining the public versus private roles in providing aviation security. The next generation of safety challenges now require development and understanding of new forms of data to improve safety in other segments of commercial aviation, and moving from a reactive, incident-based approach toward a more proactive, predictive and systems-based approach.     

Comparing the fatality risks in United States transportation across modes and over time

This paper analyzes the transportation fatality risk in the United States. The analysis is in two parts. The first part compares the relative risks of the different modes based on data for the decade from 2000 to 2009. The second part is a time-series analysis for each mode using annual data from 1975 to 2010. By almost any measure, transportation is considerably safer now than it was in the mid 1970s. The improvement is especially noticeable for commercial modes such as aviation, railroads and maritime. Even the risks from private highway driving have halved during the past thirty-five years.     

Determining optimal inland-empty-container depot locations under stochastic demand

Maritime freight volumes fluctuate with changes in consumer demand and global economies. In this paper we analyze the stochasticity in the container trade volumes and perform a two-stage stochastic analysis with recourse to determine an optimal set of inland depots to be opened within a 10-year time horizon. The work builds on our previous effort that introduced the concept of an ‘Inland-Depots-for-Empty-Containers’ (IDEC) system for effective regional repositioning of empty containers. We evaluate the proposed approach by performing a case study based on the port region of New York/New Jersey. Results obtained demonstrate greater expected benefit from the proposed approach as compared to the corresponding deterministic or single-stage stochastic models.     

Changes in the external costs of freight surface transport In Spain

This paper studies the external costs of surface freight transport in Spain and finds that a reduction occurred over the past15 years. The analysis yields two conclusions: trucks have experienced a reduction in external costs, and rail has lower externalities. The external costs of road freight transport decrease between 1993 and 2007 (44%). The external costs of rail freight increase by 12%. During this period, the external costs of road freight related to climate increase by 16%, oppositely than those from air pollution and accidents (51 and 44%). The external costs of rail related to pollutant emissions and climate increase by 4% and 43%. Oppositely, the external costs related to accidents decrease by 27%. Road freight generates eight times the external costs of rail, 2.35 Euro cents per tonne kilometre in 2005 (5.6% accidents, 74.7% air pollution and 19.7% climate) vs. 0.28 (13.4% accidents, 53.9% air pollution and 32.7% climate).     

Determinants of motor vehicle crash fatalities using Bayesian model selection methods

Motor vehicle crashes continue to result in large numbers of fatalities each year and represent the leading cause of death for young persons. In 2006, for example, there were over 42,700 fatalities associated with these crashes. Understanding the causes of these crashes and methods to reduce them continues to be of great interest to economists, public health officials, and policy makers. We present in this paper statistical models using a rich set of panel data covering the period 1980 to 2007 by state and the District of Columbia. Our choice of variables is based on an extensive literature highlighting the importance of policy, safety, demographic, and economic determinants of fatality rates.     

Strategies of state and local government in management of urban transport problems – A case of Delhi

In India, different layers of Government control different policy instruments to tackle transport externalities which might result in coordination problems and possible efficiency losses. This paper, therefore, addresses the coordination problem resulting from the division of policy instruments between two different government levels that face different types of externalities in varying degrees of magnitude in the urban transport sector by developing three types of theoretical models: the Full Control Centralised Model where the state government has full control over all pricing instrument; a Nash equilibrium model where each of the government levels controls only one instrument and takes the behaviour of the other as given; and a Stackelberg equilibrium mode where the behaviour of the state government is influenced by the fact that one of the price instruments is controlled by the local government. With an empirical illustration of the model for Delhi, the paper finds that since there are many interactions and many externalities between the two levels of government, a division of roles between them does not guarantee an efficient pricing outcome and the efficiency of pricing would depend on the institutional set up and on the correspondence between the objective functions of the two government levels.     

Modeling yard crane operators as reinforcement learning agents

Due to the importance of drayage operations, operators at marine container terminals are increasingly looking to reduce the time a truck spends at the terminal to complete a transaction. This study introduces an agent-based approach to model yard cranes for the analysis of truck turn time. The objective of the model is to solve the yard crane scheduling problem (i.e. determining the sequence of drayage trucks to serve to minimize their waiting time). It is accomplished by modeling the yard crane operators as agents that employ reinforcement learning; specifically, q-learning. The proposed agent-based, q-learning model is developed using Netlogo. Experimental results show that the q-learning model is very effective in assisting the yard crane operator to select the next best move. Thus, the proposed q-learning model could potentially be integrated into existing yard management systems to automate the truck selection process and thereby improve yard operations.     

Evaluation of maritime safety policy instruments

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of the current maritime safety policy system as a whole. It offers an overview of different kinds of policy instruments that are used to enhance maritime safety and the criteria for effective policy instruments. It provides a criticism and goes through the weak points of the current maritime safety policy system, and finally, the system is analyzed in the light of the criteria for effective policy. The paper is based on literary sources, mainly on articles published in academic journals. The conclusion of the article is that the development of individual policies will not greatly improve the current level of maritime safety, and more fundamental changes are needed in the governance of maritime safety.     

A disaggregated tool for evaluation of road safety policies

This paper presents a methodological disaggregated approach to analyze the impact of interventions on road safety. The model aims to describe the accident rates of an individual using mileage as a measure of risk exposure. The model is formulated as a system of equations that takes into account interactions between the mileage of a given individual and the other drivers. Once estimated, the model acts as a simulator allowing us to measure the performance of policy interventions to increase road safety.     

Induced travel demand: Evidence from a pseudo panel data based structural equations model

Induced traffic, defined as additional demand generated by improvements in travel conditions, has been a topic of research for many years. While previous studies have focused on specific and localised changes, the research described in this paper deals with the aggregate effects of changed generalised costs of travel on traffic generation: the propensity of participating in out-of-home activities on a given day, the number of trips and journeys conducted, and the resulting total times out-of-home and distances travelled. The generalised cost and accessibility elasticities estimated with a structural equations model for a pseudo panel constructed with the Swiss National Travel surveys since 1974 are surprisingly substantial even after correcting for age, cohort and other socio-demographic effects.     

海军护航 海上“平安”有望

自我国海军编队开赴预定海域护航行动开始,交通运输部就正式委托中国船东协会负责受理中国船东即中资航运企业的护航申请工作。一年半的时间里,护航工作取得了令人满意的成绩,船员的生命和船舶及货物财产安全得到了保障。同时,海军护航也凸显了我国建设深蓝海军的必要性。     

Valuing casualty risk reductions from estimated baseline risk

Stated choice studies have been applied regularly to the valuation of time savings and other attributes of travelling as perceived by individuals. In such experiments, respondents often provide reference levels for the attributes and the hypothetical choices presented to them are pivoted around actual behaviour. However, most individuals are not able to provide reference levels for the number of casualties on the road they travel. Thus, if valuation of this important element is attempted, it is the researcher who must provide casualty risk reference levels to the respondents. Some studies have applied route choice experiments including a safety attribute but the majority has been limited to only one particular road section with a common baseline risk for all respondents.     

关于加强雨季公路水运工程施工安全生产工作的通知

为有效遏制重大生产事故的高发势头，安全监管总局要求各部门进一步加强行业管理，及时发现并消灭苗头性问题。交通行业公路，水运工程施工现场点多面广，施工环境复杂，且又进入雨季，极易发生山洪和地质灾害。为切实保证公路水运工程建设的安全实施，现就有关事项通知如下。     

Examining the linkages between electronic roadway tolling technologies and road pricing policy objectives

The surge of road pricing projects in the U.S. and around the globe over the past 15 years has been enabled by a variety of new communication and transportation technologies. While all of these technologies increase the efficiency of roadway tolling vis-à-vis manual collection, no “best” configuration has emerged. Rather, optimal configurations depend on the objectives of the tolling effort, such as facility type, geographic scope, desire to price externalities, integration with other operations, and so on. While such policy objectives for road pricing have been examined extensively, little has been written on the explicit links between tolling technology configurations and policy objectives. This paper addresses this gap in the literature through an examination of eight road pricing programs. For each program we evaluate the conduct of the three technical tasks via the nine technology sets in light of six principal policy objectives of road pricing.     

A review of recent theoretical and empirical analyses of asymmetric information in road safety and automobile insurance

Road safety policies and automobile insurance contracts often use incentive mechanisms based on traffic violations and accidents to promote safe driving. Can these mechanisms improve road safety efficiently? Do they reduce asymmetric information between drivers and insurers and regulators? In other words, is there residual asymmetric information in observed distributions of accidents and infractions? We answer these questions in this article by reviewing recent theoretical and empirical results that rest on various data and methodologies. We present recent tests related to the identification of residual asymmetric information in road safety management and in automobile insurance contracting. We also propose a theoretical analysis of the foundations of point-record driver's licenses observed around the world.     

Part 2. Beyond single-outcome models: Decompositions of aggregate and disaggregate road safety risk

The second part of the state-of-the-art focuses on the development of the founders' double streams explaining single-outcome indicators (probability of accidents and fatalities, respectively) by fixed form regression, as outlined in the Part 1. Following Page (1997, pp. 67–122, 2001) and others, we use as turning point of the evolution of both aggregate and discrete approaches the DRAG-1 model of 1984, itself based on aggregate data, which introduced four key innovations in principle applicable to both streams.