Environmental and transport effects of warehouse relocationing: evidence from Norway

Reducing traffic volumes and CO2-emissions from freight transport has proven difficult in many countries. Although the increasing suburbanization of warehouses is seen as a relevant land use trend, comprehensive analyses of their impact remain scarce. This study uses real data in modeling transport, costs, environmental and modal effects from warehouse relocations around Oslo and Trondheim (Norway). Results indicate that for Oslo, traffic performance (ton-km), CO2-emissions, and transport costs increase following warehouse suburbanization. For Trondheim, transport performance and CO2-emissions increase less, while transport costs decrease marginally. We conclude that specific case characteristics (geography and trade patterns) are important in determining the strength and direction of effects, and expect that common concomitant developments (warehouse centralization and consolidation) would lead to more pronounced results. Our findings confirm some, but challenge other, findings from the relatively scarcely literature available. Finally, the study's more general insights and observations can help advance similar analyses beyond Norway.     

Financing urban transport projects in Europe

Transport demand in western Europe has risen steadily in recent years and the forecasts are that the unrestrained demand will continue to rise in the foreseeable future. This growth has put considerable pressure on the resources available to finance infrastructure investments and to fund what are seen as socially important social services. The recent developments in eastern Europe and the anticipated growth of the post-Communist states will put further strains on the fiscal ability of authorities in these countries to fund transport investments and operations. The outcome has been revisions in the way transport projects are funded. This paper, taking a very broad view of what constitutes a transport project, examines the specific nature of urban transport financing in Europe.     

Learning from Los Angeles: transport,urban form,and air quality

Los Angeles is well known around the world as an automobile-oriented low density community, yet recent transportation policies have emphasized greater capital investment in rail transportation than in highways, and recent policies have attempted to discourage automobile usage through transportation demand management. While these policies have accomplished small shifts toward public transport and somewhat lower dependence upon singly occupied automobilies for work commuting, the financial costs of these policy changes has been very large in relation to their benefits. Proper pricing of transportation alternatives, more creative use of new and emerging transportation technologies, and the provision of many more opportunities for simpler private sector transport services, would all appear to be more promising as cost-effective approaches to coping with congestion in Los Angeles than the current regional transportation policies.     

Environmental assessment of electrification of road transport in Norway: Scenarios and impacts

The study develops scenarios regarding the introduction of electric vehicles to the passenger vehicle fleet of Norway to reach the 2020 Norwegian greenhouse gas reduction target and a more extreme target to limit global temperature increase to two degrees. A process-based life cycle assessment approach is integrated with a temporally variable inventory model to evaluate the environmental impacts of these scenarios. We find that greenhouse gases in the reference scenario increase by 10% in 2020 in comparison to 2012; while for the more intensive improvements in conventional vehicles, this increase is reduced to 2%. For electric vehicles deployment scenarios, although the fleet share will reduce the tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions by 8–26%, with the upper end representing the two-degree reduction target, emissions reductions over the entire life cycle are only 3–15%. Electric vehicles also reduce emissions of NO_x, SO₂ and particulates reducing acidification, smog formation and particulate formation impacts, however, with addition of large numbers of electric vehicles significant trade-offs in toxicity impacts are found.     

Quantifying the climate impact of emissions from land-based transport in Germany

Although climate change is a global problem, specific mitigation measures are frequently applied on regional or national scales only. This is the case in particular for measures to reduce the emissions of land-based transport, which is largely characterized by regional or national systems with independent infrastructure, organization, and regulation. The climate perturbations caused by regional transport emissions are small compared to those resulting from global emissions. Consequently, they can be smaller than the detection limits in global three-dimensional chemistry-climate model simulations, hampering the evaluation of the climate benefit of mitigation strategies. Hence, we developed a new approach to solve this problem. The approach is based on a combination of a detailed three-dimensional global chemistry-climate model system, aerosol-climate response functions, and a zero-dimensional climate response model. For demonstration purposes, the approach was applied to results from a transport and emission modeling suite, which was designed to quantify the present-day and possible future transport activities in Germany and the resulting emissions. The results show that, in a baseline scenario, German transport emissions result in an increase in global mean surface temperature of the order of 0.01 K during the 21st century. This effect is dominated by the CO₂ emissions, in contrast to the impact of global transport emissions, where non-CO₂ species make a larger relative contribution to transport-induced climate change than in the case of German emissions. Our new approach is ready for operational use to evaluate the climate benefit of mitigation strategies to reduce the impact of transport emissions.     

A bi-objective bi-level signal control policy for transport of hazardous materials in urban road networks

A bi-objective bi-level signal control optimization for hazardous material (hazmat) transport is considered to assess trade-offs between travel cost and environment impacts such as public risk exposure. A least maxi-sum risk model with explicit signal delay is presented to determine generalized travel cost for hazmat carriers. Since the bi-level signal control problem is generally a non-convex program, a bundle method using generalized gradients is proposed. A bounding strategy is developed to stabilize solutions of the bi-level program and reduce relative gaps between iterations. Numerical comparisons are made with other risk-averse models. The results indicate that the proposed bi-objective bi-level model becomes even amiable to signal control policy makers since provides flexible solutions whilst is acceptable to carriers since takes account of travel delay at signal-controlled junctions. Moreover, the trade-offs between public risk and generalized travel costs are empirically investigated among different risk models with a variety of weights. As a result, the proposed model consistently exhibits highly considerable advantage on mitigation of public risk whilst incurred less cost loss as compared to other alternatives.     

Competition and ownership in land passenger transport: The 7th International Conference

This is the fourth time that Transport Reviews has published a summary of the workshop sessions from the Thredbo Conference. The intention is to disseminate more widely the main findings and conclusions from these sessions at this important international conference. Interested readers are also encouraged to view the full papers presented at the Institute of Transport Studies, University of Sydney website.     

Public responses to policies designed to internalise environmental and social externalities from road transport in New Zealand

Based on a public survey of registered voters, we explore four options for internalising the social and environmental costs of road transport. The options were presented together with generalised factual information about their benefits and costs. Respondents are highly supportive of fuel use efficiency standards and exhaust gas quality standards, with lesser support for proposed initiatives of road user charges and speed reduction. Demographic analysis of responses enables identification of those who might favour or oppose particular options. In this case women are identified as being strongly supportive of the speed reduction option.     

A framework to evaluate policy options for supporting electric vehicles in urban freight transport

Electric vehicles (EVs) are considered as a feasible alternative to traditional vehicles. Few studies have addressed the impacts of policies supporting EVs in urban freight transport. To cast light on this topic, we established a framework combining an optimization model with economic analysis to determine the optimal behavior of an individual delivery service provider company and social impacts (e.g., externalities and welfare) in response to policies designed to support EVs, such as purchase subsidy, limited access (zone fee) to congestion/low-emission zones with exemptions for EVs, and vehicle taxes with exemptions for EVs. Numerical experiments showed that the zone fee can increase the company’s total logistics costs but improve the social welfare. It greatly reduced the external cost inside the congestion/low-emission zone with a high population, dense pollution, and heavy traffic. The vehicle taxes and subsidy were found to have the same influence on the company and society, although they have different effects with low tax/subsidy rates because their different effects on vehicle routing plans. Finally, we performed a sensitivity analysis. Local factors at the company and city levels (e.g., types of vehicle and transport network) are also important to designing efficient policies for urban logistics that support EVs.     

Determining strategies to increase response rates in transport surveys of small shop-based businesses

Increasing representation of small business perspectives in policy research would benefit from identifying strategies to increase response rates. Despite the significance of the issue, there is inconsistent reporting amongst small business research about issues such as sampling, recruitment and survey design. Reporting on such issues may help address the under-representation of small business respondents and help reduce wasting research resources on less effective strategies. For policy matters that have the potential to disrupt how small business owners run their business, this is of particular importance. This paper reports on a survey of small businesses about changes to the transport accessibility features of a town centre that have the potential to affect the supply of car parking. Based on a review of the available literature, strategies were adopted to reduce respondent burden and maximise engagement. The paper presents an analysis of recruitment approaches in the first wave of the survey and demonstrates how the refinements to the recruitment approach were successful in achieving an increase in response rate from 40% to 47%.     

On the use of Lagrangian observations from public transport and probe vehicles to estimate car space-mean speeds in bi-modal urban networks

The Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram (MFD) has been recognized as a powerful framework to develop network-wide control strategies. Recently, the concept has been extended to the three-dimensional MFD, used to investigate traffic dynamics of multi-modal urban cities, where different transport modes compete for, and share the limited road infrastructure. In most cases, the macroscopic traffic variables are estimated using either loop detector data (LDD) or floating car data (FCD). Taking into account that none of these data sources might be available, in this study we propose novel estimation methods for the space-mean speed of cars based on: (i) the automatic vehicle location (AVL) data of public transport where no FCD is available; and (ii) the fused FCD and AVL data sources where both are available, but FCD is not complete. Both methods account for the network configuration layout and the configuration of the public transport system. The first method allows one to derive either uni-modal or bi-modal macroscopic fundamental relationships, even in the extreme cases where no LDD nor FCD exist. The second method does not require a priori knowledge about FCD penetration rates and can significantly improve the estimation accuracy of the macroscopic fundamental relationships. Using empirical data from the city of Zurich, we demonstrate the applicability and validate the accuracy of the proposed methods in real-life traffic scenarios, providing a cross-comparison with the existing estimation methods. Such empirical comparison is, to the best of our knowledge, the first of its kind. The findings show that the proposed AVL-based estimation method can provide a good approximation of the average speed of cars at the network level. On the other hand, by fusing the FCD and AVL data, especially in case of sparse FCD, it is possible to obtain a more representative outcome regarding the performance of multi-modal traffic.     

Parking management for promoting sustainable transport in urban neighbourhoods. A review of existing policies and challenges from a German perspective

ABSTRACT

The organisation of parking is a key challenge to more sustainable mobility in urban areas, as its pricing and availability affect the rates of private car ownership and use. However, changing parking policies is a challenging issue for local politicians and planners because residents frequently oppose changes or restrictions to conditions they have taken for granted such as on-street parking in a public space. The aim of this paper is firstly to assess how the parking policy of an urban neighbourhood can be structured to contribute to more sustainable mobility and to increase liveability in the neighbourhood. The second aim is to apply the policies reviewed to an example neighbourhood. For this purpose, we systematically reviewed academic literature and identified five types of relevant parking policies: (i) maximum parking requirements, (ii) physical detachment of residence and parking space, (iii) residential parking permits and the limitation of available parking space, (iv) performance-based pricing and (v) parking as a demand management strategy. We discovered that most research focuses on econometric models about parking and that studies rarely address the effects of parking on the quality of life in neighbourhoods. Therefore, we need further research regarding the relationship of parking and liveability. We conclude that for the implementation of such parking policies in an example neighbourhood, the municipality needs to develop a mobility vision for its city. It has to understand parking as a tool for transportation demand management to increase the acceptance of parking policy concepts and to avoid spillover problems. Finally, in the German case, as in most other countries, states and municipalities need to redesign their legal frameworks to be able to manage parking supply better and to react to changes related to digital developments and parking. The findings have implications for other European neighbourhoods regarding the transfer from research to local circumstances and applications for the whole city.     

Accommodating risk in the valuation of expected travel time savings

Valuation of travel time savings is a critical measure in transport infrastructure appraisal, traffic modelling and network performance. It has been recognised for some time that the travel times associated with repeated trips are subject to variation, and hence there is risk embedded in the treatment of expected travel time. In the context of the expected utility framework, we use a nonlinear probability weighting function to accommodate choice made under risk. Although the empirical findings suggest small differences between the value of expected travel time savings (VETTS) in the presence and absence of risk, the mean estimate does make a noticeable difference to time benefits when applied to real projects. By incorporating nonlinear probability weighting, our model reveals that the probabilities associated with specific travel times that are shown to respondents in the choice experiment are transformed, resulting in overweighting of outcomes with low probabilities and underweighting of outcomes with high probabilities. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.