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.     

Commuters’ willingness-to-pay for improvement of transfer facilities in and around metro stations – A case study in Kolkata

Although several cities in India are developing the metro system, there are lacunas associated with transfer facilities in and around metro stations. The present work aims to investigate the perception of commuters of Kolkata city, India in terms of their willingness-to-pay (WTP) for improvement of transfer facilities. A stated preference survey instrument was designed to collect choice responses from metro commuters and the database was analysed by developing random parameter logit (RPL) models. The decomposition effects of various socioeconomic and trip characteristics on mean estimates were also investigated in random parameter logit models with heterogeneity. The work indicates significantly high WTP of metro commuters as compared to the average metro fare for improvement of various qualitative attributes of transfer facility such as ‘facility for level change’, ‘visual communication’, ‘pedestrian crossing’, and ‘pedestrian environment’. The WTP values are also found to vary across different groups of commuter formed on the basis of ‘trip purpose’, ‘monthly household income’, ‘station type’ and ‘metro fare’. ‘Work trip’ commuters are found to have higher WTP for improvement of access time, pedestrian environment and use of an escalator over the elevator. On the other hand, ‘high-income group’ commuters have shown higher WTP for improvement of access time, pedestrian crossing, and pedestrian environment. While ‘high fare group’ commuters have higher WTP for access time and pedestrian environment, heterogeneity is also observed in WTP for facility for level change, pedestrian crossing, and pedestrian environment across commuters using different ‘station type’ (underground, at-grade, and elevated). The findings from the study provide a basis for formulating policies for the improvement of transfer facilities in and around metro stations giving due attention to the preference of commuters having different socioeconomic and trip characteristics.     

Making do: The effects of a mass transit strike on travel behavior

A brief transit strike in early December 1976 disrupted bus services to the city of Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County. That strike provided an opportunity for testing a variety of approaches to increase ride-sharing and to reduce traffic congestion, and for examining the effect of the strike on traffic congestion and on individual travel behavior. Even though over 60% of the commuters to the CBD use transit, the effects of the strike were relatively mild. There was some increase in traffic flow into the CBD and some spreading of the peak period. The largest proportion of the transit commuters who made trips to the CBD during the strike were dropped off by a non-commuter, increasing highway traffic. The most severe impact was felt by those transit commuters who had no cars in the household; 25% of these commuters (only 3% of the total CBD commuters) stayed home from work on the first day of the strike. Most attempts to mitigate the impact of the strike had little effect, largely because most commuters were able to manage adequately during the short strike. The anticipated parking problem, on which much of the contingency planning was focused, did not emerge, largely because of the use of carpooling and drop-off mode by many of the transit users.     

Investigating user perception on autonomous vehicle (AV) based mobility-on-demand (MOD) services in Singapore using the logit kernel approach

The rapid development of autonomous vehicles (AV) in recent years has drawn the attention of numerous countries in terms of its feasibility for use and deployment as individually-owned vehicles or for large-scale fleet planning and deployment as a mobility-on-demand (MOD) service. Singapore is no exception to this global trend and in her pursuit to be smart and car-lite, numerous efforts are made to have AV trials in place and test out their potential deployment in the city state. As one of the many prerequisites of AV planning, public perception on AV plays a vital role when designing any potential AV deployment scheme. As such, a stated preference survey comprising both online survey and field interviews/surveys, was performed island-wide to understand how commuters in Singapore perceive about different AV-based MOD modes. The logit kernel model is adopted to determine how different preference attributes and key demographic indicators can affect the use of AV-based MOD services over other existing first- and last-mile connection modes. The model results have identified how demographics such as gender, age, housing type, education level and income level can influence the travel mode choice. Also, the impacts brought by individuals’ stated preferences over convenience, privacy and familiarity of ride-hailing apps are also investigated. Such findings can provide useful insight in planning future car-lite towns and implementing AV-based MOD services in these towns.

     

Employment suburbanisation, reverse commuting and travel behaviour by residents of the central city in the Paris metropolitan area

This paper analyses the relationship between employment suburbanisation in the Paris metropolitan area, the growth of reverse commuting and changes in the weekday travel behaviour of working residents of the central city over a 20-year period. The results show that the number of reverse commuters has significantly increased because the municipality of Paris has lost many jobs but few working residents whilst employment has developed in the suburbs. Reverse commuters are mainly and increasingly high-income professionals whose workplace is located close to the central city in employment sub-centres that are well served by public transport. Consequently reverse commuters have lower than average car use although differences exist and are related to their professional status. The policy implications of these findings are discussed in the conclusion.     

A novel permit scheme for managing parking competition and bottleneck congestion

Morning commuters may have to depart from home earlier to secure a parking space when parking supply in the city center is insufficient. Recent studies show that parking reservations can reduce highway congestion and deadweight loss of parking competition simultaneously. This study develops a novel tradable parking permit scheme to realize or implement parking reservations when commuters are either homogeneous or heterogeneous in their values of time. It is found that an expirable parking permit scheme with an infinite number of steps, i.e., the ideal-scheme, is superior to a time-varying pricing scheme in the sense that designing a permit scheme does not require commuters’ value of time information and the performance of the scheme is robust to the variation of commuters’ value of time. Although it is impractical to implement the ideal-scheme with an infinite number of steps, the efficiency loss of a permit scheme with finite steps can be bounded in both cases of homogeneous and heterogeneous commuters. Moreover, considering the permit scheme may lead to an undesirable benefit distribution among commuters, we propose an equal cost-reduction distribution of parking permits where auto commuters with higher value of time will receive fewer permits.     

A procedure for estimating transit subsidization requirements for developing countries

The paper presents a procedure that has been developed for estimating subsidization requirements for urban transit services in developing countries. The procedure is based on a subsidization policy of reducing transport expenditure burden on the average commuter, by maintaining his transport expenditure-income ratio at a reasonable level. It is designed for both regulated and deregulated transport markets. It requires, as input, historical data (previous year) on fare, productivity, and load factor for the transport service or mode concerned, the transport expenditure-income ratio distribution of the commuters, and the current level of commuter personal transport allowance. It is based on the premise that transport expenditure-income ratio is inversely related to income. The subsidization formula developed in the paper yields a level of subsidy that is commensurate with the level of control a government is able to exercise over transit operations.     

Evaluating alternative scenarios for high-speed rail investment in Greece

Introducing High-Speed Rail services along the two main corridors in Greece is expected to change the total scene of interurban transport. The present paper considers the effects of the high-speed rail investment plan against this background. It applies a three-fold evaluation process in order to assess the transport potential and the economic and other impacts of the investment. Alternative scenarios are considered with respect to construction period and pricing of the new high-speed services.     

Accounting for systematic heterogeneity across car commuters in response to multiple TDM policies: case study of Tehran

Modeling commuters’ choice behavior in response to transportation demand management (TDM) helps in predicting the consequences of TDM policies. Although research looking at choice behavior has evolved to investigate preference heterogeneity in response to factors influencing mode choice, as far as we know, no study has considered taste variation across commuters in response to multiple TDM policies. This paper investigates the presence of systematic preference heterogeneity across commuters, in response to the TDM policies that can be explained by their socio-economic or commuting-related characteristics. Analysis is based on results of a stated preference survey developed using a Design of Experiments approach. Five policies were assessed in order to study the impact they had on how commuters chose their mode of transportation. These include increasing parking cost, increasing fuel cost, implementing cordon pricing, reducing transit time and improving access to transit facilities. For the sake of assessing both systematic and random preference heterogeneity across car commuters, a form of the Mixed Multinomial Logit (MMNL) model that identifies sources of heterogeneity and consequently makes the choice models less restrictive in considering both systematic and random preference variation across individuals was developed. The sample includes 366 individuals who regularly commute to their workplace in the city center of Tehran, Iran. The likelihood function value of this model shows a significant improvement compared to the base MNL model, using the same variables. The MMNL model shows that taste variation across the studied commuters results in differences in influences estimated for three policies: increasing parking cost, reducing transit time and improving access to transit. The analysis examines several distributions for random parameters to test the impacts of restricting distributions to allow for only normality. The results confirm the potential to improve model fit with alternative distributions.     

Level of public transport service evaluation: A fuzzy set approach

The success of any enterprise, in a market-oriented economy, depends upon it's quality. This paper describes the results of a survey of commuters on the quality of services and their relative weights, and of the attributes that determine the service level of bus transport undertakings. The model uses the theory of fuzzy sets to process the information obtained. A composite index, called level-of-public transport-service (LOPTS), is defined and used to measure the service qualities. This approach is presented with guidelines for rating the quality of services, fuzzy-set representations of the linguistic grades, definition of LOPTS and its use in a public transport quality data base. An example is presents how the approach can be employed to analyse data bases generated from a quality survey. This approach is compared with the numerical rating approach with single number representation.     

Effectiveness of en route traffic information in developing countries using conventional discrete choice and neural‐network models

Providing commuters with traffic information or advising them of alternative routes during traffic incidents can alleviate congestion. For decades, advanced traveler information services (ATIS) have been devised and dedicated to this role. ATIS comprises a wide variety of technologies across the world, including radio traffic information (RTI) advisory service. RTI is common in both developed and developing countries. Although extensive literature and evaluation results of ATISs and RTI are available in developed countries, little attention has been devoted to that in developing countries. This work provides a modeling platform to study drivers' response to en route traffic information provided by Radio‐Payam broadcasting service in Tehran, the capital city of the developing country of Iran. The results are compared with counterpart cases in developed countries. Past studies and this study have employed conventional discrete models for drivers' response, such as ordered logit and ordered probit. This work evaluates the accuracy level of these conventional models in comparison with a developed neural‐network (NN) model, because it has been widely proven that NN models are highly precise. It has also been found that, apart from reliability, the conventional models are within an acceptable level of prediction accuracy compared with the NN models. The results show a high degree of similarities between the case of Tehran and its counterparts in the developing countries. The results also deliver some insights on how to improve or better implement the ATIS technologies. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Commuters' concern for the environment and knowledge of the effects of vehicle emissions

Attitudes towards the environment and knowledge of the polluting effects of vehicle emissions were surveyed in 566 train and bus commuters, private motor vehicle commuters and smoky vehicle commuters. Environmental concern was found to significantly correlate with level of contribution to an environmental organisation but not with levels of environmental attitudes or emissions knowledge. Smoky vehicle drivers did not have lower levels of knowledge of emissions or lower levels of environmental concern compared to other private motor vehicle commuters. Train commuters showed no greater concern for the environment than car commuters.     

An equilibrium analysis of commuter parking in the era of autonomous vehicles

This study is the first in the literature to model the joint equilibrium of departure time and parking location choices when commuters travel with autonomous vehicles (AVs). With AVs, walking from parking spaces to the work location is not needed. Instead, AVs will drop off the commuters at the workplace and then drive themselves to the parking spaces. In this context, the equilibrium departure/arrival profile is different from the literature with non-autonomous vehicles (non-AVs). Besides modeling the commuting equilibrium, this study further develops the first-best time-dependent congestion tolling scheme to achieve the system optimum. Also, a location-dependent parking pricing scheme is developed to replace the tolling scheme. Furthermore, this study discusses the optimal parking supply to minimize the total system cost (including both the travel cost and the social cost of parking supply) under either user equilibrium or system optimum traffic flow pattern. It is found that the optimal planning of parking can be different from the non-AV situation, since the vehicles can drive themselves to parking spaces that are further away from the city center and walking of commuters is avoided. This paper sheds light on future parking supply planning and traffic management.     

Commuters’ acceptance of and behavior reactions to license plate restriction policy: A case study of Tianjin,China

License plate restriction (LPR) policies are currently being implemented in major Chinese cities with the aim of mitigating traffic congestions. Meanwhile, much controversy regarding the effectiveness of the LPR policies is arising. To better understand the impact of the LPR policies, this paper studies commuters’ acceptance of and behavior reactions to the policies after their implementation. A theoretical model was proposed as the first step, followed by a questionnaire survey that was conducted in Tianjin, China, where an LPR policy has been in place since March 2014. Car owners frequently commuting within the restricted area were sampled as respondents, and a multi-variable regression method was employed to analyze the collected survey data. The results indicate that it is necessary to promote public’s acceptance of the LPR policy, because lower acceptance will lead to more negative reactions towards the policy, which may weaken its effectiveness. Main factors affecting the level of acceptance of the policy are also found, which may serve as a reference for transportation authorities seeking to increase commuters’ acceptance of the policy. These findings are beneficial to designing and implementing LPR policies.     

Interurban road network planning model with accessibility and robustness objectives

Abstract

Road network planning (or design) problems consist of determining the best investment decisions to be made with regard to the improvement of a road network. In this paper, we propose an optimization model for long-term interurban road network planning where accessibility and robustness objectives are simultaneously taken into account. Three network robustness measures were defined to assess different robustness concerns: network spare capacity; city evacuation capacity; and network vulnerability. The results that may be obtained from the application of the model are illustrated for three random networks. Special attention is given to the implications of adopting each one of the robustness measures upon the optimum solution provided by the model.     

Commuter ride-sharing using topology-based vehicle trajectory clustering: Methodology,application and impact evaluation

This paper illustrates a ride matching method for commuting trips based on clustering trajectories, and a modeling and simulation framework with ride-sharing behaviors to illustrate its potential impact. It proposes data mining solutions to reduce traffic demand and encourage more environment-friendly behaviors. The main contribution is a new data-driven ride-matching method, which tracks personal preferences of road choices and travel patterns to identify potential ride-sharing routes for carpool commuters. Compared with prevalent carpooling algorithms, which allow users to enter departure and destination information for on-demand trips, the proposed method focuses more on regular commuting trips. The potential effectiveness of the approach is evaluated using a traffic simulation-assignment framework with ride-sharing participation using the routes suggested by our algorithm. Two types of ride-sharing participation scenarios, with and without carpooling information, are considered. A case study with the Chicago tested is conducted to demonstrate the proposed framework’s ability to support better decision-making for carpool commuters. The results indicate that with ride-matching recommendations using shared vehicle trajectory data, carpool programs for commuters contribute to a less congested traffic state and environment-friendly travel patterns.     

Dynamic models of commuter behavior: Experimental investigation and application to the analysis of planned traffic disruptions

This paper reviews the results of a series of experiments aimed at investigating the day-to-day dynamics of commuter behavior in congested traffic systems. The interactive experiments involve actual work commuters in a simulated traffic system, whereby commuters noncooperatively supply their decisions to a traffic simulation model that determines the resulting arrival times and associated trip times; these in turn form the basis of the commuters' decisions on the next day. Models are developed to predict the daily switching of departure time and/or route by individual commuters in response to experienced congestion in the system or to exogenously supplied information. These models are incorporated in a dynamic modelling framework for the analysis of the impacts of planned traffic disruptions, such as those associated with major highway repair and reconstruction activities.     

Managing bottleneck congestion with tradable credits

We demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of a tradable credit system in managing the morning commute congestion with identical and nonidentical commuters. The credit system consists of a time-varying credit charged at the bottleneck and an initial credit distribution to the commuters, where the credits are universal in terms of time. Credits are tradable between the commuters and the credit price is determined by a competitive market. Under the assumption that late-arrival is not allowed, we prove that an optimal credit charging scheme, which completely eliminates the bottleneck queue, always exists despite how commuters vary in their value-of-time (VOT). The optimal charge rate is strictly increasing and convex with time, which therefore drives the commuters to depart in the increasing order of their VOT. The optimal credit charging scheme is pareto-improving, but may cause undesirable welfare distribution among the commuters. Our study shows that a combination of an initial credit distribution and an optimal credit charging scheme can simultaneously achieve system optimum and certain forms of equality (e.g., “numerical” or “proportional” equality), and that the commuters in the middle VOT bracket will receive the most credits under the proportionally equitable credit distribution.     

Traffic rationing and pricing in a linear monocentric city

This paper presents a simple spatial equilibrium model for a linear monocentric city to investigate the effects of rationing and pricing on morning commuters' travel cost and modal choice behavior in each location. Under rationing and pricing, every day in the morning peak hour, each commuter is classified as either “free” or “rationed”. “Free” commuters are allowed to use the highway without paying the toll, whereas “rationed” commuters can avoid the toll only if they travel by transit. Each day, a fraction of commuters are rationed in their free use of the highway, and the rationing fractions are determined systematically so that everyone is equally rationed in a given period. It is found that Pareto‐improving rationing and pricing scheme might be obtained as a combination of the rationing degree and the toll associated with rationing. Extension to the rationing and pricing scheme with cordon and park‐and‐ride service has been made. Cordon and park‐and‐ride might help in improving the efficiency of rationing and pricing strategy although remains its Pareto‐improving property. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Household-level commuting mode choices,car allocation and car ownership level choices of two-worker households: the case of the city of Toronto

The paper presents a comprehensive investigation on household level commuting mode, car allocation and car ownership level choices of two-worker households in the City of Toronto. A joint econometric model and a household travel survey dataset are used for empirical investigations. Empirical models reveal that significant substitution patterns exist between auto driving and all other mode choices in two-worker households. It is revealed that, female commuters do not prefer auto driving, but in case of a one car (and two commuters with driving licenses) household, a female commuter gets more preference for auto driving option than the male commuter. Reverse commuting (commuting in opposite direction of home to central business district) plays a critical role on household level car allocation choices and in defining the stability of commuting behaviour of two-worker households. Two worker households in higher income zones and with longer commuting distances tend to have higher car ownership levels than others. However, higher transit accessibility to jobs reduces household car ownership levels. The study reveals that both increasing two worker households and reverse commuting would increase dependency on private car for commuting.