“公交超载”罚不罚？

备受关注的云南省陆良县公安交警大队处罚公交车超员一案再审近日审结,曲靖市中级人民法院再审维持原审判决。至此,历经两年零三个月,陆良县公安局交警大队处罚城市公交车超员案．终于尘埃落定．判决再次表明：城市公交车没有超载特权。（3月31日《法制日报》）     

算算你该睡多久

每天睡多少觉合适要因人而异,大多数人需要保证7到10个小时的睡眠.美国斯坦福大学人类睡眠研究中心推荐了两种方法,可以帮你计算自己到底需要睡多长时间.第一种方法,是建议人们在度假时记录自己每天大概睡了几个小时.度假期间身体会自行调整,假期结束时(一般需要5天以上),你的身体一般会调整到自然的睡眠模式,这个时候晚上睡几个小时,应该就是符合你身体需要的理想睡眠时间.     

治超切忌"本末倒置"

偶尔翻翻报纸,看到不少各地有关去年治超成绩的通报,大凡是检查了多少超载车辆,卸载了多少吨超载货物,罚款累计多少元,超载率下降了多少.     

When the internet is not enough: toward an understanding of carpool services for service workers

For much of the twentieth century, the economies of Canada and the United States have increasingly focused on service provision. During this same time period, cities have grown into expansive urban regions characterized by dispersed workplaces complemented by a wide array of commuting patterns, dominated by single occupancy vehicle use. This study aims to understand how service worker engagement with an Internet-based carpool formation software, known as Carpool Zone, and workplace transport policies, jointly enable carpool formation and use. The piece also explores the question of difference in carpool formation between female and male service workers. The study area is the Greater Golden Horseshoe, Canada??s largest metropolitan region. Data were drawn from Carpool Zone and a 2007 survey of commuter satisfaction. Extending past work, logistic regression analysis clarifies the importance of specific workplace policies, enacted within suburban firms, to the carpool formation process, including: provision of carpool spaces and availability of an emergency ride home service. The findings indicate that the Internet may not be enough, powerful enabling tools should be situated within expert networks of human capital developed to ameliorate the negative effects of commuting.     

供应链时代距离我们有多远?--访美国供应链管理协会中国首席代表、中国物流学会副会长王国文博士

2005年春天,深圳市政府与CSCMP达成合作意向--首次CSCMP中国年会将于2005年6月在深圳拉开序幕.由CSCMP主席马克·理查斯带领的高层企业家代表团和全美最有影响的物流专家、企业家将聚首深圳.     

效率≠效果:走出流程管理的误区

企业需要效率,但是更需要效果,没有效果的效率是徒劳的.……流程是基础性的东西,是企业必须完成的一种结构.换句话说,基础是企业的效率,而效果才是企业必须达到的结果.     

Trip chaining as a barrier to the propensity to use public transport

Trip chaining is a growing phenomenon in travel and activity behaviour. Individuals increasingly seek out opportunities to minimise the amount of travel required as part of activity fulfilment, given the competing demands on time budgets and their valuation of travel time savings. This search for ways of fulfilling (more) activities with less travel input has produced a number of responses, one of which is trip chaining. A particularly important policy implication of trip chaining is the potential barrier it creates in attracting car users to switch to public transport. This paper seeks to improve our understanding of trip chaining as a barrier to public transport use. A series of discrete choice models are estimated to identify the role that socio-economic and demographic characteristics of households have on the propensity to undertake trip chains of varying degrees of simplicity/complexity that involve use of the car or public transport with an embedded commuting or non-commuting primary purpose. Multinomial logit, nested logit and random parameter logit models are developed and contrasted to establish the gains in relaxing the strict conditions of the multinomial logit model.     

TTB or not TTB, that is the question: a review and analysis of the empirical literature on travel time (and money) budgets

This paper summarizes and analyses findings from more than two dozen aggregate and disaggregate studies of travel time (and sometimes money) expenditures, exploring the question of the existence of a constant travel time budget. We conclude (with prior researchers) that travel time expenditures are not constant except, perhaps, at the most aggregate level. Nevertheless, individuals’ travel time expenditures do show patterns that can be partly explained by measurable characteristics. Travel time expenditure is strongly related to individual and household characteristics (e.g., income level, gender, employment status, and car ownership), attributes of activities at the destination (e.g., activity group and activity duration), and characteristics of residential areas (e.g., density, spatial structure, and level of service). To the extent that travel time expenditures are constant at the aggregate level, the underlying mechanisms explaining that regularity are not well understood. Consequently, further research into explaining travel time and money expenditure patterns is justified.     

Citizen involvement in the transportation planning process: What is and what ought to be

Public involvement in the transportation planning process is an effort to ensure that citizens have a direct voice in public decision‐making. Through shared goals, such involvement enriches the planning, implementation, operation and management process. Various strategies of involving the public in the planning process have been tried in the past thirty years, but the overall effort has been lumpy and at times disappointing. In the last few years some forms of communicative action have been applied, following its appearance in current literature, but we still have a long way to go. This paper has four main objectives. First, it surveys the citizen involvement effort as it is practiced today and the problems it faces. Second, it describes teleogenic systems that are particularly suited for tackling conflictual problems. Thirdly, it presents the interplay of virtuous and vicious cycles in reinforcing or retarding collective decision making. And lastly, the process of harvesting the potential of citizen groups in collective decision‐making through critical systems thinking is described.     

An investigation into the feasibility of increasing rail use as an alternative to the car

With rail travel largely seen to be a more sustainable method than road-based transport, this paper examines the market segments amongst existing motorists that would be most likely to travel by train in the UK. The analysis is based on a large survey in London and the south-east of England, the area surrounding the routes operated by the train company First Capital Connect. Findings show that train travellers tend to be middle-aged and of a higher social grade, typically taking commuting or business trips. Individuals living within four miles of a station are considerably more likely to travel by rail than those further away. Given the competition from road-based transport, it is of particular interest that the measure highlighted to increase rail use for those living further away from the rail network is to enhance car parking at train stations.     

The accuracy of the multinomial logit model as an approximation to the multinomial probit model of travel demand

The multinomial probit model of travel demand is considerably more general but much less tractable than the better-known multinomial logit model. In an effort to determine the effects of using the relatively simple logit model in situations where the assumptions of probit modeling are satisfied but those of logit modeling are not, the accuracy of the multinomial logit model as an approximation to a variety of three-alternative probit models has been evaluated. Multinomial logit can give highly erroneous estimates of the choice probabilities of multinomial probit models. However, logit models appear to give asymptotically accurate estimates of the ratios of the coefficients of the systematic components of probit utility functions, even when the logit choice probabilities differ greatly from the probit ones. Large estimation data sets are not necessarily needed to enable likelihood ratio tests to distinguish three-alternative probit models from logit models that give seriously erroneous estimates of the probit choice probabilities. Inclusion of alternative-specific dummy variables in logit utility functions cannot be relied upon to reduce significantly the errors of logit approximations to the choice probabilities of probit models whose utility functions do not contain the dummies.     

It is time to give the “true PRT” concept a fair test

True Personal Rapid Transit (PRT), in concept and technology, is considerably advanced over PRT as proposed in the 1960s and 1970s. It is one of the few advanced transit concepts—perhaps the only one—that offers a prospect of overcoming the continued serious deficiencies of conventional transit systems. Past criticisms of PRT were often invalid, but even those questions that deserved to be taken seriously then no longer justify a postponement of serious PRT testing. Conventional transit, in spite of over two decades of considerable governmental support, is proving unable to satisfy major transportation needs of American urban areas, which are increasingly dispersed and multi-centered. There is no indication that conventional transit can overcome sufficiently its performance and economic deficiencies. If PRT is not given a chance to be tested, local public officials will continue to be faced with too limited options as between auto-dominated transportation services and high subsidies for inadequate transit solutions.