Immigrant status and commute distance: an exploratory study based on the greater Golden Horseshoe

With 8.76 million residents in 2011, the population of Southern Ontario’s Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH) has grown dramatically over the past decades, driven by net domestic in-migration and immigration. Corresponding to its growth in population, commuting distances and times within the region have grown as well. Yet, despite the number of immigrants that the region attracts on a yearly basis, there is comparatively little information on commute distances. Consequently, this paper examines commuting distance amongst immigrants in the GGH. Specifically, it evaluates commute distance by immigrant status (immigrants and native born), along with how commute distance differs by arrival cohort and ethnic and racial population groups. Results indicate that commute distance increases with increasing duration of residence, with differences by race and ethnicity.     

The positive utility of the commute: modeling ideal commute time and relative desired commute amount

Two measures of commute time preferences – Ideal Commute Time and Relative Desired Commute amount (a variable indicating the desire to commute "much less" to "much more" than currently) – are modeled, using tobit and ordered probit, respectively. Ideal Commute Time was found to be positively related to Actual Commute Time and to a liking and utility for commuting, and negatively related to commute frequency and to a family/community-oriented lifestyle. Relative Desired Commute, on the other hand, was negatively related to amounts of actual commute and work-related travel, but positively related to travel liking and a measure of commute benefit. Overall, commute time is not unequivocally a source of disutility to be minimized, but rather offers some benefits (such as a transition between home and work). Most people have a non-zero optimum commute time, which can be violated in either direction – i.e. it is possible (although comparatively rare, occurring for only 7% of the sample) to commute too little. On the other hand, a large proportion of people (52% of the sample) are commuting longer than they would like, and hence would presumably be receptive to reducing (although usually not eliminating) that commute.     

The backward-bending commute times of married women with household responsibility

The purpose of this paper is to examine theoretically and empirically whether the commute times of married women follow a backward-bending pattern with respect to wage rates. The existing literature has shown that married women tend to choose short commutes because of their relatively low wages combined with comparatively heavy household responsibilities. However, a work–leisure model, which includes the simultaneous decision wives take regarding commute times and wage rates, suggests that married women employed in highly paid positions also undertake short commutes, while married women with wage rates in the middle range choose long commutes. These results suggest that the commute times of married women display a backward-bending pattern. Applying an instrumental variable strategy that accounts for the endogeneity of wage rates, the empirical results for employed married women in Japan appear to support this finding. Moreover, one of our results suggests that highly paid married women can still secure greater leisure time with short commutes, despite retaining a heavy load of domestic responsibilities.     

On the morning commute problem with bottleneck congestion and parking space constraints

Morning commuters choose their departure times based on a combination of factors—the chances of running into bottleneck congestion, the likely schedule delays, and parking space availability. This study investigates the morning commute problem with both bottleneck congestion and parking space constraints. In particular, it considers the situation when some commuters have reserved parking spots while others have to compete for public ones on a first-come-first-served basis. Unlike the traditional pure bottleneck model, the rush-hour dynamic traffic pattern with a binding parking capacity constraint varies with the relative proportions of the two classes of commuters. It is found that an appropriate combination of reserved and unreserved parking spots can temporally relieve traffic congestion at the bottleneck and hence reduce the total system cost, because commuters without a reserved parking spot are compelled to leave home earlier in order to secure a public parking spot. System performance is quantified in terms of the relative proportions of the two classes of commuters and is compared with those in the extreme cases when all auto commuters have to compete for parking and when none of them have to compete for one.     

Morning commute in a single-entry traffic corridor with no late arrivals

This paper analyzes a model of early morning traffic congestion, that is a special case of the model considered in Newell (1988). A fixed number of identical vehicles travel along a single-lane road of constant width from a common origin to a common destination, with LWR flow congestion and Greenshields’ Relation. Vehicles have a common work start time, late arrivals are not permitted, and trip cost is linear in travel time and time early. The paper explores traffic dynamics for the social optimum, in which total trip cost is minimized, and for the user optimum, in which no vehicle’s trip cost can be reduced by altering its departure time. Closed-form solutions for the social optimum and quasi-analytic solutions for the user optimum are presented, along with numerical examples, and it is shown that this model includes the bottleneck model (with no late arrivals) as a limit case where the length of the road shrinks to zero.     

Expirable parking reservations for managing morning commute with parking space constraints

When total parking supply in an urban downtown area is insufficient, morning commuters would choose their departure times not only to trade off bottleneck congestion and schedule delays, but also to secure a parking space. Recent studies found that an appropriate combination of reserved and unreserved parking spaces can spread the departures of those morning commuters and hence reduce their total travel cost. To further mitigate both traffic congestion and social cost from competition for parking, this study considers a parking reservation scheme with expiration times, where commuters with a parking reservation have to arrive at parking spaces for the reservation before a predetermined expiration time. We first show that if all parking reservations have the same expiration time, it is socially preferable to set the reservations to be non-expirable, i.e., without expiration time. However, if differentiated expiration times are properly designed, the total travel cost can be further reduced as compared with the reservation scheme without expiration time, since the peak will be further smoothed out. We explore socially desirable equilibrium flow patterns under the parking reservation scheme with differentiated expiration times. Finally, efficiencies of the reservation schemes are examined.     

The effect of social comparisons on commute well-being

We study the effect of social comparisons on travel happiness and behavior. Social comparisons arise from exchanges of information among individuals. We postulate that the social gap resulting from comparisons is a determinant of “comparative happiness” (i.e. happiness arising from comparisons), which in turn affects subsequent behavior. We develop a modeling framework based on the Hybrid Choice Model that captures the indirect effect of social comparisons on travel choices through its effect on comparative happiness.We present an empirical analysis of one component of this framework. Specifically, we study how perceived differences between experienced commute attributes and those communicated by others affect comparative happiness and consequently overall commute satisfaction. We find that greater comparative happiness arising from favorable comparisons of one’s commute to that of others (e.g. shorter commute time than others, same mode as others for car commuters, and different mode than others for non-motorized commuters) increases overall commute satisfaction or utility.The empirical model develops only the link between social comparisons and happiness in the comparisons-happiness-behavior chain. It is anticipated that the theoretical framework that considers the entire chain will enhance the behavioral realism of “black box” models that do not account for happiness in the link between comparisons and behavior.     

The economics of parking provision for the morning commute

In this paper, we study the economics of parking provision for the morning commute, where all the parking lots are owned and operated by private operators. The parking capacity allocations, parking fees and access times are considered in a parking market. First we solve the parking market equilibrium without regulatory intervention, revealing four types of competitive equilibrium. Only one of the four types of equilibrium, however, is found to be stable and realistic, and under it each parking area is preferred by the commuters during certain time periods. Compared to the case without parking choice, provision of parking through a competitive market is able to reduce commuters’ travel cost and queuing delay, but it does not necessarily lead to the most desirable market outcome that minimizes social cost or commuter cost. This issue can be addressed through market regulations, such as price-ceiling, capacity-floor or capacity-ceiling, and a quantity tax/subsidy regulation. It is found that both price-ceiling and quantity tax/subsidy regulations can efficiently reduce both the system cost and commuter cost under certain conditions, and help ensure the stability of the parking market. Numerical examples are also provided to illustrate these findings and furthermore, how a price ceiling or a quantity tax/subsidy should be set in a parking market under realistic model parameters.     

On the morning commute problem with carpooling behavior under parking space constraint

Morning commuters choose their departure times and travel modes based on a combinational evaluation of factors associated with the chances of running into bottleneck congestion, likely schedule delays, parking space availability as well as monetary costs of traveling and parking. This study investigates a morning commute problem with carpooling behavior under parking space constraint at destination. We consider such a scenario that as a competing mode of the transit line, the highway contains a carpool lane only used by carpoolers while all solo drivers are forced to use a general purpose (GP) lane. Unlike the standard bottleneck model, the rush-hour dynamic departure patterns with a binding parking supply vary with the relative proportion of the two lanes’ capacities. The possible departure pattern domain with different parking supply and lane capacity allocation is explored in terms of the relative extra carpool cost and distinguished between the bi-mode and multi-mode equilibria. It is found that compared with solo drivers, carpoolers have shorter rush hour in order to smooth the extra carpool cost. With the decrease of parking spots, the number of solo drivers cuts down gradually, whilst the number of carpoolers climbs up firstly and then declines in the multi-mode system. Under mild assumptions, the best system performance can be realized with the joint consideration of total travel cost and vehicle emission cost through optimizing the lane capacity allocation and the parking supply.     

System optimum and pricing for the day-long commute with distributed demand,autos and transit

The day-long system optimum (SO) commute for an urban area served by auto and transit is modeled as an auto bottleneck with a capacitated transit bypass. A public agency manages the system’s capacities optimally. Commuters are identical except for the times at which they wish to complete their morning trips and start their evening trips, which are given by an arbitrary joint distribution. They value unpunctuality – their lateness or earliness relative to their wish times – with a common penalty function. They must use the same mode for both trips. Commuters are assigned personalized mode and travel start times that collectively minimize society’s generalized cost for the whole day. This includes unpunctuality penalties, queuing delays, travel times and out-of-pocket costs for users, as well as travel supply costs and externalities for society.It is shown that in a SO solution there can be no queuing and that the set of SO solutions forms a convex set. Furthermore, if the schedule penalty that users suffer due to unpunctuality is separable into morning and evening components, then the set of commuters traveling by the same mode arrive at work and depart from work in the order of their wishes. These orders are in general different in the morning and the evening. It is also shown that there always is a SO solution in which users are at all times, and on both modes, either punctual or flowing at capacity. These problem properties are used to identify search methods, both, for SO solutions and for time-dependent tolls and transit fares that preserve the solutions as Nash equilibriums. In every case studied, these prices exist. They must peak concurrently for the two modes in both periods.In special cases involving only one mode, only one period or concentrated demand the solution to the complete problem decomposes by period conditional on the number of transit users, and this facilitates the solution. In these cases the day-long SO cost is the sum of the SO costs for the two peaks considered separately. However, this is not true in general – the solution obtained by combining the two single-period solutions can be infeasible. When this happens, the optimum day-long cost will exceed the sum of the single-period costs. The discrepancy is about 40% of the total schedule penalty for an example representing a large city. Thus, to develop realistic policies the day-long problem must be addressed head on. An approximate method that yields closed form formulas for the case with uniformly distributed wishes is presented.     

Tradable permit schemes for managing morning commute with carpool under parking space constraint

Transportation - This paper proposes two tradable parking permit schemes for managing the morning commute with three alternative modes, i.e., transit, driving alone and carpool, under the parking...     

Enjoyment of commute: A comparison of different transportation modes

This study investigates how socio-demographic and attitudinal variables of university students affect their desire to increase or decrease their daily commute. The case study is McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and data was obtained by means of a web-based survey that included questions regarding travel behavior, socio-demographic information, and attitudes toward travel, land use, and the environment. The objective variable is defined as the ratio of ideal to actual commute time, and regression analysis is implemented to test the relationship between this variable and socio-demographic variables and attitudinal scores. The impact of different attitudes on the gap between ideal and actual commute time is expanded to include three different modes, active travel (walk/cycle), transit, and personal automobile. Interestingly, the results indicate that active travelers tend to be less dissatisfied with their commute, followed by those who travel in a personal vehicle and transit users. A number of attitudinal responses are shown to impact the desire to travel more or less, including variables that relate to the social environment, availability of local activities, quality of facilities, productive use of the commute, and the intrinsic value found in the commute travel. The picture emerges of a traveler who would like to spend more time commuting, as someone who is an active traveler, thinks that getting there is half the fun, dislikes traveling alone, but rather likes to live in an active neighborhood where there is a sense of community. The results suggests that enjoyment of commuting, while a challenge from the perspective of motorized mobility, may provide valuable policy opportunities from the perspective of active transportation.     

Pricing scheme design of ridesharing program in morning commute problem

This paper examines the dynamic user equilibrium of the morning commute problem in the presence of ridesharing program. Commuters simultaneously choose departure time from home and commute mode among three roles: solo driver, ridesharing driver, and ridesharing rider. Considering the congestion evolution over time, we propose a time-varying compensation scheme to maintain a positive ridesharing ridership at user equilibrium. To match the demand and the supply of ridesharing service over time, the compensation scheme should be set according to the inconvenience cost functions and the out-of-pocket cost functions. When the price charged per time unit is higher than the inconvenience cost per time unit perceived by the ridesharing drivers, the ridesharing participants will travel at the center of peak hours and solo drivers will commute at the two tails. Within the feasible region with positive ridership, the ridesharing program can reduce the congestion and all the commuters will be better off. To support system optimum (SO), we derive a time-varying toll combined with a flat ridesharing price from eliminating queuing delay. Under SO toll, the ridesharing program can attract more participants and have an enlarged feasible region. This reveals that the commuters are more tolerant to the inconvenience caused by sharing a ride at SO because of the lower travel time. Compared with no-toll equilibrium, both overall congestion and individual travel cost are further reduced at SO.     

Development of a neighborhood commute mode share model using nationally-available data

Transportation - Practitioners often use demand models to predict how neighborhood-level land use, infrastructure, demographic, and other changes may impact transportation systems. Few of the...     

Efficiency of a highway use reservation system for morning commute

This paper examines the design and efficiency of a highway use reservation system where commuters need reservations to access a highway facility at specific times. We show that, by accommodating reservation requests to the level that the highway capacity allows, traffic congestion can be relieved. Generally, a more differentiated design of the reservation system yields a higher reduction of travel cost and thus achieves a higher efficiency. The efficiency bound of the system is established. We also show that braking or tactical waiting behaviors of drivers would cause a loss of efficiency, which thus need be proactively accommodated. Given that user heterogeneity cause further loss of efficiency, we explore how two specific types of user heterogeneity affect the system efficiency. Auction-based reservation is then proposed to mitigate the efficiency loss.     

Morning commute problem considering route choice, user heterogeneity and alternative system optima

This paper extends the bottleneck model to study congestion behavior of morning commute and its implications to transportation economics. The proposed model considers simultaneous route and departure time choices of heterogenous users who are distinguished by their valuation of travel time and punctual arrival. Moreover, two dynamic system optima are considered: one minimizes system cost in the unit of monetary value (i.e., the conventional system optimum, or SO) and the other minimizes system cost in the unit of travel time (i.e., the time-based SO, or TSO). Analytical solutions of no-toll equilibrium, SO and TSO are provided and the welfare effects of the corresponding dynamic congestion pricing options are examined, with and without route choice. The analyses suggest that TSO provides a Pareto-improving solution to the social inequity issue associated with SO. Although a TSO toll is generally discriminatory, anonymous TSO tolls do exist under certain circumstances. Unlike in the case with homogenous users, an SO toll generally alters users’ route choices by tolling the poorer users off the more desirable road, which worsens social inequity. Numerical examples are presented to verify analytical results.     

The evening commute with cars and transit: Duality results and user equilibrium for the combined morning and evening peaks

This paper extends Vickrey’s (1969) commute problem for commuters wishing to pass a bottleneck for both cars and transit that share finite road capacity. In addition to this more general framework considering two modes, the paper focuses on the evening rush, when commuters travel from work to home. Commuters choose which mode to use and when to travel in order to minimize the generalized cost of their own trips, including queueing delay and penalties for deviation from a preferred schedule of arrival and departure to and from work. The user equilibrium for the isolated morning and evening commutes are shown to be asymmetric because the schedule penalty in the morning is the difference between the departure and wished curves, and the schedule penalty in the evening is the difference between the arrival and wished curves. It is shown that the system optimum in the morning and evening peaks are symmetric because queueing delay is eliminated and the optimal arrival curves are the same as the departure curves.The paper then considers both the morning and evening peaks together for a single mode bottleneck (all cars) with identical travelers that share the same wished times. For a schedule penalty function of the morning departure and evening arrival times that is positive definite and has certain properties, a user equilibrium is shown to exist in which commuters travel in the same order in both peaks. The result is used to illustrate the user equilibrium for two cases: (i) commuters have decoupled schedule preferences in the morning and evening and (ii) commuters must work a fixed shift length but have flexibility when to start. Finally, a special case is considered with cars and transit: commuters have the same wished order in the morning and evening peaks. Commuters must use the same mode in both directions, and the complete user equilibrium solution reveals the number of commuters using cars and transit and the period in the middle of each rush when transit is used.     

Modeling the commute mode share of transit using continuous accessibility to jobs

This paper presents the results of an accessibility-based model of aggregate commute mode share, focusing on the share of transit relative to auto. It demonstrates the use of continuous accessibility – calculated continuously in time, rather than at a single of a few departure times – for the evaluation of transit systems. These accessibility calculations are accomplished using only publicly-available data sources. A binomial logic model is estimated which predicts the likelihood that a commuter will choose transit rather than auto for a commute trip based on aggregate characteristics of the surrounding area. Variables in this model include demographic factors as well as detailed accessibility calculations for both transit and auto. The mode achieves a ρ² value of 0.597, and analysis of the results suggests that continuous accessibility of transit systems may be a valuable tool for use in modeling and forecasting.     

The generators of paratransit trips by persons with disabilities

Identifying the generators of paratransit trips by persons with disabilities is important to comprehend the current demand patterns and forecast future demand. Only a handful of studies have been conducted so far to identify the generators of paratransit trips and most focused on the home end of the trips. Given some of the inconsistencies in past studies and the scarcity of studies on the generators of trips away from home, this study attempts to identify the generators of paratransit trips beginning and ending at clients’ homes and away from home. It uses an extremely large dataset consisting of 1.91 million trips made by NJ TRANSIT’s Access Link clients, socioeconomic data from the American Community Survey, employment data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics, and establishment data from Dun and Bradstreet. The analytical methods include an ordinary least squares model (OLS) and several spatial generalized linear mixed models (GLMM) to identify the characteristics of census block groups associated with Access Link trip generation at home and away from home, Geographic Information System (GIS) analysis to identify the types of establishments located in the immediate vicinity of drop-offs, and a multinomial logit model (MNL) to examine the relationship between the characteristics of the establishments in the vicinity of drop-offs and the characteristics of the dropped-off clients. Together, the various analyses provide useful insights about paratransit trip generators at the macro and micro levels. Some implications of the findings are discussed.     

The effect of work-related factors on the bicycle commute mode choice in the Netherlands

Increasing the number of people cycling to work brings a number of benefits: it can lead to reductions in air pollution and traffic jams, and increases people’s physical activity levels. We investigated the extent to which work-related factors influence (1) whether an individual decides to cycle to work, and (2) whether an individual cycles to work every day. It is anticipated that the office culture and colleagues’ and employers’ attitudes would significantly influence both decisions. These factors are expected to impact the provision of cycling facilities and financial compensation schemes in the workplace. We conducted an Internet survey in 4 Dutch municipalities, gathering data from over 4,000 respondents. The results suggest that the following factors increase the likelihood of being a commuter cyclist: having a positive attitude towards cycling; colleagues’ expectations that an individual will cycle to work; the presence of bicycle storage inside; having access to clothes changing facilities; and needing a bicycle during office hours. The presence of facilities for other transport modes, an increase in the commute distance, and the need to transport goods, in turn, reduces the chance that an individual will cycle. Cycling frequency is negatively affected, meanwhile, by an increase in commute distance, a free public transport pass or car parking provided by the employer. These results indicate that an individual’s working situation affects the commuting cycling behaviour. The findings also indicate that (partly) different variables influence an individual’s decision to cycle to work, and their decision to cycle every day.