Multi-criteria route planning based on a driver’s preferences in multi-criteria route selection

In this study, some different approaches were designed, implemented, and evaluated to perform multi-criteria route planning by considering a driver’s preferences in multi-criteria route selection. At first, by using a designed neuro-fuzzy toolbox, the driver’s preferences in multi-criteria route selection such as the preferred criteria in route selection, the number of route-rating classes, and the routes with the same rate were received. Next, to learn the driver’s preferences in multi-criteria route selection and to classify any route based on these preferences, a methodology was proposed using a locally linear neuro-fuzzy model (LLNFM) trained with an incremental tree based learning algorithm. In this regard, the proposed LLNFM-based methodology reached better results for running-times, as well as root mean square error (RMSE) estimations in learning and testing processes of training/checking data-set in comparison with those of the proposed adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) based methodology. Finally, the trained LLNFM-based methodology was utilized to plan and predict a driver’s preferred routes by classifying Pareto-optimal routes obtained by running the modified invasive weed optimization (IWO) algorithm between an origin and a destination of a real urban transportation network based on the driver’s preferences in multi-criteria route selection.     

Controlled mechanical vibration applied to driver’s right heel to sustain alertness: Effects on cardiovascular behavior

Vehicle-related countermeasures to sustain driver’s alertness might improve traffic safety. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of somatosensory 20 Hz mechanical vibration, applied to driver’s right heel during prolonged, simulated, monotonous driving, on their cardiovascular hemodynamic behavior. In 12 healthy young male volunteers, during 90-min periods of simulated monotonous driving, we compared cardiovascular variables during application of 20 Hz mechanical vibration with 1.5 Hz as a control and with no vibration. The parameters recorded were indices of key cardiovascular hemodynamic phenomena, i.e., blood pressure as an indicator of stress, cardiac output, and total peripheral-vascular resistance. The principle results were that all conditions increased the mean blood pressure, and elicited a vascular-dominant reaction pattern typically observed in monotonous driving tasks. However, mean blood pressure and total peripheral-vascular resistance during the monotonous task were significantly decreased in those receiving the 20 Hz vibration as compared with 1.5 Hz and with no vibration. The observed differences indicate the cardiovascular system being more relieved from monotonous driving stress with the 20 Hz vibration. The major conclusion is that applying 20 Hz mechanical vibration to the right heel during long-distance driving in non-sleepy drivers could facilitate more physiologically appropriate status for vehicle operation and could be a potential vehicular countermeasure technology.     

Idling stop fines for exceeding legal idling times – From the driver’s perspective

In order to reduce CO₂ emissions from motorised transport, the Taiwanese government implemented an idling policy for vehicles in 2012. This paper applies a contingent valuation framework based on stated preference questions to calculate a reasonable fine for idling vehicles based on drivers’ preferences in Taiwan. Drivers were surveyed at urban roadsides to determine the amount of money they would prefer to pay for idling in excess of the 3 min currently allowed by law. The results obtained from our spike model analysis showed that drivers would prefer to pay a fine of 1720 NTD (approximately USD 57).     

Educating parents to support children’s road safety: a review of the literature

ABSTRACT

This narrative review synthesised the limited work that has been carried out into road safety education targeting parents. Parent education appeared to have a positive impact on child safety seat use and children’s bike helmet use, but results regarding the impact of parent education on pedestrian safety were mixed. The review highlighted important gaps in the literature. A key gap being identifying effective ways to engage parents of low socioeconomic and ethnic minority backgrounds. Further, another gap is understanding effective ways to engage and support parents of children with additional needs to build their children’s road safety skills. There is some evidence that parent education has a positive impact on these “at-risk” groups, but little work on how to engage with these groups and the type of parent education required.     

Influences of the driver’s bounded rationality on micro driving behavior,fuel consumption and emissions

In this paper, we propose an extended car-following model to study the influences of the driver’s bounded rationality on his/her micro driving behavior, and the fuel consumption, CO, HC and NO_X of each vehicle under two typical cases, where Case I is the starting process and Case II is the evolution process of a small perturbation. The numerical results indicate that considering the driver’s bounded rationality will reduce his/her speed during the starting process and improve the stability of the traffic flow during the evolution of the small perturbation, and reduce the total fuel consumption, CO, HC and NO_X of each vehicle under the above two cases.     

The benefits to the public of vehicle legislation — Attempts to measure the unmeasurable

Although inevitably there are grey areas, a distinction may be drawn between environmental disbenefits arising from vehicles which cause annoyance, such as noise, or loss of peace and quiet, vibration, visual intrusion, severance, and those which endanger life and limb. Legislation implemented to reduce either category will inevitably generate costs.It is suggested that in evaluating legislation relating to environmental nuisance, attempts should be made carefully to measure the benefits, while for legislation when life and limb is involved a cost-effectiveness approach should be adopted. Methods currently available to measure environmental nuisance arising from vehicles, for example opinion surveys, observing the effect of changes in some independent indicator, and simulation exercises are critically examined. Using evidence from the Urban Motorway Committee Reports, Noise Advisory Council, Transport and Road Research Laboratory surveys on the effect of traffic in selected High Streets, and the Realistic Environment Assessment Laboratory, Social and Community Planning Research ping-pong technique, studies of house price differentials, and estimates of willingness-to-pay for exclusion facilities, an attempt is made to highlight the dilemma that while benefits of environmental nuisance legislation should be carefully weighed against the anti-pollution costs, techniques currently available for measuring such benefits are very underdeveloped.Paradoxically there is a far more clear-cut procedure for valuing benefits of policies affecting life and limb. Official accident evaluation policy in the U.K. is described, and legislation affecting life and limb is examined.Finally, difficulties of effectively enforcing legislation of both environmental nuisance and life and limb categories are illustrated.     

A gradient boosting logit model to investigate driver’s stop-or-run behavior at signalized intersections using high-resolution traffic data

Driver’s stop-or-run behavior at signalized intersection has become a major concern for the intersection safety. While many studies were undertaken to model and predict drivers’ stop-or-run (SoR) behaviors including Yellow-Light-Running (YLR) and Red-Light-Running (RLR) using traditional statistical regression models, a critical problem for these models is that the relative influences of predictor variables on driver’s SoR behavior could not be evaluated. To address this challenge, this research proposes a new approach which applies a recently developed data mining approach called gradient boosting logit model to handle different types of predictor variables, fit complex nonlinear relationships among variables, and automatically disentangle interaction effects between influential factors using high-resolution traffic and signal event data collected from loop detectors. Particularly, this research will first identify a series of related influential factors including signal timing information, surrounding traffic information, and surrounding drivers’ behaviors using thousands drivers’ decision events including YLR, RLR, and first-to-stop (FSTP) extracted from high-resolution loop detector data from three intersections. Then the research applies the proposed data mining approach to search for the optimal prediction model for each intersection. Furthermore, a comparison was conducted to compare the proposed new method with the traditional statistical regression model. The results show that the gradient boosting logit model has superior performance in terms of prediction accuracy. In contrast to other machine learning methods which usually apply ‘black-box’ procedures, the gradient boosting logit model can identify and rank the relative importance of influential factors on driver’s stop-or-run behavior prediction. This study brings great potential for future practical applications since loops have been widely implemented in many intersections and can collect data in real time. This research is expected to contribute to the improvement of intersection safety significantly.     

Parking Benefit Districts – The transferability of a measure to reduce car dependency to a European context

Parking Benefit Districts (PBDs) are a parking measure where revenues from on-street parking charges are returned to the area where they are charged, and stakeholders in the area participate in prioritizing how the revenues are to be spent. The purpose of this article is to analyse whether and how a PBD programme can be transferred to a European context, and whether it can contribute to reduced car dependency. The first part of the article provides an overview of some salient features of PBD programmes in the USA through a literature survey. This is followed by results from interviews and from a focus group with civil servants and a deputy mayor in Stockholm. The results are used to analyse the conditions for implementing a PBD programme in Stockholm, as well as for analysing how such a programme can be designed to reduce car dependency. A main conclusion is that there are no legal barriers that render a PBD programme impossible in Stockholm, even though there are some legal restrictions. We also conclude that a PBD programme might contribute to reduced car dependency in two different ways, either by increasing acceptance for parking charges or by improving the alternatives to private cars. There seem to be several aspects in a PBD programme that can contribute to increased acceptance for parking charges. However, there is no tradition of working with these principles in Sweden and the programme’s redistributional effects need to be taken into account when designing the programme.     

Applying a structured simulation-based methodology to assess carpooling time–space potential

Abstract

Increasing urban traffic congestion calls for the study of alternative measures. One such measure is carpooling, a system in which a person shares his private vehicle with one or more people in a commuter trip. In principle, this system could lead to potentially significant reductions in the use of private vehicles; however, in practice it has achieved limited success. In this paper, we apply a simulation-based methodology that uses aggregated data from commuter trips in an urban area to create compatible and feasible random trips. These are then analyzed through a heuristic process recursively to find grouping possibilities, thus producing indicators of carpooling potential such as the percentage of matched trips. Using this methodology, simulations are run for the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (Portugal) and results show that an increase in the number of participants in a carpooling scheme will only increase the probability of matching up to a certain point, and that this probability varies significantly with time–space trip attributes.     

A fractional perspective to the modelling of Lisbon’s public transportation network

Transportation - Urban growth originates multiscale spatial patterns, such as those of transportation networks. Here, the public transportation network (PTN) of the city of Lisbon is analysed from...     

No longer in the driver’s seat: How do affective motivations impact consumer interest in automated vehicles?

Transportation - Emerging advancements in automated vehicles may dramatically change how transportation system users engage cars as symbols and tools to exert control over their lives, time use,...     

Factors affecting children’s journeys to school: a joint escort-mode choice model

A child’s mode of travelling to school is influenced by, or dependent on, parental choices. Thus, an increasing proportion of car trips may reflect parental choices and constraints. Whether a parent can escort their children to school may depend on their scheduling and spatial constraints, e.g., work schedule and job location in relation to home and school locations. This research aims to understand the effect of household bundling constraints on a child’s escort-mode choice. In this study, school trip data are drawn from the 2001 SCAG (Southern California Association of Governments) Post Census Regional Household Travel Survey. The study area is the five-county Los Angeles region. Our findings show that the parents’, especially the mother’s, increased working hours and more distant job locations result in an increased likelihood of several alternative escort-mode choices. Mothers who work longer hours and further away from home are less likely to chauffeur their children. These trips have been substituted by alternative escort choices such as independent travel and being escorted by fathers, or alternative mode choices such as active commuting and busing. The effect of increased working hours may be offset by the option of flexible working hours, which allows parents to arrange more escort trips. This study elucidates an important aspect in explaining children’s changing mode choice in journeys to school and sheds light on current policy efforts in reducing children’s car dependency.     

Characterizing the fragmentation level of Italian’s National Parks due to transportation infrastructures

In the last decades, due to the population increase and the relative need of new land to cultivate, expand urban centers and develop transportation networks, most of the Italian natural protected areas are subject to different typologies of human pressures that generally cause habitat fragmentation. This process represents a major concern for biodiversity conservation and a key driver of species loss.The main purpose of this paper was to investigate levels of natural habitat fragmentation due to roads and railways networks in the Italian National Parks (INP_S) through the use of an Infrastructural Fragmentation Index (IFI).All the operations (geospatial analysis, image classification, and fragmentation analysis) were performed using a Geographic Information System (GIS) software for elaborating a national database. The obtained results include an IFI value for each natural territorial unit inside any INP. Moreover, in order to highlight which are the INP_S characterized by higher infrastructural fragmentations, an IFI weighted mean was calculated for each INP. These results represent important indicators for the prioritization of biodiversity conservation interventions and the planning of a INP_S sustainable management.     

Getting around a license-plate ban: Behavioral responses to Mexico City’s driving restriction

License-plate-based driving restrictions are among the highest profile policies for local governments to address congestion and air pollution. Cities as varied as Sao Paulo, Paris, Tianjin, and New Delhi have enacted temporary or permanent restrictions to improve local air quality. Using household travel survey data and a research design based on the abrupt shift in how the policy applies to 10-year-old vs. 9-year-old vehicles, we evaluate the impact of Hoy No Circula, one of the earliest and most studied driving restrictions, in Mexico City. In line with previous studies, we find that Hoy No Circula has done little to reduce overall vehicle travel, but we reject the prevailing theory that its lack of success is due to perverse incentives for households to buy second cars. Instead, we highlight the range of other, less costly ways that people adjust behavior to avoid the restrictions. Although no single behavior dominates, most households — particularly those that own older, higher-polluting vehicles — do not use their car every weekday regardless of the restriction. As a result, it is relatively easy to shuffle travel from restricted days to unrestricted days and thus avoid the ban. Shuffling travel days is less costly, more immediately available, and far simpler for most households than buying a second car.     

Parents’ perspectives on using autonomous vehicles to enhance children’s mobility

Prior research has estimated the impact of an autonomous vehicle (AV) environment on the mobility of underserved populations such as adult non-drivers. What is currently unknown is the impact of AVs on enhancing the mobility of children who are also mobility disadvantaged, as child passengers are likely part of AV ridership scenarios in the perceivable future. To address this question, our study collected perceived benefits and concerns of AVs from a US convenience sample of parents whose children relied on them for mobility. We found that parents’ intentions to travel in AV and their technology readiness as well as parent (sex, residence area) and child (age, restraint system) demographic profiles were important determinants of potential AV acceptance and impact. In addition, two groups of potential AV users emerged from the data: the curious and the practical. This study addresses a gap in the literature by assessing parents’ perspectives on using AVs to transport children. The results have great potentials to guide the design of mobility features, safety evaluations, and implementation policies, as a decline in public interest in AVs has been recently documented.     

What’s your type: a multidimensional cyclist typology

Increasing bicycle use for utilitarian trips is a common city objective for health and environmental improvement and congestion reduction, but cyclists react heterogeneously to interventions and infrastructure. Understanding cyclist types helps in comprehending and planning for this diverse population. This study uses data from 2004 surveyed Montreal cyclists to generate a multidimensional cyclist typology based on seven factors derived from 35 variables, mostly proven determinants of the intensity of bicycle usage. The analysis revealed four distinct cyclist types: dedicated cyclists, path-using cyclists, fairweather utilitarians, and leisure cyclists. The cycling frequencies of each group respond differently to potential interventions and vary within commuting rate ranges with apparent minima and maxima. Building a network adapted to different cyclist types and emphasizing its convenience, flexibility and speed, could be an effective strategy to increase cycling mode share and frequency among the various groups. Findings from this study can be of benefit to transportation engineers, planners and policy makers as they help in better understanding the impacts of various interventions on the different groups of cyclists.     

Justice in transport as justice in accessibility: applying Walzer’s ‘Spheres of Justice’ to the transport sector

This paper seeks to provide a theoretical basis for a distributive approach to transport. Using the theory developed by Michael Walzer in his ??Spheres of Justice?? (1983), I argue that the transport good, defined as accessibility, should be distributed in a so-called separate sphere, i.e. independent from the way in which other key goods, like money or power, are allocated. I subsequently explore what kind of justice principle could guide the distribution of the transport good, once a separate sphere would be established. This preliminary exploration results in the elimination of a number of widely supported distributive principles, and in the tentative identification of a criterion matching the particularities of the transport good. The explorations in the paper are not intended as final answers, but rather seek to open the debate about the need for an explicit distributive transport policy and the distributive principle that should guide such a policy.     

What drives the gap? Applying the Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition method to examine generational differences in transportation-related attitudes

Transportation - Considerable recent work suggests that Millennials’ behaviors may be converging with those of Generation X as they enter later life stages, but few have investigated whether...     

Children’s mode choice for the school trip: the role of distance and school location in walking to school

Rising levels of childhood obesity in the United States and a 75% decline in the proportion of children walking to school in the past 30 years have focused attention on school travel. This paper uses data from the US Department of Transportation’s 2001 National Household Travel Survey to analyze the factors affecting mode choice for elementary and middle school children. The analysis shows that walk travel time is the most policy-relevant factor affecting the decision to walk to school with an estimated direct elasticity of −0.75. If policymakers want to increase walking rates, these findings suggest that current policies, such as Safe Routes to School, which do not affect the spatial distribution of schools and residences will not be enough to change travel behavior. The final part of the paper uses the mode choice model to test how a land use strategy—community schools—might affect walking to school. The results show that community schools have the potential to increase walking rates but would require large changes from current land use, school, and transportation planning practices.