Allocation flexibility and price efficiency within Singapore’s Vehicle Quota System

Permit or license plate quotas are highly effective albeit controversial policy tools for managing growth in the vehicle population and thereby, adverse traffic congestion. A judicious distribution of the scarce permits that targets the dual objectives of price efficiency and social diversity in vehicle ownership can however mitigate the controversy. This paper scrutinizes the attainment levels of these two objectives within Singapore’s multi-categorical Vehicle Quota System in two time periods (1991–1998 and 2002–2011) which differ in the number of permit allocation categories, the auction format used (sealed versus open bids) and in the frequency of distribution (monthly versus semimonthly). The lessons derived are contrasted to the other two jurisdictions which have also implemented quotas on their vehicle registrations namely, Shanghai and Beijing.     

Singapore’s Vehicle Quota System and its impact on motorcycles

Singapore’s Vehicle Quota System, implemented in 1990, uses uniform-price auctions to allocate Certificates of Entitlement (COE) or registration rights in five categories presently. Four of these are restricted to small and big cars, commercial vehicles and motorcycles. The fifth one is unrestricted as it allows successful bidders to register a vehicle in any restricted category of their choice. Owners are incentivised via another policy to deregister their vehicle by the tenth year expiry of the COE instead of revalidating it. Each deregistration results in a new COE. Currently, 10% of the COEs from each restricted category is channelled to the unrestricted category. However, hardly any of the expensive COEs in the unrestricted category has been used to register motorcycles. The sharp decline in the number of motorcycle COEs since 2014 has led to a surge in auction premiums at about twice the price of an entry-level motorcycle. The auction process before 2014 is shown to be exemplary with the COE premium driven by its inertia and a host of exogenous factors. After 2014 however, it appears to be unresponsive to the historically low quota levels. This undesirable auction trait needs to be remedied by a reformulation of the COE quota in order to help those most in need of a motorcycle to earn a living. Measures announced in the February 2017 Singapore Budget trudge in that direction.     

Mitigating supply and price volatilities in Singapore’s vehicle quota system

Traffic congestion in city-state Singapore is managed by vehicle ownership restraint complemented with usage charges in bottleneck zones. A certificate of entitlement (COE) obtained from auctions held twice a month is required to register any new vehicle. As Singapore sticks to a target vehicle population, the quota of COEs availed in the auctions hinges critically on the number of vehicles deregistered before the 10 years expiry of the COE. The paper demonstrates that vehicle deregistrations are negatively influenced by the prevailing COE prices. This engenders boom and bust cycles in the COE quotas and thereby spurs price volatility. It is also shown that below an empirically-derived breakpoint quota, COE prices surge and they may also correlate negatively with bidding competition. To avoid such undesirable situations, a proposal is made to allocate the breakpoint quota as a minimum by borrowing from future quotas. This will help smooth quota and price volatilities while adhering to medium-term vehicle population targets. The practicality of the proposal is discussed against various alternatives.     

Car restraint policies and mileage in Singapore

Negative externalities often surface after policies are implemented. This paper analyses how two “hard” Travel Demand Management (TDM) policies implemented in Singapore to target vehicle ownership and road usage may contribute to a negative externality namely excessive mileage accumulation. This has implications on resource depletion such as petrol wastage, higher CO₂ emission and losses in time and productivity. Vehicle ownership in Singapore is managed firstly via the requirement to bid for a Certificate of Entitlement (COE) which entitles the usage of local roads and secondly via the payment of an Additional Registration Fee (ARF) which is refundable between 75% and 50% to incentivise the de-registration of a vehicle before it is 10 years old. Such deregistered vehicles may also be eligible for a COE refund between 0% and 80% depending on age. The COE and ARF costs are significant as they typically account for more than half the purchase price of a vehicle. Furthermore, road usage is subject to Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) fees on busy segments. A sample of over 8700 used cars is analysed to infer the effects of the non-refundable (or “sunk”) and the “variable” portions of the combined cost of COE and ARF as well as the number of ERP gantries on mileage over and above traditional factors such as petrol price and engine size. The findings suggest tweaks to the TDM policies to reduce mileage and its negative implications.     

How to restrain participants opt out in shared parking market? A fair recurrent double auction approach

We propose a fair recurrent double VCG (FRD-VCG) auction mechanism to approach the emerging shared parking management problem. In a given shared parking environment with a parking management platform and a double-side perspective, the proposed mechanism considers how to restrain the potential participants (parking slot demanders and slot suppliers) opt out, which is based on the participants’ priority attributes and are calculated with respect to historic auction records provided by the parking platform. Participants’ fairness bids are then generated combining their priority attributes and their submitted bids (bid price and parking time) with the support of a novel evaluation function, which integrates priority attributes, bid price and parking time into an output value. The parking slot allocation rule and transaction payment rule are further designed to dealing with these issues include winner determination and price setting, respectively. Simulations show advantages of the proposed FRD-VCG mechanism, i.e., comparing with the double VCG (D-VCG) mechanism for the shared parking management problem where priority attributes and evaluation function are not considered, the proposed FRD-VCG mechanism has the potential to persuade participants to remain in the market whilst it improves the market’s retention rate, the parking slot’s utilization rate and the participants’ utilities.     

Dynamic threshold policy for delaying and breaking commitments in transportation auctions

In this paper we consider a transportation procurement auction consisting of shippers and carriers. Shippers offer time sensitive pickup and delivery jobs and carriers bid on these jobs. We focus on revenue maximizing strategies for the shippers in sequential auctions. For this purpose we propose two strategies, namely delaying and breaking commitments. The idea of delaying commitments is that a shipper will not agree with the best bid whenever it is above a certain reserve price. The idea of breaking commitments is that the shipper allows the carriers to break commitments against certain penalties. We evaluate the benefits of both strategies with simulation. In addition, we provide insight into the distribution of the lowest bid which is estimated by the shippers.     

Serial private infrastructures

This paper investigates private supply of two congestible infrastructures that are serial, where the consumer has to use both in order to consume. Four market structures are analysed: a monopoly and 3 duopolies that differ in how firms interact. It is well known that private supply leads too high usage fees, and that a serial duopoly leads to even higher fees than a monopoly, as firms are monopolists on their sections. But, as this paper finds, a duopoly can also lead to a different capacity rule than the first-best one, and this distortion differs from with two parallel facilities. Finally, four auction formats for the right to build and operate facilities are investigated. With a bid auction, the competition is on how much to pay the government. This auction leads to the same outcome as no auction. An auction on the facility’s capacity leads to an even lower welfare than no auction, as firms set overly large high capacities. Conversely, an auction on the generalised price or number of users leads to the first-best outcome, which they do when the facilities go to one or two winners and both with serial as with parallel facilities.     

New methods of controlling vehicle ownership and usage in Singapore

Over the years Singapore has introduced several fiscal measures aimed at restraining car ownership and usage and thus preventing traffic congestion. Two new methods have recently been added: the Vehicle Quota System which limits the number of new vehicles registered each month and the Weekend Car Scheme which allows cars to be registered for use during off-peak hours only, with substantial financial savings to the owners. The Vehicle Quota System involves monthly public tenders for Certificates of Entitlement needed to register new cars. Over the past 30 months the cost of COE's has been increasing and now constitutes between 12% and 27% of the on-the-road price of a new car. The fluctuations in the COE premiums for different vehicle categories are presented and analysed. The initial problems and the recent modifications made as a result of public pressure are also described. It seems that the increases in COE premiums are likely to continue under strong economic growth conditions as the demand for cars is more income-elastic than price-elastic.     

Approximation algorithms for the bid construction problem in combinatorial auctions for the procurement of freight transportation contracts

Trucking companies (carriers) are increasingly facing combinatorial auctions conducted by shippers seeking contracts for their transportation needs. The bid valuation and construction problem for carriers facing these combinatorial auctions is very difficult and involves the computation of a number of NP-hard sub problems. In this paper we examine computationally tractable approximation methods for estimating these values and constructing bids. The benefit of our approximation method is that it provides a way for carriers to discover their true costs and construct optimal or near optimal bids by solving a single NP-hard problem. This represents a significant improvement in computational efficiency. We examine our method both analytically and empirically using a simulation based analysis.     

Flexible-term contracts for road franchising

Private participation in road projects is increasing around the world. The most popular form of franchising is a concession contract, which allows a private firm to charge tolls to road users during a pre-determined period in order to recover investments. Concessionaires are usually selected through auctions at which candidates submit bids for tolls or payments to the government. This paper discusses how this mechanism does not generally yield optimal outcomes and it induces the frequent contract renegotiations observed in practice. A new franchising mechanism is proposed, based on a flexible-term contract and bi-dimensional bids for total net revenue and maintenance costs. This new mechanism improves outcomes compared to fixed-term concessions, by eliminating traffic risk and promoting the selection of efficient concessionaires.     

Auction-based highway reservation system an agent-based simulation study

Based on previous studies of a highway reservation system, this paper proposed an auction-based implementation, in which the users can bid for the right to use a route during a certain period of time. This paper models the auction system with MATSim using an agent-based simulation technique. The agents adopt their own bidding logic in the auction, and the price converges after around 130 iterations, when the number of users using the reserved highway and the total collected revenue become stable. When the overall demand changes, the collected revenue ranges from 5 to 11 dollars per user, and from 0.7 to 1.5 dollars per mile. The auction system can transfer more consumer surplus to the toll road operators, since it is a personalized tolling mechanism. The users are using the reservation system as insurance of a guaranteed congestion-free travel. The auction-based highway reservation shows great potential as a new traffic management system.     

多功能焊接车

针对全位置自动焊技术在管线中的应用,为解决野外管线施工的流动性、环境恶劣、无电力供应问题,研究一种将行走、发电、焊接、吊装等作业于一身的多功能焊接车。通过选取履带式底盘作为焊接车底盘,从中提取发电机的动力源,经过控制装置将电力提供给焊接、吊装等各用电设备和增设设备安装平台等,将行走系统、发电系统、焊接系统、吊装系统集于一身,实现了焊接车的野外行走,吊装防风棚,为全位置自动焊提供焊接电源等多种功能。     

施工项目成本管理的控制方法与对策

施工企业利润空间在当前日益激烈的市场竞争中逐步缩小，因此要在不断规范的工程项目招投标中参与国际化竞争，抓好工程项目成本管理、提高项目经济效益就显得尤其重要。文章通过对施工项目成本管理的控制方法进行分析，提出施工项目成本管理对策。     

基于碳平衡原理的天然气汽车燃料消耗量检测方法研究

文章通过分析天然气组份及天然气发动机的燃烧特性,基于碳平衡原理建立了天然气汽车燃料消耗量计算模型。对比分析了闭式和开式碳平衡检测系统的结构工作原理及适用范围,确定采用开式稀释采样方式进行天然气燃料消耗量检测系统开发。结合天然气汽车燃料消耗量计算模型中的技术参数需求,设计开发了碳平衡气耗仪。为了分析设备工作的可靠性和测量的准确性,选用LNG宇通客车和东风危险品运输车作为试验样车,利用科里奥利质量流量计对其进行标定。通过对比试验可知,碳平衡气耗仪与科里奥利质量流量计相对误差为5%,基本满足在用天然气汽车燃料消耗量检测的需求。     

Public sector comparators for UK PFI roads: inside the black box

A public sector comparator (PSC) represents the hypothetical, risk-adjusted cost of a project—such as a road scheme—when that project is financed, owned and implemented by government. A PSC is commonly used in public procurement decision-making as a yardstick against which private investment proposals are evaluated. Using original material released by the UK Highways Agency for the first time, the author recreated the PSCs used for the evaluation of the first eight road projects to be promoted under the UK’s private finance initiative (PFI). Alternative assumptions regarding project risks were modelled using different levels of optimism-bias uplift, and the impact on value-for-money of using different discount rates was evaluated. Public sector comparators have attracted considerable attention in the literature as they retain a pivotal role in the policy decision to use—or not use—private finance. However the fact that their detail is usually kept confidential by public sector procuring agencies—because of commercial sensitivities—has restricted informed discussion and open debate. Now the architecture of these comparators is laid bare for critical examination. It has generally been assumed that any reduction in the discount rate used in PSC calculations will favour conventional procurement over PFI-type contracting arrangements. The research reported in this paper demonstrates that the relationship between the discount rate and the attractiveness of using private finance is not as simple as has been assumed, and the outcome in terms of value-for-money is not as predictable as has previously been reported.     

Transaction costs and tradable mobility credits

Artificial markets for mobility credits have been proposed as an alternative to conventional congestion pricing schemes. This paper examines the effects of transaction costs on two types of markets: an auction market and a negotiated market. In an auction market, users purchase all of the needed mobility credits through a competitive bidding process. In a negotiated market, the users initially receive certain amount of mobility credits from the government and trade with each other through negotiation to fulfill their needs. We assume that a brokerage service is built in both markets to facilitate transactions and accordingly, the users have to pay a commission fee proportional to the value of trade. The users are also given the option to purchase credits from the government if for some reasons they cannot use or wish to avoid the markets. Our analyses suggest that the auction market can achieve the desired equilibrium allocation of mobility credits as long as the government sets its price properly and the unit transaction cost is lower than the price that the market would reach in absence of transaction costs. However, in the negotiated market, transaction costs could divert the system from the desired equilibrium regardless of their magnitude. More importantly, the initial allocation of mobility credits may affect the final equilibrium even when marginal transaction costs are constant.     

开口加劲肋正交异性钢桥面铺装力学分析

文章以开口加劲肋正交异性钢桥面铺装体系作为研究对象,建立了包括桥面板和铺装的整体三维有限元分析模型,研究了荷载作用下铺装层的力学特性。分析表明,横向拉应力是开口加劲肋正交异性钢桥面铺装设计的一个重要控制指标;开口加劲肋正交异性钢桥面铺装层间剪应力较大,在铺装结构设计时应注意选择具有较强抗剪强度的粘结材料;开口加劲肋正交异性钢桥面铺装对车辆荷载的应力应变响应具有很强的局部效应。     

Modelling dual carriageway lane changing using neural networks

Neural networks offer a potential alternative method of modelling driver behaviour within road traffic systems. This paper explores the application of neural networks to modelling the lane-changing decisions of drivers on dual carriageways. Two approaches are considered. The first, preliminary approach uses a prediction type of neural network with a single hidden layer and the back propagation learning algorithm to model the behaviour of an individual driver. A series of consecutive time-scan traffic patterns, which describe the driver's environment and changes over time as the selected vehicle travels along a link, are input to the neural network, which then predicts the new lane and position of the vehicle. Training data are collected from a human subject using an interactive driving simulation. The trained neural network successfully exhibited the rudiments of driving behaviour in terms of lane and speed changes. A major disadvantage of this approach was the difficulty in recording real-life data, which are required to train the neural network, for individual drivers. The second approach concentrates specifically on lane changing and makes use of a learning vector quantization classification type of neural network. Input to the neural network still consists primarily of time-scan traffic patterns, but the format is changed to facilitate the possibility of data acquisition using image processing. The neural network output classifies the input data by determining the new lane for the vehicle concerned. Performance in both testing and training was very good for data generated by the rule-based driver-decision model of a microscopic simulation. Performance in testing was less satisfactory for data taken directly from a road and highlighted the need for extensive data sets for successful training.     

Trading mechanisms for bottleneck permits with multiple purchase opportunities

This paper extends the theory of tradable bottleneck permits system to cases with multiple period markets and designs its implementation mechanism. The multiple period markets can achieve more efficient resource allocation than a single period market when users’ valuations of tradable permits change over time. To implement the multiple period trading markets, we propose an evolutionary mechanism that combines a dynamic auction with a capacity control rule that adjusts a number of permits issued for each market. Then, we prove that the proposed mechanism has the following desirable properties: (i) the dynamic auction is strategy-proof within each period and guarantees that the market choice of each user is optimal under a perfect information assumption of users and (ii) the mechanism maximizes the social surplus in a finite number of iterations. Finally, we show that the proposed mechanism may work well even for an incomplete information case.     

Procurement methods for automated guideway transit systems

Procurement of an Automated Guideway Transit (AGT) system is a relatively new process for many procuring agencies worldwide. Outside of large airports, no single transit market sector has enough experience to establish well proven procurement methodologies for innovative transit technologies. Several methods, however, have emerged recently which, together with more conventional approaches, make the decision making process quite complex. The objective of this article is to review currently used and recently considered procurement methods and recommend a methodology for their selection depending on specific project requirements.