Integrating land use and transport knowledge in strategy-making

There is broad and growing consensus regarding the central place of integrated Land Use and Transport (LUT) strategy development in establishing more efficient and sustainable urban environments. However, empirical evidence shows that such integration is hard to achieve in daily planning practice, due to many institutional barriers and substantive differences. More specifically, the tools developed to support LUT strategy development have very low implementation rates in daily planning practice. This paper introduces the concept of ‘knowledge generation’ as a potentially useful mechanism for closing the gap between support tools and planning practice. Through two specific Dutch planning cases, we analyze the applicability of this concept in supporting integrated LUT strategy development. The paper focuses on the developed strategies, how these differ from current practice, and how knowledge generation supported their development. We argue that socialization produces shared strategies and that effective socialization needs to be supported by efficient mutual exchange between tacit and explicit knowledge. We conclude by discussing the implications of this argument for the wider practice of LUT planning integration.     

Second international conference on new survey methods in transport Hungerford Hill,Australia 12–16 September 1983

The Second International Conference on New Survey Methods in Transport was held at Hungerford Hill, Australia in September 1983. The aims of the conference were to provide a focus for discussion of survey methodology and to establish bench‐marks with respect to the state of the art in various facets of transport surveys. The conference evolved around workshops in twelve key areas: sample design, survey needs for modelling, questionnaire design and piloting, perceptual studies, diary surveys, longitudinal studies, interactive survey methods, freight surveys, traffic surveys, total design concepts, response errors and data correction, and coding and computing.

A number of plenary keynote papers were also presented describing the state of the art in cross‐sectional, longitudinal and interactive survey methods. Emerging from the conference discussions, six key issues were prominent; the gap between the state of the art, as espoused by researchers, and the state of practice, as employed by practioners; the differences in results obtained when employing different survey methods to collect essentially the same data; the emerging use of the telephone for the conduct of interview travel surveys; the interaction between survey methods and demand modelling and the disparate levels of sophistication in the two areas; the role of microcomputers in the design, conduct and analysis of transport surveys; and the need for practitioners to engage in controlled experimentation, so that methodological advances may continue to be made in the field of transport surveys.     

A study on time constraints and task deviations at sea leading to accidents – a cultural-historical perspective

The high frequency of maritime accidents and incidents occurring at sea has been a major challenge for the maritime industry in the last decades. The majority of these accidents are attributed to seafarers’ poor performance. This, despite the fact that the international maritime domain continues to adopt and update conventions regulating maritime safety to mitigate these accidents from occurring. In this paper, utilising a qualitative research approach, we show through a socio-cultural contextual perspective that time constraints as a major influencing factor in causing task deviations at sea which leads to dangerous situations. We analyse how some of the present barriers in place to prevent accidents at sea are in effect prompt seafarers who are working under time pressure to deviate from their task. Moreover, the paper discusses the social constituents such as job insecurity and the seafarers’ viewpoint towards the ship operators’ commitment to safe ship operations are crucial in motivating seafarers’ deviating from the task at hand when faced with time pressure.     

e-Navigation and situation-dependent manoeuvring assistance to enhance maritime emergency response

Safe ship handling in every situation and under all prevailing circumstances of ship status and the environment is a core element contributing to the safety of the maritime transportation system. Especially in case of emergencies, there is a need for quick, accurate and reliable information to manoeuvre a ship safely. This paper focusses on investigations into enhanced response to maritime emergencies by means of onboard manoeuvring support. The research and discussions are done exemplarily for person overboard (PoB) accidents. PoB is a typical situation for application of manoeuvring assistance and decision support, e.g. in order to return quickly to the position of the accident. Based on the analysis of selected accident case studies and existing solutions representing the technical state-of-the-art, shortcomings will be identified and discussed, and a potential approach for advanced manoeuvring support in the context of e-Navigation-based requirements will be introduced and discussed.     

Improving operational safety during icebreaker operations

The study presented in this paper aims at investigating what safety measures that can be taken to improve the operational safety during icebreaker operations in the Baltic Sea. During icebreaker operations, the icebreaker and the assisted vessel operate in close proximity to each other, a distance which can be even smaller if weather and ice conditions are severe. This poses a severe threat to the operation, since the extremely short distance between the vessels leaves no room for error. The results, which are based on data collected through individual interviews and questionnaires, indicate several possible improvements. Firstly, on a regulatory level, the introduction of an ice navigation certificate for deck officers would set a minimal level of formal competency. Secondly, on a knowledge level, more ice navigation training and better language skills work in favour for the safety. Thirdly, on a technical level, having an electronic chart with target tracking capability increases the efficiency and safety of the passage through ice. In addition to these results, this study shows a need to further research the communication and language situation during icebreaker operations.     

Optimization of crashworthy marine structures

History shows that ferry and RoPax collisions with tankers can be devastating for human life. This paper follows up such a scenario to contribute to rational increase of safety of marine structures. Through the coupling of multi-objective structural optimization and crashworthiness analysis, a conventional tanker structure is optimized for higher collision tolerance, accounting for the change in hull mass, so that the increase in safety is efficient. Two new concepts, proposed here, are deemed necessary for the successful execution of this task: a ‘two-stage’ optimization approach, reducing the number of needed collision simulations, and a rapid collision simulation approach that utilizes coarse FE mesh and reduces calculation time. Combining the obtained results with the state-of-the-art knowledge, a new insight about crashworthy design of tanker structures is also realized.     

The development of public attitudes towards the Stockholm congestion trial

A full-scale congestion charging trial was carried out in Stockholm the first months of 2006. Almost half of respondents in a county-wide survey stated that they changed their attitudes towards congestion charges during the trial. Most of them became more positive.An analysis of media shows that the attitudinal change in media towards the trial coincides with the attitudinal change of the public. There was no dramatic change in the proportion of articles expressing a negative view. Instead, the result indicates that the increase in positive views was driven by a shift from neutral to positive articles during the trial.In order to ascertain why the public attitudes swung, we have analysed the anticipated and perceived effects of the trial. Generally, the analysis seems to indicate that improved understanding of the type and magnitude of concrete effects was not a main driving force behind the attitudinal change. Instead, it seems that the public attitude changed because personal experience gave a new understanding of the implications of the charges for the personal well-being. This would imply that trials, generally, may be a more useful tool than information in the process of implementing ‘difficult’ policy measures, such as congestion charges.     

Identifying Suitable Sites for Macroalgae Cultivation on the Swedish West Coast

Special attention has been paid to sustainable macroalgae cultivation in Europe. The question on where suitable cultivation areas lie, without conflicting with current marine socio-economic activities and respecting the environment, remains a great challenge. Considering 13 criteria critical to seaweed farming such as depth, shipping traffic, and distance to ports, this paper aimed to identify suitable and sustainable offshore areas on the West Coast of Sweden for the cultivation of the Sugar Kelp, Saccharina latissima. An integrated approach with the tools geographic information systems (GIS) and multi-criteria analysis (MCA) was used to aggregate the criteria by means of Boolean and weighted linear combination (WLC) techniques. The Boolean method singled out 544?km² as suitable, whereas the WLC method indicated 475?km² as highly suitable. Both techniques complement each other in finding optimal sites. Furthermore, the integrated models excelled in providing an overview for effective spatial decision-making that fosters sustainable development of macroalgae cultivations within marine and coastal systems.

• Highlights

• To the authors’ knowledge no study on seaweed aquaculture site selection has been conducted using such a range of criteria with the purpose of including sustainability aspects within a comparative GIS-MCDA.

• The large areas identified on the West Coast of Sweden as suitable highlight the potential of this new industry and the complexity of associated marine spatial planning.

• Boolean and weighted linear combination methods were applied and compared, providing valuable insights in the selection of methods for spatial decision-making support. These insights should support a more sustainable development of macroalgae cultivation in the region, as well as a more resilient marine spatial planning process for blue growth strategies.

     

Disaggregate Path Flow Estimation in an Iterated Dynamic Traffic Assignment Microsimulation

This article describes the first application of a novel path flow and origin/destination (OD) matrix estimator for iterated dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) microsimulations. The presented approach, which operates on a trip-based demand representation, is derived from an agent-based DTA calibration methodology that relies on an activity-based demand model (Flötteröd, Bierlaire, & Nagel, 2011). The objective of this work is to demonstrate the transferability of the agent-based approach to the more widely used OD matrix-based demand representation. The calibration (i) operates at the same disaggregate level as the microsimulation and (ii) has drastic computational advantages over conventional OD matrix estimators in that the demand adjustments are conducted within the iterative loop of the DTA microsimulation, which results in a running time of the calibration that is in the same order of magnitude as a plain simulation. We describe an application of this methodology to the trip-based DRACULA microsimulation and present an illustrative example that clarifies its capabilities.