Competition and Ownership in Land Passenger Transport: The Sixth International Conference,Cape Town,South Africa,September 1999 - Part 1

The ability of conventional South African travel analysis practices to analyse adequately the travel needs of the poor is examined. The origins and nature of conventional practices are described, and it is observed that typically their scope has been limited to motorized modes, commutes and peaks. The paper reports on the findings of an activity diary survey administered in Cape Town that extended the conventional scope of analysis. An activity‐based survey method was selected because it typically yields higher rates of trip recall than other methods and is therefore relatively well suited to investigating travel behaviour in its fuller complexity. Selected findings of the survey are presented to demonstrate that travel occurring by non‐motorized modes, for non‐work purposes and during off‐peak periods, is considerable. It is argued that the conventional limitation in analytical scope can create serious misconceptions of the true nature of travel behaviour, particularly of low‐income households. By restricting the focus of analysis to motorized, work and peak period trip‐making, there is a risk of a routine bias being introduced in the way the urban passenger transport problem is understood, and in the nature of the interventions that are implemented as a result.     

Urban passenger transport in the United States and Europe: a comparative analysis of public policies

This is the second part of a two‐part series that examines recent developments in urban passenger transport in the United States and Europe, focusing on the roles and impacts of the public sector as these have varied by country and over time. The first part of the series described public policies for roadway systems and private car use, whereas this second part concentrates on public transport. After a review of demand and supply trends, the article evaluates government policies in terms of public vs private ownership and operation, public regulation, financing responsibility by government level, types and amounts of subsidy, and impacts of ownership, regulation, and financing arrangements on costs and productivity. This second part concludes with an overall comparison between Europe and the United States, and considers how Europeans and Americans might learn from each other's successes and mistakes in order to improve transport policies.     

Book review

COMPUTER SCHEDULING OF PUBLIC TRANSPORT 2, edited by J.‐M. Rousseau. North‐Holland Publishing Company, August 1985 (ISBN: 0–444–87778–9), pp. 512 (U.S. $59.25/DF1. 160.00)     

How much disruption to activities could fuel shortages cause? – The British fuel crisis of September 2000

In September of 2000 the UK experienced a blockade of oil refineries in response to rising fuel prices. These protests resulted in severe fuel supply disruptions that intensified over the course of about one week. During the peak of the crisis, travel activity by car was curtailed. This paper analyzes survey data collected about two months after the crisis utilizing the recent memory of respondents as to how they would expect this sort of disruption to affect their participation in daily activities. Specifically, we focused on a variety of non-discretionary and discretionary activities and examined what factors are associated with respondents expecting disruption to those activities. Statistical models were developed to analyze how demographic factors, commute mode selection, vehicle characteristics, and various other factors can explain how individuals expect disruption to their activities. Results suggest that the majority of individuals do not expect major disruptions, although for more car-dependent individuals, disruption was expected to be substantial, especially for work-related trips. These results have implications for the potential success and benefits of an integrated transport policy.     

中国船舶修理改装厂全览

在过去几年里,中国已经明显成为在船舶修理和船舶改装行业中日益崛起的国家之一.中国的修船业起先仅因其价格竞争优势而闻名,而如今中国的领先船厂在船舶修理和船舶改装业务中所具有的全面竞争力已经获得全球海运界的公认.日本川崎重工和新加坡胜科集团这样的业界领先企业已经在中国建起了合资船厂,这些国际知名船舶管理公司的加盟正使中国修造船企业的竞争力得到进一步的增强.     

不断增长的威胁

由于运量的增加,集装箱航运业2003年增长12%,2004年达14%,这引起人们的担心.在仅仅两年的时间里,随着全球集装箱产量跃居8350万TEU,集装箱运量有望增长30.3%.     

The influence of alternative data smoothing prediction techniques on the performance of a two-stage short-term urban travel time prediction framework

This article investigates the impact of alternative data smoothing and traffic prediction methods on the accuracy of the performance of a two-stage short-term urban travel time prediction framework. Using this framework, we test the influence of the combination of two different data smoothing and four different prediction methods using travel time data from two substantially different urban traffic environments and under both normal and abnormal conditions. This constitutes the most comprehensive empirical evaluation of the joint influence of smoothing and predictor choice to date. The results indicate that the use of data smoothing improves prediction accuracy regardless of the prediction method used and that this is true in different traffic environments and during both normal and abnormal (incident) conditions. Moreover, the use of data smoothing in general has a much greater influence on prediction performance than the choice of specific prediction method, and this is independent of the specific smoothing method used. In normal traffic conditions, the different prediction methods produce broadly similar results but under abnormal conditions, lazy learning methods emerge as superior.     

Using kinematic driving data to detect sleep apnea treatment adherence

People spend a significant amount of time behind the wheel of a car. Recent advances in data collection facilitate continuously monitoring this behavior. Previous work demonstrates the importance of this data in driving safety but does not extended beyond the driving domain. One potential extension of this data is to identify driver states related to health conditions such as obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). We collected driving data and medication adherence from a sample of 75 OSA patients over 3.5 months. We converted speed and acceleration behaviors to symbols using symbolic aggregate approximation and converted these symbols to pattern frequencies using a sliding window. The resulting frequency data was matched with treatment adherence information. A random forest model was trained on the data and evaluated using a held-aside test dataset. The random forest model detects lapses in treatment adherence. An assessment of variable importance suggests that the important patterns of driving in classification correspond to route decisions and patterns that may be associated with drowsy driving. The success of this approach suggests driving data may be valuable for evaluating new treatments, analyzing side effects of medications, and that the approach may benefit other drowsiness detection algorithms.     

A nationwide study of factors associated with household car ownership in China

Car ownership is growing very rapidly in China; whilst this is a reflection of sustained economic growth, it presents a major challenge to Chinese transport policymakers. The consequences of China's motorization also extend beyond the national borders, however, via mechanisms such as increased demand for new automobiles produced in North America and Europe and the global atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. Chinese cities are also experimenting with innovative transport policies to manage increasing car ownership, which in a number of cases go beyond the menu of policy options that have traditionally been considered in the West. Despite policy interest for these reasons, China's motorization process is poorly understood, in part due to a scarcity of relevant data.This paper contributes to the body of literature regarding this phenomenon by drawing on a unique data resource: the 2011 wave of the China Household Finance Survey (n = 8438 households). This is a disaggregate national-scale survey dataset developed to monitor economic conditions in China, though to the authors' knowledge the CHFS has not previously been employed to study patterns of car ownership.We report a set of three analyses, to identify factors associated with: 1) whether a household owns at least one car, 2) multiple car ownership, and 3) whether a household owns a new car. Amongst other empirical results, we find that living in a rural area is negatively associated with car ownership, net of confounding effects, and that within towns/cities poor accessibility (i.e. long travel time) to the town/city centre is also negatively associated with car ownership. These findings regarding spatial effects are contrary to typical findings in the West, where car ownership is generally lowest in urban centres.An earlier version of this study was presented at the 2017 Transportation Research Board conference.