Financing urban rail projects: The case of Los Angeles

This paper describes the potential use of the financing strategy of value capture or benefit assessment for an urban mass transportation project. The paper describes the legal background to the use of benefit assessment, and the process of implementation for the first construction phase of the Los Angeles Metro Rail project. The process of developing the benefit assessment structure was a consultative one, utilizing technical inputs from a team of specialist consultants, a task force consisting of major developers and property owners in the affected area, and politicians representing many of the interests in the region. The initial benefit assessment districts were set up to raise $130 million of the cost of the first 4.4 miles of the rail project, and are based on the benefits accruing to certain categories of property in the vicinity of stations. The assessment would be collected for about 18 years and bonding would be used to provide the capital at the time of construction.The paper describes the procedure for setting boundaries, the structuring of the assessment rates, the definition of benefiting properties, and the uses and tenure of the assessment. In almost all cases, the theory of value capture indicated a different result than was achieved from a consensus of the task force, and the nature of these differences is explored in the paper. The establishment of the benefit assessment districts withstood early court challenges, but has subsequently been appealed and was overturned on appeal. Action is pending with the Supreme Court currently, and efforts are also underway to pass new legislation to deal with some of the issues raised in the court proceedings.     

An investigation of the reliability of real-time information for route choice decisions in a congested traffic system

This paper investigates the reliability of information on prevailing trip times on the links of a network as a basis for route choice decisions by individual drivers. It considers a type of information strategy in which no attempt is made by some central controller or coordinating entity to predict what the travel times on each link would be by the time it is reached by a driver that is presently at a given location. A specially modified model combining traffic simulation and path assignment capabilities is used to analyze the reliability of the real-time information supplied to the drivers. This is accomplished by comparing the supplied travel times (at the link and path levels) to the actual trip times experienced in the network after the information has been given. In addition, the quality of the decisions made by drivers on the basis of this information (under alternative path switching rules) is evaluated ex-post by comparing the actually experienced travel time (given the decision made) to the time that the driver would have experienced without the real-time information. Results of a series of simulation experiments under recurrent congestion conditions are discussed, illustrating the interactions between information reliability and user response.     

The state-of-the-art in urban transportation planning or how we got here

This paper traces the development of urban transportation planning in the United States, focusing particularly on the influence that three previous conferences -Sagamore (1958), Hershey (1962), and Williamsburg (1965) - have had on the course of this development. Included also are comments on the current state of the art of urban transportation planning and observations as to its future direction.The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1934, which authorized the use of 1 percent funds for highway planning is identified as the progenitor of urban transportation planning in the U.S., and two reports based on information developed by the highway planning surveys first funded under the 1934 Act, Toll Roads and Free Roads (1939) and Interregional Highways (1944), are credited with preparing the ground for much of the urban transportation planning that was to follow.The rapid development of home interview survey techniques in the late 1940's and the full-scale introduction of computer technology in the Detroit Area Transportation Study are noted, as is the work of the National Committee on Urban Transportation, which was initiated in 1954 under sponsorship of the Automotive Safety Foundation. In addition to its substantial technical contributions, the NCUT, through its success in mobilizing the cooperative efforts of virtually every major group concerned with urban transportation, stimulated significant gains in Federal-State-local relationships and paved the way for increased Federal aid to cities in solving their local transportation problems.The impact of the 1956 and 1962 Federal-Aid Highway Acts on urban transportation planning is assessed. The substantial contributions, of the Hartford, Sagamore, Hershey, and Williamsburg conferences are discussed, as are their shortcomings. It is noted that many of our present concerns — environmental impacts, relationships between transportation and land use, need for cooperation among all levels of government, the multi-modal nature of urban transportation, and the need for citizen involvement, to name a few — were incorporated in the provisions of either one or another of the Federal-Aid statutes in the 1950's and 60's or appear in the recommendations of the several conferences. That these matters still concern us today is given as evidence that planning has not fully lived up to its promise and responsibility, that more rather than less planning is needed, and that, above all, new leadership to pick up where the old has left off must soon assert itself.     

Goodness-of-fit measures for probabilistic travel demand models

This paper is concerned with the assessment of the goodness-of-fit of nonlinear models of the type currently being used in the development of the disaggregate, behavioral travel demand approach. These models are emerging as a potential new technique for many transportation planning problems, although much research is yet needed before they are sufficiently developed for operational use. In order to pursue the necessary research, and also for the later assessment of operational models, it is necessary to have adequate measures of the goodness-of-fit.The paper examines the adequacy of standard measures of goodness-of-fit as applied to any nonlinear estimating equation and they are found to be inappropriate and inadequate. A little-known statistic, called the correlation ratio, is then defined and derived, and is explored as a substitute for the standard measures. In both theoretical and empirical tests, the correlation ratio is found to be a significantly more useful and appropriate measure of goodness-of-fit.Some further properties of the correlation ratio are examined, and the ratio is found to possess some degree of arbitrariness when applied to typical travel demand models. This arbitrariness, however, only impairs the usefulness of the correlation ratio in the absolute assessment of a model, but not for the comparative assessment of two or more models. Finally, a number of research tasks, relating to the correlation ratio, are identified.     

Microscopic decision model for pedestrian route choice at signalized crosswalks

In this paper, two‐tier mathematical models were developed to simulate the microscopic pedestrian decision‐making process of route choice at signalized crosswalks. In the first tier, a discrete choice model was proposed to predict the choices of walking direction. In the second tier, an exponential model was calibrated to determine the step size in the chosen direction. First, a utility function was defined in the first‐tier model to describe the change of utility in response to deviation from a pedestrian's target direction and the conflicting effects of neighboring pedestrians. A mixed logit model was adopted to estimate the effects of the explanatory variables on the pedestrians' decisions. Compared with the standard multinomial logit model, it was shown that the mixed logit model could accommodate the heterogeneity. The repeated observations for each pedestrian were grouped as panel data to ensure that the parameters remained constant for individual pedestrians but varied among the pedestrians. The mixed logit model with panel data was found to effectively address inter‐pedestrian heterogeneity and resulted in a better fit than the standard multinomial logit model. Second, an exponential model in the second tier was proposed to further determine the step size of individual pedestrians in the chosen direction; it indicates the change in walking speed in response to the presence of other pedestrians. Finally, validation was conducted on an independent set of observation data in Hong Kong. The pedestrians' routes and destinations were predicted with the two‐tier models. Compared with the tracked trajectories, the average error between the predicted destinations and the observed destinations was within an acceptable margin. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Efficient solution algorithm for finding spatially dependent reliable shortest path in road networks

Travel times are generally stochastic and spatially correlated in congested road networks. However, very few existing route guidance systems (RGS) can provide reliable guidance services to aid travellers planning their trips with taking account explicitly travel time reliability constraint. This study aims to develop such a RGS with particular consideration of travellers' concern on travel time reliability in congested road networks with uncertainty. In this study, the spatially dependent reliable shortest path problem (SD‐RSPP) is formulated as a multi‐criteria shortest path‐finding problem in road networks with correlated link travel times. Three effective dominance conditions are established for links with different levels of travel time correlations. An efficient algorithm is proposed to solve SD‐RSPP by adaptively using three established dominance conditions. The complexities of road networks in reality are also explicitly considered. To demonstrate the applicability of proposed algorithm, a comprehensive case study is carried out in Hong Kong. The results of case study show that the proposed solution algorithm is robust to take account of travellers' multiple routing criteria. Computational results demonstrate that the proposed solution algorithm can determine the reliable shortest path on real‐time basis for large‐scale road networks. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Skid Prediction

In this paper, available information about anti-skid devices is reviewed with the specific purpose of bringing out the importance of skid prediction. Then the merits and demerits of three methods of prediction are studied.