Causal linkages between highways and sector-level employment

While transport infrastructure investments have usually been viewed to have long-term impacts on employment, what is perhaps not immediately clear is the direction of causality. This paper has sought to disentangle the causal relationship between highway infrastructure and employment, using panel data for the 48 contiguous US states from 1984 to 1997. Of particular emphasis in this analysis is the sectoral differences in the causal and spatial effects of highway capacity expansions for employment growth in alternative sectors of the economy. The results indicate that lane-mile additions of own-state major highways could increase state employment growth in the services sector while reducing growth in manufacturing. However, the causal relationship is also found to work the other way around. That is, both the rapid growth in services employment and the slowdown in manufacturing jobs temporally lead to increases in roadway capacity of non-interstate major roads. Our analysis also shows that highway infrastructure could produce both positive and negative employment spillovers across states. We find that improvements in non-interstate major roads outside the state border are beneficial to the manufacturing sector which generally serves regional and national markets. For the services sector, however, employment gains from interstate highways in the same state may come at the expense of other states as there is clear evidence of negative employment spillovers from interstate lane-mile additions.     

Maritime security and seafarers’ welfare: Towards harmonization

This article examines the negative situation surrounding seafarers’ welfare in the post 9–11 shipping world. Its main focus is the denial of shore leave which has become a prime source of disharmony since the implementation of post 9–11 security measures. It discusses the implementation of these measures which has been at the expense of seafarers’ customary right to shore leave.     

Tanker safety: Regulatory change

There are many regulatory changes being imposed on tanker operators of new and existing ships. This paper provides a brief on the main changes and their practical impact on design and operation i.e. the significant recent and upcoming revisions to IMO MARPOL Annexes I, II and VI, SOLAS and other regulations and the IACS Common Structural Rules.     

Parenthood and cars: A weakening relationship?

Transportation - A wide body of research supports the notion that the travel behaviour of families with children tends to be car dependent. Yet recent literature suggests a more varied set of...     

Estimating the trip generation impacts of autonomous vehicles on car travel in Victoria,Australia

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) potentially increase vehicle travel by reducing travel and parking costs and by providing improved mobility to those who are too young to drive or older people. The increase in vehicle travel could be generated by both trip diversion from other modes and entirely new trips. Existing studies however tend to overlook AVs’ impacts on entirely new trips. There is a need to develop a methodology for estimating possible impacts of AVs on entirely new trips across all age groups. This paper explores the impacts of AVs on car trips using a case study of Victoria, Australia. A new methodology for estimating entirely new trips associated with AVs is proposed by measuring gaps in travel need at different life stages. Results show that AVs would increase daily trips by 4.14% on average. The 76+ age group would have the largest increase of 18.5%, followed by the 18–24 age group and the 12–17 age group with 14.6 and 11.1% respectively. If car occupancy remains constant in AV scenarios, entirely new trips and trip diversions from public transport and active modes would lead to a 7.31% increase in car trips. However increases in car travel are substantially magnified by reduced car occupancy rates, a trend evidenced throughout the world. Car occupancy would need to increase by at least 5.3–7.3% to keep car trips unchanged in AV scenarios.     

Scale and rationalization in container shipping

Return to scale are important in container shipping: service operators are continuing to increase the size of their vessels. Mr Seok-Min Lim's article 'Economies of container ship size' (Maritime pollicy and Management,21(2) pages 149-160, 1994) uses a sample of transPacific voyages to evaluate the effect of vessel scale on revenue and cost.Although the results are inconclusive,his study is of value in drawing attention to the revenue-side problems of large containerships. More data need to be collected before the effects of topping up with low-rated cargo on unit revenue retention can be assessed. Meanwhile the pursuit of scale aggravates over-tonnaging. The required response is further rationalization, through the medium of the conferences and the container consortia. In Europe both are under political attack. Operators need to convince the authorities of the soundness of the soundness of their case for adapting these institutions to the neeeds of times.Otherwise the scramble for scale could spell disaster.     

Changing demographics and young adult driver license decline in Melbourne,Australia (1994–2009)

In the last decade young people in North America, Australia and much of Europe are becoming less likely to hold a driver’s license and, if they can drive, they are driving less. This is a remarkable trend which is not yet well understood. This paper is an empirical analysis exploring the relationship between young adult driver licensing and young adult demographics and living arrangements. In many developed countries, young adults are becoming increasingly less likely to be in full-time work, more likely to be in part-time work or studying, more likely to be living at home with parents and they are getting married and having children later in life. Against the background of these trends, a binary logistic regression model of travel survey data (1994–2009) for Melbourne, Australia is used to explore the association between these demographics and young adult license-holding. The model established that full-time employment and child-rearing are associated with higher young adult licensing rates whereas part-time work and studying were associated with lower licensing rates. However the impact of living at home with parents was not clear and requires further study. Together it is theorised that these changes in living arrangements may be restricting the disposable income of some young adults and reducing or postponing license take-up. The paper concludes with the implications of findings for policy and opportunities for future research.     

The place of transport in facilitating social inclusion via the mediating influence of social capital

Social policy makers rarely associate the ability to be mobile with having a role in the facilitation of social inclusion. This paper provides an initial exploration of the association between a person’s travel patterns and their risk of social exclusion. Information is drawn from a major Australian Research Council transport study which interviewed 535 people from Metropolitan Melbourne, Australia. It includes an analysis of the extent of the person’s bonding and bridging social networks, their connectedness to the community, self-assessed level of well-being and their beliefs about whether or not they are able to control outcomes in their life. It was found that those who had the greatest risk of social exclusion, travelled less often and less distance, owned fewer cars and used public transport less, than those who were more socially included. However, those who were more at risk of social exclusion did not identify their lower trips as due to either a lack of transport, or problems with the public transport system. The ability to have good bridging networks appears to be related to increased trip-making and promotion of social inclusion but not necessarily self-assessed well-being which is satisfied by bonding networks.     

An investigation of multiplier effects generated by implementing queue jump lanes at multiple intersections

This paper investigates the combination effects of queue jump lanes (QJLs) on signalised arterials to establish if a multiplier effect exists, that is, the benefit from providing QJLs at multiple intersections is higher than the sum of benefits from providing them individually at each of those intersections. To explore the combination effects on bus delay and total person delay, a delay estimation model is developed using kinematic wave theory, kinematic equations and Monte Carlo simulation. In addition, to investigate the combination effects in offset settings optimised for bus delay or total person delay, offset optimisation models are proposed. Validation results using traffic micro‐simulation indicate the effectiveness and computational efficiency of the proposed models. Results of a modelling test bed suggest that providing QJLs at multiple intersections can create a multiplier effect on one‐directional bus delay savings with signal offsets that provide bus progression. Furthermore, optimising offsets to minimise bus delay tends to create a multiplier effect on one‐directional bus delay savings, particularly when variations in dwell times are not high. The reason for the multiplier effect may be that providing QJLs reduces variations in bus travel times, which makes signal coordination for buses perform more effectively. From a policy perspective, the existence of a multiplier effect suggests that a corridor‐wide scale implementation of QJLs has considerable merit. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.