What determines university student’s willingness to pay for bikeways?

Transportation - Inadequate infrastructure is recognized as an important barrier to cycling; therefore, improvements in the provision of bicycle facilities, such as bikeways, are frequently...     

An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Beach Management in the Catalan Coast (North-Western Mediterranean)

This article presents a comprehensive analysis of beach management in the Catalan coast (NW Mediterranean) by introducing and integrating results from different partial projects. They analyzed the legal, political, and administrative framework of beach management, the quality tools available, the practices of management, the processes of beach use, and beach waste/litter dynamics. The information obtained served to create a new beach management tool referred to as the Beach Quality Index, which was developed by an interdisciplinary team of academics from the natural/physical sciences and social sciences that worked together during the course of four years. Information obtained from users and key stakeholders served to create the index. The study demonstrated that as a consequence of the shortcomings in the legal and administrative system as well as inadequate practices of beach managers, beach management in the area experiences coordination problems, insufficient information and lack of proactive management, pollution, and in general problems associated with the satisfaction of short-term user demands.     

The Role of Indigenous Resurgence in Marine Conservation

Abstract

Indigenous peoples’ efforts toward environmental conservation are indivisible from their cultural identity and their social and political organizations. Indigenous resurgence, including the reinvigoration and reestablishment of Indigenous ways of living, are linked to the management, restoration, and conservation of marine and coastal ecosystems around the world. However, there remains a significant gap in the recognition and support of Indigenous governance systems in international policy discussions regarding conservation work. As a way to address this gap, we offer an analysis of marine Indigenous community-led conservation initiatives from around the world that were recipients of the UNDP Equator Prize, framed by initial research on Indigenous-led conservation in British Columbia, Canada. We highlight specific Indigenous governance strategies undertaken by such communities that foster both marine resource conservation and stewardship. The strategies we identified included practicing Indigenous traditional resource management, protection of traditional territories, Indigenous-led actions of environmental conservation, and data collection and monitoring. We also identified networking and collaboration with non-Indigenous supporters, as was reinvestment into education and capacity-building within the community. We conclude with concrete policy suggestions drawn from these cases that can help strengthen the leadership and self-determination of Indigenous peoples on local resource and environmental issues, and aid in much broader conservation efforts globally.     

Classifying Ports for Efficiency Benchmarking: A Review and a Frontier-based Clustering Approach

Abstract

Port efficiency and port clustering are two aspects that have received different degrees of attention in the existing literature. While the actual estimation of port efficiency has been extensively studied, the existing literature has paid little attention to developing robust methodologies for port classification. In this paper, we review the literature on classification methods for port efficiency, and present an approach that combines stochastic frontier analysis, clustering and self-organized maps (SOM). Cluster methodologies that build on the estimated cost function parameters could group ports into performance metrics’ categories. This helps when setting improvement targets for ports as a function of their specific cluster. The methodology is applied to a database of Spanish port authorities. The dendrogram features three clusters and five outlier Spanish Port Authorities. SOM are employed to track the temporal evolution of Spanish Port Authorities that are of special interest for some reasons (i.e. outliers). Results show that use of a combination of cost frontier and cluster methods to define robust port typology and SOMs, jointly or in isolation, offers useful information to the decision-makers.     

Transportation of dangerous goods by road: the Brazilian case for selection of carriers based on a risk management methodology

Abstract

This article applies a methodology for selecting carriers for the transportation of dangerous goods by road, with a special focus on risk management aspects. The methodology makes use of Stated Preference techniques and verifies the most critical risk-related variables influencing decision-making from the shippers' point of view. It embraces the planning and execution stages, an evaluation of the contracted company and a feedback process. The methodology was effectively applied to the case of liquid fuel shippers in the Brazilian middle-west region where it proved possible to identify which dangerous goods road transport company to contract in accordance with the risk management factors selected by the decision makers.     

Estimation of a route choice model for urban public transport using smart card data

This paper describes a logit model of route choice for urban public transport and explains how the archived data from a smart card-based fare payment system can be used for the choice set generation and model estimation. It demonstrates the feasibility and simplicity of applying a trip-chaining method to infer passenger journeys from smart card transactions data. Not only origins and destinations of passenger journeys can be inferred but also the interchanges between the segments of a linked journey can be recognised. The attributes of the corresponding routes, such as in-vehicle travel time, transfer walking time and to get from alighting stop to trip destination, the need to change, and the time headway of the first transportation line, can be determined by the combination of smart card data with other data sources, such as a street map and timetable. The smart card data represent a large volume of revealed preference data that allows travellers' behaviour to be modelled with higher accuracy than by using traditional survey data. A multinomial route choice model is proposed and estimated by the maximum likelihood method, using urban public transport in ?ilina, the Slovak Republic, as a case study     

Implications of Thresholds in Discrete Choice Modelling

Abstract

Individual choices are affected by complex factors and the challenge consists of how to incorporate these factors in order to improve the realism of the modelling work. The presence of limits, cut‐offs or thresholds in the perception and appraisal of both attributes and alternatives is part of the complexity inherent to choice‐making behaviour. The paper considers the existence of thresholds in three contexts: inertia (habit or reluctance to change), minimum perceptible changes in attribute values, and as a mechanism for accepting or rejecting alternatives. It discusses the more relevant approaches in modelling these types of thresholds and analyses their implications in model estimation and forecasting using both synthetic and real databanks. It is clear from the analysis that if thresholds exist but are not considered, the estimated models will be biased and may produce significant errors in prediction. Fortunately, there are practical methods to attack this problem and some are demonstrated.     

Book Review: Airline Marketing and Management

Abstract

Public transport policy in the Madrid Metropolitan Area is often deemed as a success. In 1985, an important reform was carried out in order to create a new administrative authority to coordinate all public transport modes and establish a single fare for all of them. This reform prompted a huge growth in public transport usage, even though it reduced the funding coverage ratio of the transport system. Since then, Madrid’s public transport system has been undergoing an increasing level of subsidization, which might jeopardize the financial viability of the city public transport system in the future. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of the evolution of the public transport funding policy in Madrid in recent years. We found that the increasing level of subsidy can hardly be explained on the basis of equity issues. Moreover, we claim that there is still room for a funding policy that makes the efficiency of the system compatible with its financial sustainability.     

Estimation of air–sea CO2 fluxes in the Bay of Biscay based on empirical relationships and remotely sensed observations

An empirical algorithm has been developed to compute the sea surface CO₂ fugacity (fCO₂^sw) in the Bay of Biscay from remotely sensed sea surface temperature (SST_RS) and chlorophyll a (chl a_RS) retrieved from AVHRR and SeaWiFS sensors, respectively. Underway fCO₂^sw measurements recorded during 2003 were correlated with SST_RS and chl a_RS data yielding a regression error of 0.1 ± 7.5 µatm (mean ± standard deviation). The spatial and temporal variability of air–sea fCO₂ gradient (ΔfCO₂) and air–sea CO₂ flux (FCO₂) was analyzed using remotely sensed images from September 1997 to December 2004. An average FCO₂ of ? 1.9 ± 0.1 mol m^? 2 yr^? 1 characterized the Bay of Biscay as a CO₂ sink that is suffering a significant long-term decrease of 0.08 ± 0.05 mol m^? 2 yr^? 2 in its capacity to store atmospheric CO₂. The main parameter controlling the long-term variability of the CO₂ uptake from the atmosphere was the air–sea CO₂ transfer velocity (57%), followed by the SST_RS (10%) and the chl a_RS (2%).     

The use of Risk Concept to characterize and select High Risk Vessels for ship inspections

The Paris Memorandum of Understanding (Paris MoU) has defined criteria aimed at better targeting of ships for Port State Control inspections. These criteria are mostly based on ship detentions or deficiencies. Another approach proposed in this paper is based on the concept of risk, combining in various ways the probability of the occurrence of casualties and the potential consequences of such occurrences. These measures are to help identify High Risk Vessels (HRV) and to inspect them accordingly.