Incident reporting in Finnish shipping companies

The purpose of the International Safety Management Code (the ISM Code) is to promote safety culture in the maritime industry. Learning the lessons from incidents should help to improve safety performance since incidents and accidents can share the same root causes. The aim of this paper is to take a closer look at incident reporting in the Finnish shipping industry, to study the reasons for poor incident reporting and to suggest improvements to increase reporting. The paper consists of a literature study, which focuses on previous studies concerning incident reporting, and an interview study, which focuses on Finnish shipping companies and their personnel. The interview study confirmed that incident reporting does not function properly within the Finnish maritime industry. The maritime personnel have an occupational culture which is incompatible with the rule-based safety management approach provided by the ISM Code. The willingness to report incidents could be increased if all seafarers were involved in the reporting process and the preparation of corrective actions. In addition, the reporting procedures should be streamlined and developed to a more user-friendly direction.     

Demand management of congested public transport systems: a conceptual framework and application using smart card data

Transportation - Transportation demand management, long used to reduce car traffic, is receiving attention among public transport operators as a means to reduce congestion in crowded public...     

Employment suburbanisation, reverse commuting and travel behaviour by residents of the central city in the Paris metropolitan area

This paper analyses the relationship between employment suburbanisation in the Paris metropolitan area, the growth of reverse commuting and changes in the weekday travel behaviour of working residents of the central city over a 20-year period. The results show that the number of reverse commuters has significantly increased because the municipality of Paris has lost many jobs but few working residents whilst employment has developed in the suburbs. Reverse commuters are mainly and increasingly high-income professionals whose workplace is located close to the central city in employment sub-centres that are well served by public transport. Consequently reverse commuters have lower than average car use although differences exist and are related to their professional status. The policy implications of these findings are discussed in the conclusion.     

Hailing a change: comparing taxi and ridehail service quality in Los Angeles

Transportation - For decades, taxis have provided for-hire vehicle service without significant competition from other modes. But in 2012, ride-hail services such as Uber and Lyft upended the taxi...     

Analyzing voter support for California’s local option sales taxes for transportation

Local and regional governments in the U.S. rely increasingly on voter-approved local option sales taxes (LOSTs) to fund transportation capital investments, maintenance, and operations. LOSTs typically present voters with lists of local transportation projects and programs to be funded by a ¼ to 1 percent sales tax increase. Most research on LOSTs are case studies, which make generalizations about LOSTs difficult. We conducted a comprehensive, multi-jurisdictional analysis of LOST measures in California, the U.S. state with the greatest number of LOST measures. We examined 76 LOST measures put to voters between 1976 and 2016 to assess factors associated with voter support. LOSTs in California are enacted by counties, which we examined in addition to smaller intra-county geographies using both regression models and case studies. We tested several explanatory variables for association with voter support including macroeconomic and political context, planned measure expenditures, voter characteristics, and spatial distribution of proposed projects. We found that funding dedicated to public transit and returned to local jurisdictions predicts support at the county level, and that LOSTs that create new taxes—as opposed to extending or renewing existing taxes—are less popular with voters, all else equal. Our analyses of sub-county geographies revealed that political party affiliation is the strongest predictor of local voter support for LOSTs and that voters living adjacent to funded projects tended to be more supportive of LOSTs.

     

Transport-related CO2 effects of online and brick-and-mortar shopping: A comparison and sensitivity analysis of clothing retailing

This paper compares transport-related CO₂ emissions of online and brick-and-mortar shopping based on supply, delivery, order and travel data related to one multi-channel clothing retailer. A sensitivity analysis sheds more light on how situational factors, such as the customers’ travel distances, returns, the use of public transport modes and information behavior via different channels influence the outcome of this comparison. The results show that online retailing causes lower CO₂ emissions under many conditions. Nevertheless, the brick-and-mortar channel is more environmentally friendly when travel distances are small. The radius for which brick-and-mortar shopping has an advantage increases when returns, shifts in the use of public transport and information behavior are also considered.     

On the estimation of trip matrices in the case of missing and uncertain data

The problem of missing data in the base (calibration) year is of major importance when applying the gravity model in transportation planning, because base year data are used for calibration of the model. In this article, this problem is tackled by solving an optimization problem for the prediction year for values of the entropy level and the proportions of trips in a given stratification of the cells of the trip matrix estimated in the base year. The problem of uncertain data in the prediction year is handled by replacing equality constraints for the marginal totals in the prediction year by interval constraints. Computational results are given for trip data from the Linköping area.     

Allision risk analysis of offshore petroleum installations on the Norwegian Continental Shelf—an empirical study of vessel traffic patterns

The Norwegian Petroleum Safety Authority (PSA) requires offshore petroleum operators on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS) to perform risk assessments of impacts (allisions) between passing ships and offshore installations. These risk assessments provide a basis for defining the allision accidental load that the installation shall be designed for. Even though the risk of allision is small, the potential consequences can be catastrophic. In a worst-case scenario, an allision may result in the total loss of an installation. The ageing industry standard allision risk model, COLLIDE, calculates the risk of impacts between passing (non-field-related) ships and installations based on Automatic Identification System (AIS) data. Both the COLLIDE risk model and a new Bayesian allision risk model currently under development are highly sensitive to variations in vessels’ passing distances, especially close proximity passings. Allision risk assessments are typically performed during the design and development phase of an installation, which means that historical AIS data are used “as is”, disregarding future changes to the traffic pattern when the new installation is placed on a location. This article presents an empirical study of one of the most important variables used to calculate the risk of allision from passing vessels, namely passing distance. The study shows that merchant vessels alter course to achieve a safe passing distance to new surface offshore petroleum installations. This indicates that the results of current allision risk assessments are overly conservative.     

Risk analysis of vessel traffic systems

A risk analysis approach to the capital planning of vessel traffic services (VTS) is embedded within the benefit-cost methodology. The method is discussed in the Canadian context, but has already been used to plan the Hong Kong VTS system. Recently, in response to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the US Congress asked for a study of the requirements for VTS systems in American ports and waterways, and the US Coast Guard chose to apply our risk analysis approach to their study.     

A portfolio approach to strategic chartering decisions

Modern management techniques are slowly but surely being introduced aslo in shipping management. Large sections of the industry practises strategic management at various levels in the firm. This paper outlines a method for deciding chartering strategies in the international bulk shipping industry. A well known risk/return model is tailored to transportation contracts in the shipping industry. The model delineates a set of optimally defined transportation contracts that may serve as a basis for the shipowner's strategic decisions. The strategies and elements of strategies suggested by the model have historically been practised by a number of successful shipowners. An important conclusion of the paper is that no second best problems exists and hence movement towarts the optimal solution is advocated even if such a solution cannot or will not be reached. Additionally, the paper provides an organized way of crafting, analysing and applying chartering strategies where the outcomes can be clearly defined and analysed based on well known statistical concepts and theories.