Introducing congestion pricing on a new toll road

This paper proposes a demonstration project to test the effectiveness of congestion pricing in an urban area. It reviews the general theoretical case for such pricing and summarizes recent international interest in congestion pricing. Next, it sets forth the reasons why demonstration projects are needed, both to add to our knowledge about how effective congestion pricing may prove to be, and to address political and other public-acceptance barriers to implementation of the concept. The paper then defines a specific proposed test site for congestion pricing: a new toll road being planned for Orange County, California. It is proposed that instead of charging flat-rate tolls, the transportation agency could charge peak and off-peak tolls, increasing the level of the peak charge each year over a period of up to 10 years unless or until toll revenues decline below the levels forecast under the flat-rate toll alternative. Measurements of traffic flow and ride-sharing behavior would be made, as well as calculations of emission-reduction effects. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of marketing and political considerations involved in conducting such a demonstration.Abbreviations ARB Air Resources Board - AVI Automatic Vehicle Identification - CDMG Corridor Design Management Group - HOV High-occupancy vehicle - SJHTC San Joaquin Hills Transportation Corridor - TCA Transportation Corridor Agency - VMT Vehicle miles traveled     

Adaptation of a General Multibody Dynamical Formalism to Dynamic Simulation of Terrestrial Vehicles

The development of general Eulerian dynamic formalisms for the digital simulation of multi-body systems is reviewed. The formalism of Robertson/Wittenburg is generalized to systems whose configuration includes closed loops, thereby adapting it to the dynamic simulation of terrestrial vehicles.     

橡胶减振系统的动力学冲击模拟和试验

橡胶减振装置在铁道运输系统中是必不可少的部件。基于将橡胶结构大变形和高阻尼特性考虑在内的自然频率域(NFR-Natural Frequency Region)方法,针对实际工业减振产品CUS单元在整个冲击过程中的动力响应测试,分别用2种模拟冲击质量体的有限元模型(点质量模型和实体模型)进行较详尽的分析,评估实体橡胶减振系统的时域冲击响应,所模拟的结果和测试数据吻合良好。可为有关工作提供参考,有助于更准确地模拟橡胶减振系统的动力响应,从而加快和优化设计过程。     

Web-Based Interactive VR-CAD System for Conceptual Design and Analysis

Introduction Exploring a large number of design variants in aconceptual design phase assists in identifying the mostcost-effective design. However, how to capture userintents is challenging[1]. Although the necessity andadvantages of integrating customers into the innova-tion process are widely recognized[2], customers havea passive role in this design involvement process. Thefirst reason is the complexity of modeling tools. Most3D product mockups are created using commercialCAD packages or …     

Research review of air traffic management

As air transport demand keeps growing more quickly than system capacity, efficient and effective management of system capacity becomes essential to the operation of the future global air traffic system. Although research in the past two decades has made significant progress in relevant research fields, e.g. air traffic flow management and airport capacity modelling, research loopholes in air traffic management still exist and links between different research areas are required to enhance the system performance of air traffic management. Hence, the objective of this paper is to review systematically current research in the literature about the issue of air traffic management to prioritize productive research areas. Papers about air traffic management are discussed and categorized into two levels: system and airport. The system level of air transport research includes two main topics: air traffic flow management and airspace research. On the airport level, research topics are: airport capacity, airport facility utilization, aircraft operations in the airport terminal manoeuvring area as well as aircraft ground operations research. Potential research interests to focus on in the future are the integration between airspace capacity and airport capacity, the establishment of airport information systems to use airport capacity better, and the improvement in flight schedule planning to improve the reliability of schedule implementation.     

Do Public Transport Improvements Increase Agglomeration Economies? A Review of Literature and an Agenda for Research

Public transport improvements may increase economic productivity if they enable the growth and densification of cities, downtowns, or industrial clusters and thereby increase external agglomeration economies. It has been argued that the potential agglomeration benefits are large; if so, understanding them better would be useful in making funding decisions about public transport improvements. We reviewed theoretical and empirical literature on agglomeration as well as a small number of articles on transportation's role in agglomeration. The theoretical literature is useful in understanding possible avenues by which transportation improvements might affect agglomeration, although there is little discussion of public transport specifically. Relevant empirical studies tend to focus on metropolitan regions and use a generalized measure of transportation cost. But public transport impacts on agglomeration are likely to be different from road investment impacts. We identified several ways of conducting research building on this literature that would help evaluate the agglomeration impacts of public transport proposals: tracing the links between transport, agglomeration, and productivity; better motivating research using theories of agglomeration mechanisms; taking scale and redistribution into account; exploring the functional form of agglomeration economies; accounting for endogeneity in model structure; and considering development context.     

Revisiting the notion of induced traffic through a matched-pairs study

In investigating the question of the existence of "induced demand" in connection with highway expansion projects, Hansen et al. (1993) studied eighteen California state highway segments whose capacities had been improved in the early 1970s. For the present study, these segments were paired with control segments that matched the improved segments to unimproved ones with regard to facility type, region, approximate size, and initial volumes and congestion levels. Taking annual data for average daily traffic (ADT) and design-hour-traffic-to-capacity (DTC) ratios during the 21 years 1976–1996, three approaches were used to compare growth rates between the improved and unimproved segments: overall growth comparisons for the matched pairs, repeated measures analysis, and analysis of matched mean profiles. We found the growth rates between the two types of segments to be statistically and practically indistinguishable, suggesting that the capacity expansions, in and of themselves, had a negligible effect on traffic growth over the period studied. Reasons for the differences between these results and those of aggregate cross-sectional models finding a significant induced demand effect are discussed. Our analyses suggest that the aggregate models may overestimate induced traffic due to the attribution of at least a fraction of the observed traffic growth to "induced demand" rather than to some of the confounding factors which were not controlled for in such studies. At the same time, it is noted that the traffic induced by capacity expansion may in certain circumstances be larger than that observed in the present study, with the effect of new highway construction on traffic growth being a prime candidate for scrutiny in this regard. The results of this study nonetheless suggest that, for existing facilities, the size of the induced-traffic effect that can be attributed to capacity enhancements may be sufficiently small that its detection in a case-control study would be difficult, if not impossible, without a substantially larger sample size.     

Map-matching poor-quality GPS data in urban environments: the pgMapMatch package

Global Positioning System (GPS) data have become ubiquitous in many areas of transportation planning and research. The usefulness of GPS data often depends on the points being matched to the true sequence of edges on the underlying street network – a process known as ‘map matching.’ This paper presents a new map-matching algorithm that is designed for use with poor-quality GPS traces in urban environments, where drivers may circle for parking and GPS quality may be affected by underground parking and tall buildings. The paper is accompanied by open-source Python code that is designed to work with a PostGIS spatial database. In a test dataset that includes many poor-quality traces, our new algorithm accurately matches about one-third more traces than a widely available alternative. Our algorithm also provides a ‘match score’ that evaluates the likelihood that the match for an individual trace is correct, reducing the need for manual inspection.