Drivers of customer satisfaction with public transport services

This paper aims to improve the understanding of the drivers of customer satisfaction with public transport (PT). The methodology provides a relevant contribution to the previous studies since it highlights the complex interaction between the level and composition of satisfaction, negative social safety experiences (NSSEs), urban settings, and the PT mode used.Overall, PT users see the service attributes on-time performance, travel speed, and service frequency as the most important, followed by personnel/driver behaviour and vehicle tidiness. A generic policy aimed at achieving these attributes may yield favourable results with respect to satisfaction.Further, we demonstrate the influence of differences in customer characteristics on satisfaction. A policy aimed at increasing the service frequency and putting new vehicles into operation will probably lead specifically to more satisfied older people (>65), passengers travelling by regional train, and people living in dense urban areas.These findings may be of help to PTAs intending to exert an influence on the actions of PT operators, for instance by using them as a measuring rod in incentive contracts.     

Comparative analysis of three user equilibrium models under stochastic demand

Recent empirical studies on the value of time and reliability reveal that travel time variability plays an important role on travelers' route choice decision process. It can be considered as a risk to travelers making a trip. Therefore, travelers are not only interested in saving their travel time but also in reducing their risk. Typically, risk can be represented by two different aspects: acceptable risk and unacceptable risk. Acceptable risk refers to the reliability aspect of acceptable travel time, which is defined as the average travel time plus the acceptable additional time (or buffer time) needed to ensure more frequent on‐time arrivals, while unacceptable risk refers to the unreliability aspect of unacceptable late arrivals (though infrequent) that have a travel time excessively higher than the acceptable travel time. Most research in the network equilibrium based approach to modeling travel time variability ignores the unreliability aspect of unacceptable late arrivals. This paper examines the effects of both reliability and unreliability aspects in a network equilibrium framework. Specifically, the traditional user equilibrium model, the demand driven travel time reliability‐based user equilibrium model, and the α‐reliable mean‐excess travel time user equilibrium model are considered in the investigation under an uncertain environment due to stochastic travel demand. Numerical results are presented to examine how these models handle risk under travel time variability.     

Economic appraisal of universal design in transport: Experiences from Norway

Economic assessment of universally designed transport projects has not been studied in depth in the transport planning literature. Universal Design (UD) refers to the design of transport systems in a way that they are accessible to all users, irrespective of the users’ abilities. This definition of UD has not yet gained roots in the transport economic literature. The conventional thinking is that UD is for the few, i.e., the impaired, and given that they are few in numbers, UD projects will generally be unprofitable from a socioeconomic point of view because benefits will be low while investment costs will be too high. The objective of this paper is to prove the opposite: UD projects benefit all users of the facility, whether impaired or not, and the additional costs of implementing them are generally low; hence, their net present values are high and positive. We build on collaborative work between the Norwegian Public Roads Administration (NPRA) and the Institute of Transport Economics (TOI) aimed at creating guidelines for assessing the economic merits of UD projects. Therefore, in this paper, we: (1) define how UD is to be understood in the context of road and public transport; (2) describe the types of benefits and costs that accrue to users if UD projects are implemented; (3) address how the benefits and cost can be valued in monetary terms; and (4) using three different types of projects, demonstrate that UD projects are surprisingly profitable from a socioeconomic point of view. Finally, we address the implications of our findings and explain why governments need to be concerned with UD of transport systems.     

Bounded rationality and irreversible network change

A network change is said to be irreversible if the initial network equilibrium cannot be restored by revoking the change. The phenomenon of irreversible network change has been observed in reality. To model this phenomenon, we develop a day-to-day dynamic model whose fixed point is a boundedly rational user equilibrium (BRUE) flow. Our BRUE based approach to modeling irreversible network change has two advantages over other methods based on Wardrop user equilibrium (UE) or stochastic user equilibrium (SUE). First, the existence of multiple network equilibria is necessary for modeling irreversible network change. Unlike UE or SUE, the BRUE multiple equilibria do not rely on non-separable link cost functions, which makes our model applicable to real-world large-scale networks, where well-calibrated non-separable link cost functions are generally not available. Second, travelers’ boundedly rational behavior in route choice is explicitly considered in our model. The proposed model is applied to the Twin Cities network to model the flow evolution during the collapse and reopening of the I-35 W Bridge. The results show that our model can to a reasonable level reproduce the observed phenomenon of irreversible network change.     

Evaluating a concept design of a crowd-sourced ‘mashup’ providing ease-of-access information for people with limited mobility

This study investigates the impact of using a concept map-based ‘mashup’ (www.accessadvisr.net) to provide volunteered (i.e. user contributed) ease of access information to travellers with limited mobility. A scenario-based user trial, centred around journey planning, was undertaken with 20 participants, divided equally between (1) those who have physical restrictions on their mobility, due to disability, illness or injury, and (2) those with practical mobility constraints due to being parents with young children who have to use a child’s pushchair when using public transport. Both user groups found the concept useful, but its potential impact was less for the pushchair user group. There were mixed views in relation to the ability of the mashup to convey the trustworthiness, credibility and reliability of information necessary for journey planning. The study identified a number of key information-related user requirements which help enable effective design of user contributed web-based resources for travellers with mobility-related issues.     

船体结构有限元分析计算前后处理系统

本文讨论了交互图形有限元分析前后处理的方法和技术，介绍了ＰＣＦＥＰ系统及在微机上的实现。     

CompactPCI热插拔系统设计与应用

热插拔是CPCI系统最重要和最具优势的特点。目前,业界尚没有一种能够同时支持基本热插拔、完全热插拔和高可靠性热插拔的实现方案。提供了一种CPCI热插拔系统,分别从系统架构、软件架构、各组成部分的数据流交互、热插拔驱动以及守护进程的工作流程5个方面阐述了整个系统的硬件和软件实现。该热插拔系统符合CPCI热插拔规范,能够同时支持基本热插拔、完全热插拔和高可靠性热插拔。     

奥运智能交通系统体系框架开发方法研究

以北京奥运会为例研究了大型活动ITS体系框架的开发方法,对TurboArchitecture软件在中国的适用性进行了验证。研究了2008年奥运会ITS的定位和发展基础,确定了相应的发展战略。借助ITS框架开发软件TurboArchitecture,按照识别用户服务、确定ITS要素、选择功能模块和构建物理框架的步骤,开发了奥运ITS的体系框架。     

考虑土体渗透性径向变化的砂井地基数值模拟分析

土体渗透性是影响砂井地基固结的重要因素。为研究复杂条件下砂井地基的固结性状,通过编制用户子程序在ABAQUS中建立了渗透系数沿径向变化的砂井地基固结计算数值模型,对固结过程中的孔压分布及固结性状进行了研究。结果表明:渗透系数在径向上的变化情况会对砂井固结性状产生很大的影响。假定涂抹区渗透系数为常数时固结速率最慢;假定涂抹区渗透系数呈抛物线变化时固结速率最快;而假定涂抹区渗透系数呈线性变化时固结速率介于以上两种情况之间。此外,砂井地基的固结性状还受排水条件和土层特性等因素的影响。