Electric vehicle charging station locations: Elastic demand,station congestion,and network equilibrium

Battery-only electric vehicles (BEVs) generally offer better air quality through lowered emissions, along with energy savings and security. The issue of long-duration battery charging makes charging-station placement and design key for BEV adoption rates. This work uses genetic algorithms to identify profit-maximizing station placement and design details, with applications that reflect the costs of installing, operating, and maintaining service equipment, including land acquisition. Fast electric vehicle charging stations (EVCSs) are placed across a congested city's network subject to stochastic demand for charging under a user-equilibrium traffic assignment. BEV users’ station choices consider endogenously determined travel times and on-site charging queues. The model allows for congested-travel and congested-station feedback into travelers’ route choices under elastic demand and BEV owners’ station choices, as well as charging price elasticity for BEV charging users.Boston-network results suggest that EVCSs should locate mostly along major highways, which may be a common finding for other metro settings. If 10% of current EV owners seek to charge en route, a user fee of $6 for a 30-min charging session is not enough for station profitability under a 5-year time horizon in this region. However, $10 per BEV charging delivers a 5-year profit of $0.82 million, and 11 cords across 3 stations are enough to accommodate a near-term charging demand in this Boston-area application. Shorter charging sessions, higher fees, and/or allowing for more cords per site also increase profits generally, everything else constant. Power-grid and station upgrades should keep pace with demand, to maximize profits over time, and avoid on-site congestion.     

武汉光谷国际网球中心与三环线衔接匝道研究

介绍了武汉市三环线武黄立交新增匝道的设计思路、方案调整及匝道车道数研究。通过分析新增匝道建设的主要受控因素,提出了三环线到达及驶离网球中心停车场不同路径的匝道方案,并从多方面对匝道方案进行综合比选。     

Transit network design with allocation of green vehicles: A genetic algorithm approach

The use of fossil fuels in transportation generates harmful emissions that accounts for nearly half of the total pollutants in urban areas. Dealing with this issue, local authorities are dedicating specific efforts to seize the opportunity offered by new fuels and technological innovations in achieving a cleaner urban mobility. In fact, authorities are improving environmental performances of their public transport fleet by procuring cleaner vehicles, usually called low and zero emission vehicles (LEV and ZEV, respectively). Nevertheless there seems to be a lack of methodologies for supporting stakeholders in decisions related to the introduction of green vehicles, whose allocation should be performed since the network design process in order to optimize their available green capacity.In this paper, the problem of clean vehicle allocation in an existing public fleet is faced by introducing a method for solving the transit network design problem in a multimodal, demand elastic urban context dealing with the impacts deriving from transportation emissions.The solving procedure consists of a set of heuristics which includes a routine for route generation and a genetic algorithm for finding a sub-optimal set of routes with the associated frequencies.     

Understanding members' carsharing (activity) persistency by using econometric model

Carsharing is an innovative travel alternative that has recently experienced considerable growth and become part of sustainable transportation initiatives. Although carsharing is becoming increasingly a popular alternative transportation mode in North America, it is still an under‐researched area. Current research is aimed at better understanding of the behavior of carsharing users. For every member, a two‐stage approach microsimulates the probability of being active in any month using a binary probit model and given that a particular member is active during a month, the probability of that member using the service multiple times using a random utility‐based model. The model is estimated using empirical data from one of the largest carsharing companies in North America. The model estimates reveal that the activity persistency of members is positively linked to previous behaviors for up to 4 months, and that the influence of previous months weakens over time. It also shows that some attributes of the traveler (gender, age, and language spoken at home) impact his or her behaviors. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The determinants of long distance travel in Great Britain

This study analyses of the determinants of long distance travel in Great Britain using data from the 1995-2006 National Travel Surveys (NTSs). The main objective is to determine the effects of socio-economic, demographic and geographic factors on long distance travel. The estimated models express the distance travelled for long distance journeys as a function of income, gender, age, employment status, household characteristics, area of residence, size of municipality, type of residence and length of time living in the area. A time trend is also included to capture common changes in long distance travel over time not included in the explanatory variables. Separate models are estimated for total travel, travel by each of four modes (car, rail, coach and air), travel by five purposes (business, commuting, leisure, holiday and visiting friends and relatives (VFRs)) and two journey lengths (<150 miles and 150+ miles one way), as well as the 35 mode-purpose-distance combinations.The results show that long distance travel is strongly related to income: air is most income-elastic, followed by rail, car and finally coach. This is the case for most journey purposes and distance bands. Notable is the substantial difference in income elasticities for rail for business/commuting as opposed to holiday/leisure/VFR. In addition, the income elasticity for coach travel is very low, and zero for the majority of purpose-distance bands, suggesting coach travel to be an inferior mode in comparison to car, rail and air. Regarding journey distance, we find that longer distance journeys are more income elastic than shorter journeys.For total long distance travel, the study indicates that women travel less than men, the elderly less than younger people, the employed and students more than others, those in one adult households more than those in larger households and those in households with children less than those without. Long distance travel is also lowest for individuals living in London and greatest for those in the South West, and increases as the size of the municipality declines.     

Development of railway station choice models to improve the representation of station catchments in rail demand models

ABSTRACT

This paper describes the development of railway station choice models suitable for defining probabilistic station catchments. These catchments can then be incorporated into the aggregate demand models typically used to forecast demand for new rail stations. Revealed preference passenger survey data obtained from the Welsh and Scottish Governments was used for model calibration. Techniques were developed to identify trip origins and destinations from incomplete address information and to automatically validate reported trips. A bespoke trip planner was used to derive mode-specific station access variables and train leg measures. The results from a number of multinomial logit and random parameter (mixed) logit models are presented and their predictive performance assessed. The models were found to have substantially superior predictive accuracy compared to the base model (which assumes the nearest station has a probability of one), indicating that their incorporation into passenger demand forecasting methods has the potential to significantly improve model predictive performance.     

Daily activity and travel sequences of students,faculty and staff at a large Canadian university

This paper examines the activity engagement, sequencing and timing of activities for student, faculty and staff commuter groups at the largest university in the Maritime Provinces of Canada. The daily activity patterns of all university community groups are modeled using the classification and regression tree classifier algorithm. The data used for this study are derived from the Environmentally Aware Travel Diary Survey (EnACT) conducted in spring 2016 at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia. Results show that there are significant differences in activity and travel behavior between university population segments and the general population in the region, and between campus groups. For example, students participate in more recreation activities compared to faculty and staff. They also take more trips to and from campus, and are more flexible in their scheduling of trips. The insights gained from this study will provide helpful information for promoting sustainability across university campuses, and for development of campus-based travel demand management strategies.     

Tradable credits for managing car travel: a review of empirical research and relevant behavioural approaches

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in Tradable Credits (TC) as an alternative measure to manage the growth of personal car use. This paper summarises the results and methodologies of studies that have sought to anticipate the behavioural responses to several proposed TC schemes that target personal travel. In a critical reflection on this work and in an attempt to inspire future research, we argue that future empirical studies on TC behaviours can greatly benefit from insights from the fields of behavioural economics and cognitive psychology. Therefore, in the second part of the paper, we bring together behavioural concepts from these fields that are relevant in a TC decision-making context. Based on observations from current TC studies and the behavioural mechanisms identified in the second part of the paper, we propose promising directions for future research on understanding the impact of TC on personal car travel.     

Long-term impact of the Shinkansen on rail and air demand: analysis with data from Northeast Japan

This paper analyses how the high-speed rail construction in Northeast Japan (Tohoku) has affected total demand and interregional travel patterns. We use annual interregional passenger data from 1989 to 2012 and apply regression analysis with the demand between Tokyo and the Tohoku prefectures as the dependent variable. We distinguish particularly between the ‘Full-’ and the ‘Mini-’ Shinkansen, where the latter are branch services running with reduced speed. We find that the ‘Full-Shinkansen’ quickly increases rail and total public transport trips and generates additional rail demand year on year. The ‘Mini-Shinkansen’ impacts are less pronounced. Furthermore, our analysis shows that the Shinkansen has shifted some demand from air to rail once it started operation and increased rail share gradually. We therefore suggest that predictions of demand impacts should carefully distinguish immediate from gradual impacts. We also discuss differences in regional demand in that not all prefectures have gained equally from Shinkansen construction.     

Asymmetry in transport fuel demand: Evidence from household level data

Models for gasoline demand for transportation activities generally assume that demand is perfectly reversible with respect to gasoline price (and income). The small literature which relaxes the reversibility assumption in gasoline demand argues technological fixation leads to this asymmetry and utilizes aggregate time-series model to find evidence in favour of asymmetry. In this research it is suggested that there could also be behavioural factors behind this asymmetric response, possibly due to the loss aversion nature of human beings as described in the prospect theory. For the first time, household level data was used to understand asymmetry in gasoline demand in response to changes in gasoline price and income. There was statistical evidence that gasoline price and income both can induce asymmetric changes in gasoline demand among households. Specifically, elasticity with respect to rising prices and falling income is larger than the elasticity with respect to falling prices and rising income respectively, which is consistent with loss aversion in gasoline purchase behaviour. There was also some evidence of heterogeneity in the asymmetric responses between urban and rural households. The results have implications for transport-related energy tax policies or subsidies, while the method can be applied directly for non-energy goods as well.