Women’s mode and trip structure choices in daily activity-travel: a developing country perspective

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we analyze the travel patterns of Iranian women, where typical patriarchal views and specific social and cultural norms may differ from the patterns of those in western societies. In addition to inherent psycho-physical gender differences, women in Iran can face special constraints forcing them not to be involved in all activity-travel patterns that people in developed countries usually undertake. We pay special attention to the role of marital and employment status on women’s activity-travel patterns. To this end, we develop a joint mode and daily activity pattern (DAP) discrete choice model, which is a two-level mixed nested Logit. The upper nest of the proposed model embodies women’s DAP choices, and the lower nest belongs to the mode choices. In this paper, we try to show how different factors in a patriarchal Muslim society like Iran affect or restrict women’s type and structure of activity-travel patterns.     

Merging ICT and informal transport in Jakarta's ojek system

This paper discusses how information and communication technologies (ICT) may influence travel behavior of an informal transport system, and whether and in which ways merging digital technologies represents disruption for a specific sociotechnical ensemble. For decades, ojek has been a form of informal passenger transport, based on motorcycles in Jakarta, and recently smartphone apps have become available in that sociotechnical arrangement. We randomly surveyed passengers and drivers in the central district, for both those who do and do not use these apps. Despite many similarities between both groups, the drivers who use smartphones for their trips reported higher daily incomes, longer average trip distances and a larger coverage area. Passengers using conventional ojek transport reported lower levels of both safety perception and satisfaction when compared to app-based ojek users. For both categories of user, ojek seems to compete with, complement, and be an alternative to bus rapid transit and the suburban rail system (KRL) in the area covered by our sample. The areas covered by regular buses and vans roughly match the origins and destinations of ojek trips.     

Numerical Modeling of an Advanced Semi-SWATH Hull in Calm Water and Regular Head Wave

A small waterplane area twin hull (SWATH) has excellent seakeeping performance and low wave-making resistance, and it has been applied to small working craft, p...     

Flow measurements in the exhaust system of a motorized engine

Stereo Particle Image Velocimetry (SPIV) is used to measure the highly turbulent flow in the upstream region of the catalytic converter for a four stroke IC engine. These experiments are conducted for a motorized engine to investigate the feasibility of using SPIV for exhaust flow measurements in a firing IC engine in our future research. The results obtained here can also be used for validation of the CFD models. The measured flow is highly three dimensional, non-uniform with large magnitudes of turbulence indicating recirculating flow structures. These structures show signatures of jet flows coming out of the exhaust valves at all exhaust crank angles. The triangular shape and location for the end face of each exhaust runner pipe, the length and geometry of the runners also affect the flow mixing process upstream of the catalytic converter contributing to the complexity of this flow. Although majority of the exhaust flow passes through the catalytic converter, some will recirculate due to impingement of the exhaust jets on the surface of the catalyst.