Tonnage tax: is it working?

The introduction of the tonnage tax for shipping companies has been a response to the declining fleets in many European countries. There are strategic and commercial reasons why a maritime presence is desirable, not least of which is to maintain an important skill base. Although regimes have differed they all offer some form of preferential rates of tax for those ships on the register. In certain cases this tax subsidy has been linked to a requirement to train seafarers, notably in the UK. This article analyses the impact of the tonnage tax system and its success in achieving its objectives of fleet expansion and employment with particular reference to the UK.     

Systematic variability in repetitious travel

The focus of this paper is the degree to which day-to-day variability in the individual's travel pattern has a systematic, or nonrandom, component. We first review the different sources of variability in travel, emphasizing the difference between between-individual and within-individual variation and the implications of this difference for travel analysis. After discussing the impact of measurement (i.e. the way in which travel behavior is measured) on the study of repetition and variability, we use the Uppsala data to examine the level of systematic variability in an individual's longitudinal travel record. The analysis focuses on two questions:

- How well does observation over one week capture longer-term (five-week) travel behavior; in other words, is behavior highly repetitive from week to week?

- How systematic is within-individual variability; in other words, are certain stops distributed over the five-week record in a nonrandom, that is either regular or clustered, fashion?

Using measures of travel that include more than one stop attribute (e.g. activity, mode, time of day, and location), we found that:

- A seven-day record of travel does not capture most of the separate behaviors exhibited by the individual over a five-week period, but it does capture, for most people, a good sampling of the person's different typical daily travel patterns.

- Whereas a considerable portion of intraindividual variability is systematic (nonrandom), clustering is a more important source of nonrandom variation than is regularity.

The results suggest that behavior does not follow a weekly cycle closely enough for a one-week travel record to measure the longer-term frequency with which the individual makes certain stops or to assess the level of day-to-day variation present in the individual's record. Because these results are likely to reflect the particular measures of behavior we used, one conclusion of this study is the need for other studies that replicate the aims of this one but use a variety of other travel measures. Only through such additional work can we truly assess the sensitivity of our findings to measurement techniques.     

Surface street traffic volume and single-family house price

This study investigates the relationship between surface street traffic volume and single-family house prices in a relatively small city in the US. Hedonic price models are estimated using data from 9670 transactions that occurred between January 1998 and March 2011. It is discovered that parcels fronting or adjacent to a high-traffic street sell, on average, at an 8.1% discount compared to similar parcels that are not so situated. Restricting the analysis to parcels on or adjacent to a high-traffic street, house price and traffic volume are found to be negatively related; a doubling of volume from any particular traffic count, ceteris paribus, reduces selling price by an average of 2.1%.     

Urban form,travel time,and cost relationships with tour complexity and mode choice

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate how relative associations between travel time, costs, and land use patterns where people live and work impact modal choice and trip chaining patterns in the Central Puget Sound (Seattle) region. By using a tour-based modeling framework and highly detailed land use and travel data, this study attempts to add detail on the specific land use changes necessary to address different types of travel, and to develop a comparative framework by which the relative impact of travel time and urban form changes can be assessed. A discrete choice modeling framework adjusted for demographic factors and assessed the relative effect of travel time, costs, and urban form on mode choice and trip chaining characteristics for the three tour types. The tour based modeling approach increased the ability to understand the relative contribution of urban form, time, and costs in explaining mode choice and tour complexity for home and work related travel. Urban form at residential and employment locations, and travel time and cost were significant predictors of travel choice. Travel time was the strongest predictor of mode choice while urban form the strongest predictor of the number of stops within a tour. Results show that reductions in highway travel time are associated with less transit use and walking. Land use patterns where respondents work predicted mode choice for mid day and journey to work travel.

State estimation in roll dynamics for commercial vehicles

Accurate lateral load transfer estimation plays an important role in improving the performance of the active rollover prevention system equipped in commercial vehicles. This estimation depends on the accurate prediction of roll angles for both the sprung and the unsprung subsystems. This paper proposes a novel computational method for roll-angle estimation in commercial vehicles employing sensors which are already used in a vehicle dynamic control system without additional expensive measurement units. The estimation strategy integrates two blocks. The first block contains a sliding-mode observer which is responsible for calculating the lateral tyre forces, while in the second block, the Kalman filter estimates the roll angles of the sprung mass and those of axles in the truck. The validation is conducted through MATLAB/TruckSim co-simulation. Based on the comparison between the estimated results and the simulation results from TruckSim, it can be concluded that the proposed estimation method has a promising tracking performance with low computational cost and high convergence speed. This approach enables a low-cost solution for the rollover prevention in commercial vehicles.     

Impact of phytoplankton community size on a linked global ocean optical and ecosystem model

We isolated the effect phytoplankton cell size has on varying remote sensing reflectance spectra (R_rs(λ)) in the presence of optically active constituents by using optical and radiative transfer models linked in an offline diagnostic calculation to a global biogeochemical/ecosystem/circulation model with explicit phytoplankton size classes. Two case studies were carried out, each with several scenarios to isolate the effects of chlorophyll concentration, phytoplankton cell size, and size-varying phytoplankton absorption on R_rs(λ). The goal of the study was to determine the relative contribution of phytoplankton cell size and chlorophyll to overall R_rs(λ) and to understand where a standard band ratio algorithm (OC4) may under/overestimate chlorophyll due to R_rs(λ) being significantly affected by phytoplankton size. Phytoplankton cell size was found to contribute secondarily to R_rs(λ) variability and to amplify or dampen the seasonal cycle in R_rs(λ), driven by chlorophyll. Size and chlorophyll were found to change in phase at low to mid-latitudes, but were anti-correlated or poorly correlated at high latitudes. Phytoplankton size effects increased model calculated R_rs(443) in the subtropical ocean during local spring through early fall months in both hemispheres and decreased R_rs(443) in the Northern Hemisphere high latitude regions during local summer to fall months. This study attempts to tease apart when/where variability about the OC4 relationship may be associated with cell size variability. The OC4 algorithm may underestimate [Chl] when the fraction of microplankton is elevated, which occurs in the model simulations during local spring/summer months at high latitudes in both hemispheres.     

The passenger vessel services act and America's cruise tourism industry

The Passenger Vessel Services Act (PVSA) of 1886, a cabotage law, attempts to shield U.S. maritime shipping from foreign competition. It also applies to the U.S. cruise ship industry. The PVSA requires foreign cruise ships that carry passengers between U.S. ports to also stop at foreign ports. Norwegian Cruise Line America (NCLA), which operates one U.S. flagged cruise ship in Hawaii, wants the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to require foreign cruise ships offering Hawaii itineraries from the U.S. west coast to spend more time in foreign ports. We analyze the merits of NCLA's proposal. We argue that rather than making the PVSA even more protectionist, the law should be repealed.     

Transport decision-makers speak: the Seaport Development in the European Communities Research Project†—Part II

This paper, in two parts, reports on the Seaport Development in the European Communities Research Project wherein forty interviews with decision-makers were held in European seaports, and another forty were held with shipowning organizations. This part of the paper reports on analysis of the open-ended tape-recorded responses of the interviewees to six separate sets of propositions they were shown. The first major conclusion is that decision-makers in the ports and shipping industries have a great deal to offer in helping to shape future EC policies about seaports. The second is that these decision-makers on the whole agree with students of the subject, but outside the industries, that a step-by-step approach is possible towards a Common Seaports Policy. Indeed, without prompting, some respondents even confirmed a previously published suggestion for the first stage of this process—the necessity for an agreed standard basis for ports' accounts. It is believed that a small secretariat within the Brussels Commission could weld representatives of the industries into a working group which could make real progress by consulting their colleagues through interviews similar to those successfully conducted for this project.     

The Impact of Recreation on Barrier Islands: A Case Study on Masonboro Island

Since 1992, coastal researchers at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington have been documenting the impacts of human recreational use on Masonboro Island, a component of the North Carolina National Estuarine Research Reserve, and the subsequent natural processes that mitigate these impacts. Both short-term and long-term natural mitigational processes were identified. The effects of these processes were found to be much more rapid than similar impacts on typical terrestrial settings. However, careful examination of the data suggests that both physical location of the impact site and natural variability of weather patterns and events play a role. Management implications of these findings are proposed.