Exploring the trip chaining behaviour of public transport users in Melbourne

This paper explores trip chaining behaviour of Melbourne residents using evidence from a household travel survey. The research literature has suggested that trip-making behaviour has grown increasingly complex as modern life has become busier and people grow time-poor. Complex trip chains have been said to require flexible travel modes, and for this reason some research has suggested that public transport is limited in this regard compared to the private car. Results of this study show that between 1994 and 1999 the complexity of trip chains was relatively stable and the complexity of chains was found to be larger for rail and tram than for car-based trips. Disaggregate analyses compare the complexity of chains based on work versus non-work chains, the purpose of stops on the chain, and whether the chain entered the central city of Melbourne or not. Overall these findings suggest a less bleak outlook for public transport ridership in a travel future which is said to be becoming more complex.     

The quality of service desired by public transport users

This article describes the methodology used to study the quality of service desired by users of a public transport system. The desired quality is different from the perceived quality because it does not represent the daily experiences of the users, but rather what they desire, hope for or expect from their public transport system. This is why it is important to study the desired quality, knowledge of which gives local authorities the background information for personalised marketing policies based on the user’s requirements rather than their daily perceptions. The methodology goes through several stages, such as the use of focus groups to choose the most important variables for the users, the design and use of unlabelled stated preferences surveys and the calibration of discrete choice models. All of these help determine the weight of the most relevant variables. The analysis is carried out with different categories of users and potential users (those people not currently using public transport).Waiting time, cleanliness and comfort are shown to be the public transport variables that users most valued, but the degree to which they are valued varies according to the category of user. Variables such as driver kindness, bus occupancy and journey time are generally given less weight. The first two vary little by user category, but some variability appears for journey time.For potential users the more important variables when defining expected quality from public transport are waiting time, journey time and above all, level of occupancy. They consider the other variables to be of little importance when defining an efficient public transport service.In order to improve service quality and attract more passengers to public transport in general, the application of this methodology provides the authorities and operating companies with useful information to plan personalised marketing policies specifically directed at different categories of users and potential users of public transport.     

Moving freight on public transit: Best practices,challenges, and opportunities

Freight on Transit (FOT) refers to an operational strategy where public transit vehicles and/or infrastructure are used to move freight. Examples include moving goods alongside passengers on buses, attaching cargo trailers to transit vehicles, and operating freight vehicles between trains on subway lines. This paper describes the methods and results of a three-round Delphi study engaging 34 transportation experts to explore challenges and opportunities of FOT and to conceptualize and evaluate potential FOT operations in Toronto. Traditional Delphi methods were used for the exploration of FOT challenges and opportunities, and a modified approach was formulated to integrate experts' opinions and develop new FOT concepts for Toronto. The results support previous claims that technical challenges of FOT may be easier to overcome than institutional barriers. Evaluation of potential FOT operating strategies in Toronto suggests that while the current public transit network does not have capacity to support additional movements, there may be realistic opportunities to include freight service in future projects as a means of offsetting operating costs and reducing the impacts of goods movements.     

Megacorridors: striking a balance between the space of flows and the space of places

The corridor concept occupies a prominent place in several European reports. The creation of corridors is related to ‘space of flows’ and ‘space of places’. The analysis of the case of the Brussels high speed train station makes it utterly clear that the space of flows often wipes out and replaces the space of places. A new financial and managerial elite is installed at the cost of the local population. This article provides elements of an alternative, open, fair and transparent approach. This calls for innovations in the governance structure as well.     

Ridesharing in Adelaide: Segmentation of users

Ridesharing and the tech companies that enable it have become household names. However, as research has focused on users rather than non-users, much less is known about the latter. Understanding the characteristics, behaviours, and motivations of non-users is quite important too, if the planning goal is to shift urban populations from private cars to ridesharing. This study examines both users and non-users in the context of Adelaide, an Australian metropolis of 1.3 million inhabitants. We segment (potential) ridesharers into three groups: (1) users, (2) interested non-users, and (3) non-interested non-users in order to investigate the determinants of their behaviours and preferences in more detail. Applying advanced statistical analyses, we find that population density and housing value at neighbourhood level, higher levels of education and income, causal work status, younger age, and access to smartphones are the key factors associated with higher ridesharing use and/or higher interest in ridesharing. Factors such as concern over safety and security, advanced age, digital illiteracy, and suburban living lead non-interested non-users to shun ridesharing. Socio-demographic factors such as car ownership, ethnic background; gender, and household size, are not associated with ridesharing behaviours or preferences. We conclude that the choice of ridesharing in Adelaide is driven by the notion of socio-economic status.     

The effect of economic restrictions on transport practices in Cuba

Like many developing nations, Cuba has undergone—and continues to undergo—a revolution in the way its society lives, works and accesses mobility. However, unlike other developing nations, Cuba is unique in that it has faced enormous pressures for the past forty years due to an economic blockade by its erstwhile dominant trading partner, the United States. Furthermore, this economic pressure was exacerbated in the early 1990s with the political and economic collapse of the Former Soviet Union, and the Eastern European Socialist countries, which had replaced the United States as Cuba's principal trading partners. These events have led to a transformation in how goods and people are moved, not least because of a huge reduction in the amount of hard currency available to pay for fuel, vehicles and spare parts. This resulted in a number of innovative behavioural and technological outcomes.Cuba thus provides an enhanced example of how physical, economic and social factors influence the development of transport systems. This unusually severe situation contains lessons for other countries seeking to develop more sustainable transport systems. In particular, the case graphically illustrates the link between economic and transport growth. The paper will outline the development of transport practices in Cuba thus far, look at the options available for the future and draw conclusions on what other countries can learn from the Cuban experience.     

Tourism destination preferences of low-cost airline users in the East Midlands

Increasing demand for air travel, associated with the boom in low-cost airlines, has assisted tourism growth. Expanding opportunities from regional airports underpin an increased propensity to fly. This paper examines European tourism destination preferences and price sensitivity to fly by population segment from an air travel household survey in the East Midlands region of the United Kingdom. Of the eight typical low-cost airline destinations presented to respondents cultural locations such as Rome are preferred. Weekend break leisure trips are particularly attractive to those in employment. Price sensitivity, suggests that increasing financial pressures will have an impact upon growth, however demand for an annual holiday is important, particularly for families.     

Domestic codesharing practices in the US airline industry

This paper documents some stylized facts about domestic codesharing practices in the US airline industry. It is demonstrated that unlike international codesharing, the majority of domestic codeshare tickets do not combine the networks of two carriers. Rather, most codeshare tickets between major US carriers are virtual in nature, whereby one carrier sells tickets on flights operated entirely by another carrier. Moreover, we show that the price of these virtual tickets are, on average, less than those operated and marketed by a single carrier.     

The effect of management practices on aircraft incidents

Many models have been put forward in order to examine the human factors in aircraft accidents and incidents. Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS) which is the most widely used in literature is one of these models. HFACS is based on Reason's Swiss Cheese Model. The biggest disadvantage of the Reason's model is its post-accident applicability. Mostly HFACS aviation applications are usually based on accident data. This is a reagent (result-focused) approach. In this study, however, HFACS which is an improved version of Reason's model, was applied to aircraft incidents that did not result in an accident. This is a proactive approach. Thus, with this approach, the biggest disadvantage of Reason's model is turned into an advantage. In addition, a realistic application of this approach has been demonstrated in this study, focusing on aircraft incidents that took place between 2000 and 2018. The year 2000 forms a milestone in the manufacture of more technically advanced aircraft models which significantly reduced occurrence of technical errors in aircrafts, hence the choice of 2000 as base year. A total of 328 aircraft incident reports from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) database were studied and among these reports cockpit crew related incidents were analyzed using HFACS. As a result of the analyzes, the root causes of incidents have been identified. In addition, unlike traditional HFACS analysis, the relationship between errors occurred at management levels of HFACS and the unsafe acts of the cockpit crew in aircraft incidents was statistically revealed.     

Placing the public in integrated transport planning

The paper argues the need for a more nuanced debate over the place of public involvement in transport planning in Britain, in the context of the current democratic turn in governance. The recent policy shift towards integrated transport has been accompanied by significant institutional changes, which have created a new framework for transport planning, with important implications for public involvement. Yet many issues underlying the new participative approach to transport planning have yet to be resolved. In this paper, the wider socio-political context for increasing inclusivity in planning processes is discussed, followed by a brief analysis of the condition of public involvement in transport planning in Britain. A conceptual framework then draws together the issues to be considered when planning programmes for public involvement in transport planning.     

Exploring the impact of public transport strikes on travel behavior and traffic congestion

Public transport (PT) disruption can occur due to various factors such as malfunctions and breakdowns of vehicles, power outages, and personnel strikes. This paper explores the network-wide impacts of PT strikes (train, tram, and bus strikes) on traffic congestion in Melbourne, Australia using a network modeling approach. A primary survey aimed to investigate the mode shift of users when each public transport mode ceases was conducted with 648 public transport users in May 2016. Findings show that train withdrawal was expected to result in 43% of users shifting to car. Smaller yet significant shifts to car was also expected with bus withdrawal (34%) and tram withdrawal (17%). Based on the survey results and the use of a four-step transport model, train withdrawal was expected to increase the number of severely congested road links by 130% and reduce the average travel speed from 48 km/h to 39 km/h (20% decrease). Bus and tram withdrawal was also found to increase congestion although the result was less severe. Future research should investigate the switching behavior in actual withdrawal events and explore the long-term effects of public transport withdrawal.     

Uncovering the spatially heterogeneous effects of shared mobility on public transit and taxi

A Mixed Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) model is applied to explore the effects of shared mobility trips on taxi and public transit ridership at the macro-level. Several essential variables, including socioeconomic, transportation, network, and land use data, are set as the causal factors. The experiment is conducted using the smart card data, vehicle GPS trajectories, and vehicle order data collected in Shenzhen City, China. We show that the Mixed GWR outperforms the basic GWR in model fitting and capturing the unobserved heterogeneity. The spatial analysis reveals that bike-sharing addresses the “last-mile” and “first-mile” problems to bus and metro in the urban periphery. It substitutes the bus and taxis in short-distance journeys in the city center. However, the over-placement of bike-sharing in some regions limits the flexibility of bike-sharing connections to the metro. In the city center, ride-hailing fills the gaps in bus coverage and competes with the metro. In the peripheral areas, ride-hailing replaces buses and improves the accessibility to metro stations. The transportation policy increases the cooperation between ride-hailing and taxis citywide, although competitions in few regions need to be solved. The abovementioned results provide policy suggestions to optimize the allocation of local transportation resources.     

The differing perspectives of road users and service providers

A survey of almost 3000 people gathered evidence on their experiences of problems on Britain's roads, their level of support for potential solutions, and on the different perspectives of transport professionals. An assessment was made of the steps required to reduce gaps between users' expectations and their current experience. Questions raised by the findings include: the likelihood that current policy priorities are influenced by inaccurate assumptions about what the public would find acceptable; the potentially misleading impressions created by vicarious opinions; the need to re-weight survey responses to correct for differential response rates; and the role of public opinion, media pressure and professional judgement in the political decision-making process.     

Use characteristics and mode choice behavior of electric bike users in China

In 2005, 10 million electric bikes were produced in China. Strong domestic sales are projected for coming years, raising concerns about the sustainability and potential regulation of this fairly new mode. Policy makers are wrestling with developing policy on electric bikes with little information about who uses them, why they are used, and what factors influence electric bike travel. This paper probes these questions by surveying electric bike usage in two large Chinese cities, Kunming and Shanghai. Demographic comparisons are made between the different modes and cities as well as differences in travel patterns. Electric bike users are found to travel considerably more than bicycle users. Also, most electric bike users would travel by bus if electric bikes were unavailable. This suggests that electric bikes are less of a transitional mode between human-powered bikes and full-blown automobile ownership, and more an affordable, higher quality mobility option to public transport.     

A preliminary examination of the relationship between consumer attitude towards space travel and the development of innovative space tourism technology

With increasing global competition in service sectors, innovative technologies have radically changed the tourism industry, and to be successful innovative products/services must have clear, significant points of difference that are related to needs in the market place. Furthermore, changes in consumer perceptions that emanate from an innovation are central to its effective product and service design. Although for most of us space travel is still a faraway dream, it is in fact a future probability that will increasingly attract travellers who seek new vacation experiences, and as a result, sustain academic interest. Thus, in initiating space tourism for the purposes of recreation, leisure and knowledge enhancement, a preliminary estimation of potential global demand characteristics that are specific to consumer innovators for space travel needs to be undertaken prior to promotion of research and development. In this context, this paper investigates both consumer attitudes towards space travel by analysing the components of motivated consumer innovativeness and the interest that potential consumers have in developing space tourism technology innovations within Taiwan. Consumer innovativeness is complex and comprised four innovativeness types, namely, social, functional, hedonic and cognitive. As product/service innovation development has been relatively unexplored in the mature industry of tourism, many business managers would welcome an understanding of which vacation travellers are most likely to be the earliest buyers of such an exciting new product. With data collected from a sample of 354 Taiwanese, this research uses mediated regression to examine the influence of the four types of consumer innovativeness on consumer's attitudes and acceptance of a space tourism technology innovation, and the mediating role perceived novelty plays in the relationship. The findings indicate that only hedonic and social innovativeness are associated with improved consumer attitude and that novelty partially mediates the relationship for those two types of consumer innovativeness. The implications for theory and practice are discussed. Limitations and directions for future research are also addressed.     

Co-passengering and the gendering of a mobile ferry space

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork with residents of ferry-reliant Bell Island, located in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. It develops the concept of co-passengering to explore the strong mutual assistance relationships among long-term work commuters in this context who daily travel on multi-modal trips involving a five-kilometre ferry ride as well as travel by road at either end of the ferry. This paper highlights how mobile commuting spaces such as ferries can become gendered in specific ways as a result of formal design features and routinized practices that develop among passengers, including intense sociality over the long-term that involves regular ‘seating partners’ and activities such as card playing and ongoing conversations. In this context, co-passengering relationships mark a key element of commuting to work for Bell Islanders that has remained similar since the late 1960s.     

A note on how to measure hubbing practices in airline networks

Benefits and costs associated to hubbing practices of airlines are still subject to much debate. In the previous literature, some standard spatial concentration indices have been proposed to measure it. However, we show that these indices are “ill-defined” because they do not take into account the salient characteristic of hubbing: connecting passengers. The purpose of this research is to present a new methodology which avoids the pitfalls of other methods. Our new methodology also analyzes the level of concentration of the connecting passengers studying two different dimensions: hub airports and routes. Finally, we apply our methodology to some US carriers.     

Evaluation of land-use and transport network effects on cyclists' route choices in the Copenhagen Region in value-of-distance space

Growing interest in sustainable transportation systems has driven decision-makers toward policies and investments aimed at promoting cycling, but little to no effort has been made toward incorporating bicycle transport in transport planning models. This study contributes toward this direction by estimating a bicycle route choice model in value-of-distance space from a large sample of 3384 cycling trips that were traced with GPS devices in the Copenhagen Region. The novelty of this study lies in (i) observing cyclists' behavior in a cycling-oriented country, (ii) exploiting rich data about the cycling environment, (iii) estimating the model in value-of-distance rather than preference space, and (iv) not focusing only on preferences for traditional variables (e.g., distance, turns, hilliness, intersections, motorized road characteristics), but also on perceptions and preferences for bicycle facilities (e.g., bicycle lanes, bicycle paths, bicycle traces) and land-use designations (e.g., residential, industrial, sports, scenic areas). The findings from the model show that: (i) cyclists exhibit heterogeneous preferences for avoiding right and left turns, cycling the wrong way, using roundabouts and bridges, and cycling alongside residential and scenic areas; (ii) cyclists dislike cycling on unpaved and hilly surfaces and alongside larger roads; (iii) cyclists have clear perceptions about different types of bicycle facilities, with a preference for bicycle lanes and segregated paths; (iv) cyclists have clear perceptions about land-use designations, with a preference for cycling alongside sports and scenic areas; (v) time-of-day and air temperature contribute to the perceptions of cyclists and their preferences for bicycle facilities and land-use designations.