This article estimates hedonic price models for automobiles using a data set on almost 3,000 households from the U.S. Department of Energy Residential Transportation Energy Consumption Survey. The standard hedonic models are generalized to recognize the role of discounting of fuel efficiency and safety, yielding an estimated rate of time preference ranging from 11 to 17 percent. This range includes the prevailing rate of interest for car loans in 1988 and is consequently consistent with market rates. Purchasers exhibit an implicit value of life ranging from $2.6 to $3.7 million, which is within the range found in the labor market as well as other market contexts. The model also estimates a significant price effect for auto injury risks and fuel efficiency.
This paper examines the effects of parking availability on morning rush hour congestion and assesses the relative efficiency of road tolls and parking fees. Without pricing, drivers occupy parking in order of increasing distance from the CBD. A time-varying toll can prevent queueing, but does not affect the order in which parking spots are taken. Optimal location-dependent parking fees may be superior; they do not eliminate queueing, but induce drivers to park in order of decreasing distance from the CBD, thereby concentrating arrival times closer to work start times. Competitively set parking fees do nothing to reduce queueing, and are relatively inefficient.
This paper presents a micro simulation model for studying the effect of information on commuters' behavior during morning peak congestion, and its impact is examined here in relation to network performance. The model is fed by survey data of perceived behavior in two cities in two different countries: Israel and Sweden. The model considers parameters such as: home-to-work trips, constraints with respect to the arrival time at the destination, exposure to various levels of information, flexibility of the mode of transportation, pre-trip information and en-route information.
Advancement of the motor vehicle and its production methods is analyzed as a process of technological change. In a broader context, motor vehicles evolved as an integral component of road transportation through a series of interlaced substitutions of old by new technologies. Building on a large number of studies that described technological substitution processes, first it is shown how new energy forms replaced their predecessors and how the old marine-transport technologies were substituted by new ones. These examples constitute some of the oldest, empirically documented technological changes and show that many events in the dynamics of energy substitution and marine transport are related to technological changes in road transportation. It is shown that these substitution processes can be described by simple rules and that the replacement of old by new technologies in the energy and transport systems lasted about 80 years. The technological changes within road transportation, however, were more rapid. Replacement of horses by automobiles and older by newer generations of motor vehicles and production methods lasted only a few decades in the United States. Thus, technological substitutions within the road-transportation system were considerably shorter than the expansion of railroads, surfaced roads, all road vehicles together, and the more recent expansion of air transportation.
A necessary input for the analysis of efficient transport policies is the marginal external cost of each transport mode. This paper studies the marginal external costs of urban transportation. These include the marginal external cost of congestion, accidents, air pollution and noise. The costs are computed for cars, buses, trams, metro and trucks. The methodology is described and applied to the urban area of Brussels for the year 2005.
This paper aims to shed more light on potential economic costs and benefits associated with new motorist information systems, particularly with respect to economic consequences, by reviewing and combining results obtained in the literature. In addition, future research directions, essential for increased understanding of these systems, are provided. Ultimately, it is concluded that the implementation of a motorist information system will, owing to an efficiency improvement on the road network, generate more traffic. The size of this newly generated traffic is uncertain and is dependent on the kind of information system, behavioral responses of the road users, the particular network under consideration, and the level of market penetration. The benefits to equipped drivers seem to diminish as the level of market penetration increases.
FOLLOWING A BRIEF DISCUSSION OF SHORTCOMINGS OF ALL-OR- NOTHING ASSIGNMENT AND OF PRIOR EFFORTS IN MULTIPATH ASSIGNMENT, TWO ALGORITHMS ARE PRESENTED, BOTH OF WHICH YIELD RESULTS WITH THE ABOVE PROPERTIES. THE ALGORITHMS DIFFER IN THEIR DEFINITION OF A REASONABLE PATH AND IN THE NUMBER OF TIMES EACH IS EXECUTED TO ASSIGN ALL TRIPS FROM A GIVEN ORIGIN NODE. THE FIRST USES MORE RESTRICTIVE DEFINITION THAN THE SECOND AND REQUIRES A SINGLE EXECUTION FOR EACH DISTINCT ORIGIN/DESTINATION NODE PAIR. THE SECOND, A MINOR VARIATION OF THE FIRST, USES A RELAXED DEFINITION OF A REASONABLE PATH, WHICH ALLOWS THE SIMULTANEOUS ASSIGNMENT OF ALL TRIPS ORIGINATING AT A GIVEN NODE IN A SINGLE EXECUTION. COMPARED WITH THE FIRST ALGORITHM, THE LATTER PARALLEL MULTIPATH ALGORITHM IS MUCH MORE EFFICIENT COMPUTATIONALLY, BUT IS LESS DISCRIMINATING IN ITS SELECTION OF PROBABLE PATHS. (A).
Automobiles are a source of considerable pollution at the global level, including a significant fraction of the total greenhouse gas emissions. Alternative fuels have received some attention as potential options to curtail the carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles. This article discusses the feasibility and desirability (from a technical as well as a broader environmental perspective) of the large-scale production and use of alternative fuels as a strategy to mitigate automotive carbon dioxide emissions. Other options such as improving vehicle efficiency and switching to more efficient modes of passenger transportation are also discussed. These latter options offer an effective and immediate way to tackle the greenhouse and other pollutant emission from automobiles, especially as the limitations of currently available alternative fuels and the technological and other constraints for potential future alternatives are revealed.
In a ''closed-economy'' cost-benefit analysis of a public investment, all affected economic agents matter. In such an analysis, if price equals marginal cost in all affected markets, accurately measuring benefits requires looking only at the use made of the improvement; ''non-user'' costs and benefits cancel out. Only if price is unequal to marginal cost in affected markets do unduplicated net nonuser benefits and costs exist. In an ''open-economy'' cost-benefit analysis, gains and losses to outsiders are ignored. The nature of nonuser insider benefits, particularly from ''job-creation,'' is discussed.
The duality relationships between transformation functions and multiproduct cost functions are straight forward extensions of the single output case. In a formal sense it is also straightforward to generalize functional forms from the single to the multiple output case. However, all of the cost functions that have been proposed contain flaws which limit their attractiveness for empirical work in the multiproduct setting. These flaws include: (1) violation of regularity conditions on the structure of production, (2) an excessive number of parameters to be estimated and (3) an inability to accommodate observations which contain zero levels for the outputs. The purpose of this paper is to review the flaws of existing multiproduct cost functions and to proposed a new multiproduct cost function which exhibits none of these flaws.
Departing from traditional location theory (which treats a firm as a single-unit entity), in this paper we consider that each firm consists of multiple units that exchange information or services. Specifically, we develop a general equilibrium model of the city, in which each firm consists of a front-unit (e.g. business office) and back-unit (e.g. plant or back-office). Each front-unit interacts with all other front-units for the purpose of business communications, while each back-unit exchanges information or management services only with the front-unit of the same firm. Each firm must choose the location of its front-unit and back-unit optimally. The equilibrium spatial configuration of the city is determined as an outcome of interactions among all firms and households through competitive land and labor markets. We show that, depending on parameters, a variety of interesting patterns of metropolitan spatial organization emerges.
Twenty-five years ago the Smeed Report said that road pricing was technicaly feasible and environmentally desirable. Current technical developments in electronics and concerns with the environmental effects of traffic, reinforce that case. There are two main parts to the argument. First, it has always been argued that road pricing would increase economic and transport efficiency. This is valid but some crucial points of the proof of that argument have never been given much attention when using the classical diagrams and equations. Unfortunately, they are the parts that have political implications, and this explains why implementing road pricing has been so politically difficult. Secondly, exactly the same political difficulties, if re-analyzed, provide a different specification of the objectives of road pricing. This will resolve many of the new problems, and also create the basis of a completely new alignment of political and pressure groups that can unify rather than divide those who can benefit.
A model of traveler behavior is proposed which is consistent with the possibility that travelers expend average daily amounts of time and money on travel with stable regularities both among urban areas and over time in the same area. The model is founded on economic utility theory. It is designed to forecast: (1) the amount of total travel generated by types of households, (2) the division of travel among available modes, and (3) the relationship between the amounts of time and money allocated to travel expenditures. The qualitative properties of the model are shown to be consistent with economic principles. Specific theoretical results reveal that, in the simultaneous presence of constraints on both time and money, travel budgets are not strictly constant proportions of income and time available as they are in the cases of single constraints relevant to classes of travelers to whom time is scarce compared to money, or conversely. Constant expenditure proportions are shown to be linear approximations which are subject to empirical validation. The relevant economic principle is that expenditures can be considered fixed in the short run but become flexible in the long run when utility maximization is applied to the expenditures themselves and not just to their allocation. Empirical tests of the model using data from three urban areas are positive, but additional tests are called for. The most important output of the research is deemed to be the establishment of theoretical hypotheses which can be used in continuing tests of travel budgets.
New information/communication technologies certainly hold great potential to make more efficient use of existing and new transport facilities, but serious questions arise concerning their likely impact on environmentally sustainable futures. Validity of the substitution hypothesis, that transportation will give way to communication, is increasingly in doubt. The European Union recently issued a call for tenders for a regional telecommunications atlas to describe the state of infrastructure and service provision on a regional level. A similar effort is needed in North America to more clearly identify the relationship of such technologies to transportation and to monitor the space-time diffusion of their accessibility.
If urban transportation in China is to be improved, the best place to start is with the use and misuse of bicycles. This paper describes bicycle use in the overall transportation mix. Used as a primary means of transportation by large numbers of urban inhabitants, bicycles have many advantages and disadvantages. Bicycles contribute to street congestion and noise, interfere with pedestrian and other vehicle movement and cause many street accidents.
This paper explores roads toward environmentally sustainable transport, with particular emphasis on the bottlenecks preventing the achievement of policy objectives of reconciling the economic interests of the transport sector with environmental constraints. Several arguments substantiated by empirical evidence from various countries are put forward to demonstrate that current megatrends in transport are at odds with a sustainable development and lead to high social costs. A variety of policy strategies is discussed to improve the current threatening situation. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
In April 1983, the “Fourth World Conference on Transport Research” was held in Hamburg. For a period of four days, experts from all parts of the world discussed transport research and planning problems. The discussions were divided into eight so‐called ‘sub‐topics’. Fortunately, one of the sub‐topics, ‘Man and his Transport Behaviour’ (chaired by Moshe Ben‐Akiva, U.S.A. and Werner Brog, Federal Republic of Germany) dealt with the individual and his behaviour. This complemented the traditionally supply‐oriented thinking of the transport planners by introducing the demand component which had frequently been neglected in the past. Since the view has become increasingly widespread that transport is meant to serve people and thus that research should emphasize the (potential) users of the transport system, the number of papers submitted and presented on this sub‐topic was especially large. However, the number of papers which could be included in the ‘Conference Proceedings’ was limited and this would have meant that a number of interesting documents could not be published. Therefore, papers on four special areas within this sub‐topic are to be published in four consecutive issues of Transport Reviews. The areas which will be dealt with are ‘Telecommunications’, ‘Non‐Motorised Transport’, ‘Special Problems in Third World Countries’ and ‘Fare Structures in Public Transport’. The papers were selected strictly according to their contents. A brief commentary in each issue explains in turn the reasons for choosing each of the four subject areas.
This study reviews the efforts of Singapore to curb road congestion through restraints on motor vehicle ownership as well as user fees. In particular, it traces the history of the famous Area Licensing Scheme (ALS), and then discusses its shortcomings, also the need for Electronic Road Pricing (ERP), its advantages and disadvantages and the technology involved in this state of the art system. This paper identifies important research questions to be addressed in connection with the first full-scale adoption of ERP.
Travel demand analyses are useful for transportation planning and policy development in a study area. However, travel demand modeling faces two obstacles. First, standard practice solves the four travel components (trip generation, trip distribution, modal split and network assignment) in a sequential manner. This can result in inconsistencies and non-convergence. Second, the data required are often complex and difficult to manage. Recent advances in formal methods for network equilibrium-based travel demand modeling and computational platforms for spatial data handling can overcome these obstacles. In this paper we report on the development of a prototype geographic information system (GIS) design to support network equilibrium-based travel demand models. The GIS design has several key features, including: (i) realistic representation of the multimodal transportation network, (ii) increased likelihood of database integrity after updates, (iii) effective user interfaces, and (iv) efficient implementation of network equilibrium solution algorithms.
Information on the number and types of communication activities (including travel) engaged in over a period of four consecutive days, at two points in time about six months apart, was collected from 91 respondents in the context of the introduction of a community network to the city of Davis, California. Three major types of communication were measured: personal meetings (and in a separate but related measure, trips), transfer of an information object (in-house documents, regular mail, and express or overnight mail), and electronic (phone, fax, and e-mail). A system of structural equations was developed and estimated, expressing the number of instances of each type of communication at time 2 as a function of: the number of instances of each type at time 1, the elapsed time between measurements, and exogenous sociodemographic variables. All “own” lagged effects (that is, the effect of one communication type in wave 1 on the same type of communication in wave 2) were found to be positive and (except for information object delivery) highly significant. The “elapsed time” variable was always positive and (except for personal meetings and, in one model, information object delivery) significant; these effects indicate net generation of communication activities over time. Significant “cross” lagged effects (that is, the effect of one communication type in wave 1 on a different type in wave 2) were mostly positive, indicating the presence of some complementarity effects across modes. However, relationships specifically between electronic forms of communication and personal meetings or trips were not significant in either direction for the final models. Several exogenous variables were significant in logical ways.
