Maritime policy in Scotland.

This paper begins by defining the meaning of the term `maritime policy'. Since devolution in the UK, the opening of the new Scottish parliament in 1998 and the creation of the Scottish Executive, little effort has been made to establish a distinct maritime policy for Scotland. As was evident prior to devolution, the primary emphasis from any maritime policy perspective has continued to be a focus on lifeline island ferry services. This ignores significant developments in several other key maritime transport sectors, and this paper provides examples of areas that require some form of policy response, including intra-European short sea shipping, UK coastal shipping, urban/river transport and global container shipping. Long-standing institutional bias against maritime transport coupled with subsidy devoted almost entirely to land transport systems has resulted in a quite distorted marketplace. This suggests that a maritime policy is now imperative if maritime transport is to play a more significant role in the overall transport system. Further discussion centres on the need to consider, from a Scottish policy perspective, the role of various state-sponsored maritime service providers and how these bodies might fit better within evolving policy. The conclusion is that formulation of a maritime policy by the Scottish Executive is overdue and that a degree of restructuring of transport responsibilities within the Executive, combined with adequate resource allocation towards the maritime industry, will be necessary in order that market distortions can be overcome, so enabling Scotland to fully exploit the competitive and environmental advantages that maritime transport can provide.

International comparative field evaluation of a traffic-responsive signal control strategy in three cities

The recently developed network-wide real-time signal control strategy TUC has been implemented in three traffic networks with quite different traffic and control infrastructure characteristics: Chania, Greece (23 junctions); Southampton, UK (53 junctions); and Munich, Germany (25 junctions), where it has been compared to the respective resident real-time signal control strategies TASS, SCOOT and BALANCE. After a short outline of TUC, the paper describes the three application networks; the application, demonstration and evaluation conditions; as well as the comparative evaluation results. The main conclusions drawn from this high-effort inter-European undertaking is that TUC is an easy-to-implement, inter-operable, low-cost real-time signal control strategy whose performance, after very limited fine-tuning, proved to be better or, at least, similar to the ones achieved by long-standing strategies that were in most cases very well fine-tuned over the years in the specific networks.

Comparative field evaluation of the signal control strategy TUC in three traffic networks.

This paper describes how the recently developed network-wide real-time signal control strategy TUC has been implemented in three traffic networks with quite different traffic and control infrastructure characteristics: Chania, Greece (23 junctions); Southampton, U.K. (53 junctions); and Munich, Germany (25 junctions), where it has been compared to the respective resident real-time signal control strategies TASS, SCOOT and BALANCE. After a short outline of TUC, the paper describes the three application networks; the application, demonstration and evaluation conditions; as well as the comparative evaluation results. The main conclusions drawn from this high-effort inter-European undertaking is that TUC is an easy-to-implement, inter-operable, low-cost real-time signal control strategy whose performance, after limited fine-tuning, proved to be better or, at least, similar to the ones achieved by long-standing strategies that were in most cases very well fine-tuned over the years in the specific networks.