Conceptualising convenience : transportation practices and perceptions of inner-urban high density residents in Brisbane, Australia

High-density living in inner-urban areas has been promoted to encourage the use of more sustainable modes of travel to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, previous research presents mixed results on the relationship between living in proximity to transport systems and reduced car-dependency. This research examines inner-city residents’ transportation practices and perceptions, via 24 qualitative interviews with residents from high-density dwellings in inner-city Brisbane, Australia. Whilst participants consider public transport accessible and convenient, car use continues to be relied on for many journeys. Transportation choices are justified through complex definitions of convenience containing both utilitarian and psycho-social elements,with three key themes identified: time-efficiency, single versus multi-modal trips, and distance to and purpose of journey, as well as attitudinal, affective and symbolic elements related to transport mode use. Understanding conceptions of transport convenience held by different segments of the transport users market,alongside other factors strongly implicated in travel mode choice, can ensure targeted improvements in sustainable transport service levels and infrastructure as well as information service provision and behavioural change campaigns.

Transportation behaviours of older adults : an investigation into car dependency in urban Australia

Aim: Increased car dependency amongst Australia's ageing population may result in increased social isolation and other health impacts associated with the cessation of driving. While public transport represents an alternative to car usage, patronage remains low amongst senior cohorts. This study investigates the facilitators and barriers to public transport patronage and the nature of car dependence among older Australians. Method: Data was gathered from a sample of 24 adults (mean = 70.33 years) through a combination of quantitative (remote behavioural observation) and qualitative (interviews) investigation. Results: Findings suggest factors of relative convenience, affordability and health/mobility dictate choices of transport mode. The car is considered more convenient for the majority of suburban trips irrespective of the availability of public transport. Conclusion: Policy attention should focus on providing better education and information regarding driving cessation and addressing aged-specific social aspects of public transport including the accommodation of various health and mobility issues.

Sustainable, smart, safe : a 3'S' approach towards a modern transportation system

Sustainability, smartness and safety are three sole components of a modern transportation system. The objective of this study is to introduce a modern transportation system in the light of a 3‘S’ approach: sustainable, smart and safe. In particular this paper studies the transportation system of Singapore to address how this system is progressing in this three-pronged approach towards a modern transportation system. While sustainability targets environmental justice and social equity without compromising economical efficiency, smartness incorporates qualities like automated sensing, processing and decision making, and action-taking into the transportation system. Since a system cannot be viable without being safe, the safety of the modern transportation system aims minimizing crash risks of all users including motorists, motorcyclists, pedestrians, and bicyclists. Various policy implications and technology applications inside the transportation system of Singapore are discussed to illustrate a modern transportation system within the framework of the 3‘S’ model.

The integrated land use and transportation indexing model : assessing the sustainability of the Gold Coast, Australia

Urban sustainability and sustainable urban development concepts have been identified as the ultimate goal of many contemporary planning endeavours and have become central concepts on which the urban development policies are formulated. In the confinement of these concepts, land use and transport integration has been highlighted as one of the most important policy objectives considering the interrelationship between them and available intervention means of planning. While its interpretation varies, in Australia, it has been embraced as integration of land use and transport planning/policies and been an integral part of regional and local plans. Accordingly, a number of principles have been defined to guide its implementation, to name a few, planning for compact and connected urban development, encouraging active transport modes, creation of mixed-use activity centres and public transport precincts, provision of high quality public transport services, and enhancing character and amenity of urban areas. However, there is lack of an evaluation framework to measure the extent of achievement of implementation of these principles. In pursuit of filling this gap, this study aims to devise an evaluation framework to measure the performance of urban settings according to the integration principles in South East Queensland, Australia context and to demarcate problematic areas which can be intervened by planning tools...

A decision support system for sustainable urban development : the integrated land use and transportation indexing model

Broad, early definitions of sustainable development have caused confusion and hesitation among local authorities and planning professionals. This confusion has arisen because loosely defined principles of sustainable development have been employed when setting policies and planning projects, and when gauging the efficiencies of these policies in the light of designated sustainability goals. The question of how this theory-rhetoric-practice gap can be filled is the main focus of this chapter. It examines the triple bottom line approach–one of the sustainability accounting approaches widely employed by governmental organisations–and the applicability of this approach to sustainable urban development. The chapter introduces the ‘Integrated Land Use and Transportation Indexing Model’ that incorporates triple bottom line considerations with environmental impact assessment techniques via a geographic, information systemsbased decision support system. This model helps decision-makers in selecting policy options according to their economic, environmental and social impacts. Its main purpose is to provide valuable knowledge about the spatial dimensions of sustainable development, and to provide fine detail outputs on the possible impacts of urban development proposals on sustainability levels. In order to embrace sustainable urban development policy considerations, the model is sensitive to the relationship between urban form, travel patterns and socio-economic attributes. Finally, the model is useful in picturing the holistic state of urban settings in terms of their sustainability levels, and in assessing the degree of compatibility of selected scenarios with the desired sustainable urban future.

Airport ground transportation policies and the future of rail connections at US airports

Airports are currently being pressured to operate in a more environmentally-sensitive manner; as a response, airports have integrated environmental policies into their operations. However, environmental concerns regarding automobile traffic and related emissions have yet to be addressed. While the automobile is the dominant air passenger ground transportation mode at US airports, services facilitating automobile usage including public parking and car rentals are a major airport revenue source. Less than 20 US hub airports have direct access to rail-based transportation modes. New rail transportation projects serving additional airports are either being consideration or under construction. Regardless of whether an airport has direct access to rail-based transportation modes, the air passenger ground transportation modal split at US airports remain low in comparison to those in Asia and Europe. The high cost of providing additional US airports with direct rail connections in an era of severe governmental budgetary cutbacks is making the “build it and they will come” mindset untenable. Governmental policies are but one factor determining whether programs increasing transit usage results in automobile traffic reductions and related emissions. This study reveals that a significant percentage of the busiest US airports do not have policies fostering increases in the air passenger ground transportation modal split. A case study of one US airport is presented that has successfully adopted a transit first policy to achieve a high air passenger ground transportation modal split and facilitate the availability of rail-based transportation services.

Intraurban rail access : Policy implications of five revealed perspectives from a Q-sorting exercise in three Australian cities

This project advances current understanding of intra-urban rail passengers and their travel experiences in order to help rail industry leaders tailor policy approaches to fit specific, relevant segments of their target population. Using a Q sorting technique and cluster analysis, our preliminary research identified five perspectives occurring in a small sample of rail passengers, who varied in their frequency and location of rail travel as well as certain socio-demographic characteristics. Revealed perspectives (named to capture the gist of their content) included: ‘Rail Travel is About the Destination, Not the Journey’; ‘Despite Challenges, Public Transport is Still the Best Option’; ‘Rail Travel is Fine’; ‘Rail Travel? So Far, So Good’; and ‘Bad Taste for Rail Travel’. This paper discusses each of the perspectives in detail, and considers them in terms of tailored policy implications. An overarching finding from this study is that improving railway travel ‘access’ requires attention to physical, psychological, financial, and social facets of accessibility. For example, designing waiting areas to be more socially functional and comfortable has the potential to increase ridership by addressing social forms of access, decreasing perceived wait times, and making time at the station feel like time well spent. Even at this preliminary stage, the Q sorting technique promises to provide a valuable, holistic albeit fine-grained analysis of passenger attitudes and experiences that will assist industry efforts to increase ridership.

Waste and resource management practices, legislation and policy encouraging and influencing ‘regeneration reuse’ of property assets

Carbon taxation governance is becoming increasingly popular, further evolving the polluter pays concept already well established in the built environment as a mechanism to controlling and licensing waste generation. This paper presents an explanation of property asset ‘regeneration reuse’ principles following deconstruction, which reduce waste generation associated with the process of demolition, construction and operation. An analysis is made of strategies in Australia and the United Kingdom, comparing jurisdiction targets pertaining to construction and demolition waste that encourage ‘regeneration reuse’. From examination of applicable Australian and United Kingdom legislation, strategic, fiscal and policy that influence on the 'regeneration reuse' of property assets, an evaluation to the variety of issues relevant to waste and resource management practices is reached. The paper concludes that a systematic evaluation framework to selecting building components and structures suitable for reuse after deconstruction must be considered in legislation.

Comparing China's city transportation and economic networks

The city system has been a prevailing research issue in the fields of urban geography and regional economics. Not only do the relationships between cities in the city system exist in the form of rankings, but also in a more general network form. Previous work has examined the spatial structure of the city system in terms of its separate industrial networks, such as in transportation and economic activity, but little has been done to compare different networks. To rectify this situation, this study analyzes and reveals the spatial structural features of China’s city system by comparing its transportation and economic urban networks, thus providing new avenues for research on China’s city network. The results indicate that these two networks relate with each other by sharing structural equivalence with a basic diamond structure and a layered intercity structure decreasing outwards from the national centers. A decoupling effect also exists between them as the transportation network contributes to a balanced regional development, while the economic network promotes agglomeration economies. The law of economic development and the government both play important roles in the articulation between these two networks, and the gap between them can be shortened by related policy reforms and the improvement of the transportation network.

Alternative trajectories for decarbonizing urban transportation

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Learning Multirobot Hose Transportation and Deployment by Distributed Round-Robin Q-Learning

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) algorithms face two main difficulties: the curse of dimensionality, and environment non-stationarity due to the independent learning processes carried out by the agents concurrently. In this paper we formalize and prove the convergence of a Distributed Round Robin Q-learning (D-RR-QL) algorithm for cooperative systems. The computational complexity of this algorithm increases linearly with the number of agents. Moreover, it eliminates environment non sta tionarity by carrying a round-robin scheduling of the action selection and execution. That this learning scheme allows the implementation of Modular State-Action Vetoes (MSAV) in cooperative multi-agent systems, which speeds up learning convergence in over-constrained systems by vetoing state-action pairs which lead to undesired termination states (UTS) in the relevant state-action subspace. Each agent's local state-action value function learning is an independent process, including the MSAV policies. Coordination of locally optimal policies to obtain the global optimal joint policy is achieved by a greedy selection procedure using message passing. We show that D-RR-QL improves over state-of-the-art approaches, such as Distributed Q-Learning, Team Q-Learning and Coordinated Reinforcement Learning in a paradigmatic Linked Multi-Component Robotic System (L-MCRS) control problem: the hose transportation task. L-MCRS are over-constrained systems with many UTS induced by the interaction of the passive linking element and the active mobile robots.

Implications of local lifecycle analyses and low carbon fuel standard design on gasohol transportation fuels

State and regional policies, such as low carbon fuel standards (LCFSs), increasingly mandate that transportation fuels be examined according to their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We investigate whether such policies benefit from determining fuel carbon intensities (FCIs) locally to account for variations in fuel production and to stimulate improvements in FCI. In this study, we examine the FCI of transportation fuels on a lifecycle basis within a specific state, Minnesota, and compare the results to FCIs using national averages. Using data compiled from 18 refineries over an 11-year period, we find that ethanol production is highly variable, resulting in a 42% difference between carbon intensities. Historical data suggests that lower FCIs are possible through incremental improvements in refining efficiency and the use of biomass for processing heat. Stochastic modeling of the corn ethanol FCI shows that gains in certainty due to knowledge of specific refinery inputs are overwhelmed by uncertainty in parameters external to the refiner, including impacts of fertilization and land use change. The LCA results are incorporated into multiple policy scenarios to demonstrate the effect of policy configurations on the use of alternative fuels. These results provide a contrast between volumetric mandates and LCFSs. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.

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.

Policy packages as potential routes to urban road pricing in the UK

This paper focuses on urban road pricing as a demand management policy that is often regarded as radical and generally unacceptable. Road pricing often gets delayed or abandoned due to low acceptability. This may be due to the fact that complex interactions and drivers of change affect road transport management and require cooperation within implementation networks. The implementation network is a group of people (referred to as partners and actors) who co-ordinate the introduction of policy tools. The drivers of change include any internal or external influences that have an effect on the time, place, or ‘shape’ of the policy measures being introduced. Demand management measures that focus on 'sustainable transport' usually address a limited set of objectives and are often implemented alone i.e. are not necessarily combined with other policy measures. When combined with other measures, it is not always clear whether the multiple interactions between policy tools and implementation networks have been sufficiently considered. Examples of ongoing implementation of policy package in the UK are the support of road pricing initiatives combined with public transport improvements by the Transport Innovation Fund. The objectives of the paper are twofold. First, we present a review of the UK urban road pricing situation. Second, we contrast the emerging issues against six key implementation factors. The analysis of three existing UK road pricing examples - London, Edinburgh and Durham – shows the importance of combining policy tools. Furthermore, through the above examples and theoretical arguments, we emphasise the additional need of creating and maintaining strong networks when implementing policy packages.