Asian Transport Studies最新文献

In recent years, there has been an increasing demand for “Michi-no-Eki.” These roadside stations in Japan help solve food desert problems and enhance social interaction. Accordingly, the number of Michi-no-Eki with various urban amenities (e.g., supermarket, restaurant, and playground) has been increasing. However, there is no statistical model that can calculate the impact of a Michi-no-Eki with urban amenities on shopping difficulty or social interaction. Consequently, it can be difficult for local authorities to assess the need, the location, and the design of a Michi-no-Eki with urban amenities to ease shopping difficulty and enhance social interaction. This study aimed to (1) confirm the influence of Michi-no-Eki with urban amenities on shopping difficulty and social interaction, and (2) identify the factors influencing the impact of such Michi-no-Eki to support development of statistical models for shopping difficulty and social interaction.

Bus bunching is a critical issue in bus operation management. This study investigated the impacts of potential factors affecting bus bunching on a city-wide bus route network, using Taipei City as an example with its 267 bus routes and 4741 bus stops. Frequency of bus bunching was measured on an hourly basis using Automatic Vehicle Location data. Multilevel count models based on Conway-Maxwell Poisson distributions were developed, and the spatiotemporal distributions of random intercepts and residuals were examined. The results showed that the effects of bus lane design, bus route network and operation, and traffic characteristics were consistent with those reported in prior studies. However, a quadratic relationship between bus route length, best measured by number of stops, and bus bunching was identified, which explains the conflicts between the theories of bus bunching propagation and self-repair. Bus route design often faces a dilemma between extending route length to collect additional passengers and reducing in-vehicle travel time to enhance service quality. The findings of the study could be a useful reference for bus route design to minimize bus bunching.

Mobile spatial statistics from across Japan are used to analyze the vitality of stations over the COVID period. Time series population information of 500m × 500m meshes that include major stations are extracted. We analyze the demand loss patterns of 69 train stations during the first COVID wave. We firstly discuss the correlation of this data with annual ridership information. We then conduct a clustering analysis of the time series data and distinguish five impact patterns which we try to explain with a multinomial logistic regression. Stations in large cities had higher ridership but were also more affected than smaller cities. We also find that cities with less dense populations and more local population frequenting the station appear to be more robust to the pandemic. Our results can be used to help cities forecasting the impact of future pandemics on the local economy.

Since the detection of the first COVID-19 case in March 2020, the Indonesian government has implemented various mobility restrictions as a policy response to address the pandemic. To date, violations of mobility restrictions have been discussed in relation to public health risk, but rarely analyzed in terms of understanding the transport policy-practice gap. Using content analysis of news media from March 2020 to May 2021, this article identifies individual actions and institutional factors enabling violations of mobility restrictions. Our findings infer a policy-practice gap regarding operationalization, institutional issues, and lack of consideration of target groups’ behavior. These findings provide insights for transport policy formulation in uncertain times, such as the post-pandemic, especially in the context of rapidly growing Asian cities.

We used a Bayesian structural time series (BSTS) model to evaluate the short- and long-term impacts of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on transit ridership. We accessed smart-card data from Miyazaki City, Japan. We defined attributes based on card types (commuters, students and elders) and aggregated attributes (high-frequency users and “frequently used bus-stop pairs”) and analyzed the differences between all users and the extracted groups. Among card types, the short-term impact on elders was almost identical to that of all users, however, the short-term impact of the pandemic on commuters was much smaller and that of students was much larger than that of all users. The long-term trend of commuters was less fluctuated than that of all users. The long-term ridership recovery of students was higher than that of all users. Among aggregated attributes, the short-term impact was smaller on “high-frequency users” than on all users: the decrease in ridership immediately after the appearance of COVID-19 was smaller among “high-frequency users” than among all users. The long-term recoveries in the riderships of the extracted subsets were slower than the recoveries of riderships of all users.

Considering the relevance of providing good accessibility to public transport and adequate non-motorized infrastructure to lower social inequality and exclusion, this study evaluates the public transport coverage and the quality of the walking infrastructure in the thirty barangays of Pasig City (Philippines). Using regression analysis, the research attempted to identify socioeconomic factors at the barangay level that correlated to the assessed walkability and public transport accessibility. It was found that barangays with less financial resources, having higher populations, and with a larger share of lowest monthly income households and informal settlements were more likely to have lower walkability. Similar results to explain poorer access to public transport were also observed. These results can be used to o identify disadvantaged barangays to prioritize for improvement for social inclusivity.

The presence of illegal parking attendants (IPAs) in Padang, Indonesia, indicates the practice of parking mismanagement. This study explored why the Padang government cannot control the widespread menace of IPAs using an interpretive approach based on mixed qualitative research. Data collection techniques were conducted through interviews with three different types of respondents. In addition, observations were made to further understand the phenomenon and triangulate the interview findings. The results revealed 3 indicators of parking mismanagement practice: (1) the inappropriate cash flow mechanism of parking charges, (2) the parking signs limitation, and (3) the weak law enforcement. Handling the IPA problem is a part of city development planning that all departments in the local government must pay attention of. The widespread existence of IPAs represents parking mismanagement and local government failure. We call for all the relevant departments and authorities to discuss and collaborate in finding a comprehensive solution to the IPA problem that has impacted Padang's tourism industry. We propose beneficial parking management design, technology utilization, and cashless procedures to overcome this problem.

This paper analyses the accuracy of Benefit-Cost Analysis (BCA) of transport projects financed by the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Ex post evaluation of BCAs outside Europe and North America has been largely missing from the current literature. This study covers 59 roadway projects in developing countries funded by ADB and examines the accuracy of BCA results through four dimensions: frequency, magnitude, correlation, and tendency. We found that under an average project completion rate of 95.33%, the average construction cost overrun for 59 roadway projects is 10.71%, equivalent to USD 71.4 million. Grounded on 23 projects disclosing detailed economic analysis, we discovered a systematic tendency to understate both the present values of cost (18 out of 23 projects) and the present values of future economic benefits (13 out of 23 projects) in ex ante BCA. Furthermore, more than half of projects (25 out of 47) underestimated EIRR, and about 52.17% of them (12 out of 23) understated NPV. Since the underestimation of economic benefits is too small to counterbalance the underestimation of costs, the project EIRR is on average 5.4% lower than the initial expectation. Moreover, we discussed ADB’s choice of the social discount rate, shadow price, and counterfactual base scenarios, which significantly influence the accuracy of BCA results and the reliability of decision-making grounded on BCA results. Lastly, the causes of cost overruns and benefits underestimations were analyzed.

In the past few years, telecommuting has diffused on a large scale across many developed countries; however, its popularity in Japan is low due to various factors and cultural differences. The outbreak of COVID-19 has made the adoption of telecommuting indispensable, reaching an unprecedented level in Japan, bringing dramatic changes in the lifestyles and behaviors of citizens. This study investigates how and to what extent this pandemic-induced telecommuting affected employees’ travel, activities, and residence locations and explores their expectations of post-pandemic life. The data were collected through the online questionnaire survey across three major metropolitan areas in Japan that incorporates a comprehensive set of questions regarding telecommuting implementation and feasibility, lifestyles before and during the pandemic, and expected way of life after the pandemic, and the total of 2045 respondents were collected. The analysis has been done based on revealed preference data considering two time periods i.e., before COVID-19, during COVID-19, and for the post-COVID 19 scenario where stated preferences are considered. In the first step, telecommuting behavior, telecommuting preferences and plans, and activity patterns are estimated based on aggregate sample data. Next, by using the stated preference survey conducted, ordered probit model and mixed logit model are applied to identify factors influencing post-pandemic telecommuting frequency and residential location preference, respectively. The analysis revealed two major findings: telecommuting brought significant changes in multiple aspects of people’s lifestyles and activities that might persist after the pandemic; although determinants that govern telecommuting frequency and residential location choice after COVID-19 may differ across metropolitan areas, commuting/telecommuting frequency is the prime factor influencing residential location decisions. The findings of this research can guide transportation and urban planners in establishing effective travel demand management tools and sustainable urban networks for the new-normal era.