Economics of Transportation最新文献

Public transport is central to commuting in most cities. This paper studies the role of public transportation in shaping the urban structure. Its main contribution is to propose a tractable model as a tool to study urban regulations and transport policies in the long-run. Using the classic monocentric city framework, we model public transport as a mode that can only be accessed by walking to a set of stops. By incorporating a discrete transport mode choice and income heterogeneity, the model remains simple yet can reproduce non-monotonous urban gradients observed in cities with public transport, and well-observed spatial patterns of sorting by income and use of public transport. For example, it can reproduce an inverted U-shape of transit usage along the city. To highlight the relevance of the model, we study the effects of pricing pollution externalities together with extending the public transportation network on the urban structure.

This study examines a ceiling price for build-operate-transfer (BOT) road projects in the context of developing countries. Although ceiling price is one of the most significant elements in BOT policy given that it has a focal-point effect, it has been rarely examined in prior studies. Subsequently, the study formulates a model of ceiling price under the framework of simple two-route network by integrating the nature of travelers' mode choice with the interaction between stakeholders through the Nash equilibrium as well as a risk-mitigation approach in the ceiling price decision-making process. The proposed model has unique characteristics that allow the government to protect social welfare while still providing opportunities for private investors to achieve their optimal toll rates. It also provides room to the government for negotiating with private investors while taking into account travelers' benefits and risk identification. The model is applied to a case study in Hanoi, Vietnam; and successfully showed its applicability with empirical evidences. The proposed method highlights planning aspects rather than road users’ aspect, which is expected to contribute to a project preparation stage in BOT projects.

Over the last decade, the use of air transport to facilitate global merchandise trade has grown significantly, driven by the increasing demand for ‘just in time’ delivery of intermediate goods as well as due to the growing importance of trade between more distant countries. In this paper we analyze the effect of improved global logistics and trade facilitation on transport mode choice in international trade using the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model of global trade which we modify to incorporate modal choice. To parameterize this model, we develop a continuous modal choice model and estimate the associated elasticities of substitution between transport modes. We find that modal substitution elasticities have values ranging from 0.57 to 2.14, indicating significant response to changes in the relative cost of different modes of goods transport. The quality of logistics infrastructure is also found to influence modal choice in international trade with improved logistics performance generally leading to increased reliance on air transportation.

We validate the modified and parameterized GTAP model by simulating the impact of improvements in logistics, measured as a change in the Logistics Performance Index (LPI). We find that improvement in LPI in the poorest countries of the world reduces the overall cost of transport and amount of services required to transport a given product along a given route by a given mode. Importantly, the reduction in modal cost of transport results in modal substitution. We use the framework to explore the consequences of an improvement in low income country logistics performance for GDP and economic welfare.

Sweden has been a front runner in vertical separation. We use data from the business long-distance corridor in Sweden to calibrate and define a demand and supply model. We simulate how the profit, welfare, fares, frequencies, modal shares and train size depend on the level of the track charges. We simulate the welfare optimal track charges, given different levels of congestion on the track, hence using the charges as a pricing instrument to allocate the train slots efficiently. We find that increases in charges have a limited impact on fares but larger impacts on the frequency. When the length of the trains can be extended and when the crowding penalty is high, the impact of higher track charges on the frequencies is larger. Higher track charges increase the length of the trains if possible. The intermodal competition from road and air has a significant impact on rail fares.

Traffic fatalities in the US have been rising among pedestrians even as they fall among motorists. Contemporaneously, the US has undergone a significant shift in consumer preferences for motor vehicles, with larger Sport Utility Vehicles comprising an increased market share. Larger vehicles may pose a risk to pedestrians, increasing the severity of collisions. I use data covering all fatal vehicle collisions in the US and exploit heterogeneity in changing vehicle fleets across metros for identification. Between 2000 and 2019, I estimate that replacing the growth in Sport Utility Vehicles with cars would have averted 1,100 pedestrian deaths. I find no evidence that the shift towards larger vehicles improved aggregate motorist safety.

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and highway expansions actually proposed for Beirut are compared using an urban computable general equilibrium model. The model has two geographic zones, central area and suburbs, but it is economically detailed. It includes production, labor, residential and commercial real estate markets and multimodal road congestion with private car, minibus and taxi vehicles and public buses. BRT reduces road congestion by 9 %, improves traffic speed by 24 %, and reduces the road congestion externality by 18 %. The BRT improves consumer utility and achieves social welfare gains that are 7.9 % of income: two-thirds are from the BRT as a new mode and one-third from the benefits of the lower congestion for the other modes. Road expansion also improves consumer utility, but achieves lower social welfare due to its cost and lower effect on real estate prices. The BRT yields an operating surplus, but road expansion requires deficit financing.

This paper revisits the airline schedule-buffer choice problem analyzed by Brueckner et al. (2021) using a simpler model where the random shocks influencing flight times are discrete rather than continuous. The analysis yields closed-form solutions for the flight and ground buffers as well as full comparative-static results, neither of which were available in the earlier paper. The paper also explores several extensions to the model that were not present in the previous paper.

The great weight that the car has as a means of mobility in large cities generates significant negative externalities both in terms of pollution and congestion. The goal of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of low emission zones (LEZs) and to compare it with the existing results in literature on the effectiveness of urban tolls. First, we build up a theoretical model that departs from De Borger and Proost (2012), who study the effects of urban tolls on congestion, by incorporating pollution into the analysis and LEZs as an alternative (quantity-based) policy measure. Then we perform an econometric analysis taking advantage of a unique and extremely original panel of large European urban areas over the period 2008–2016, using data on congestion from TomTom and data on pollution (PM2.5) from environmental sciences. We conclude that LEZs can curb pollution. They are particularly effective in highly polluted cities, when they are applied to a wide area of the city, and/or when they are stringent in the type of restricted vehicles. Instead, LEZs are ineffective in mitigating congestion. This is a very relevant result, given the growing importance of LEZs in Europe.

In this paper, we consider the problem of increasing efficiency of a transportation system through optimizing the behavior of commuters. The assumption is that the time spent in the traffic can be represented by a monetary value and hence introduction of monetary compensations can lead to a more efficient organization of the transportation system. In our model, heterogeneous travelers differently assess the value of their time spent in congestion, hence it is presumably viable to reduce traffic in the most congested streets by introducing a bidding mechanism that will allow the participants who have a lower monetary value of time to receive a compensation financed by the group of commuters that have a higher value of time spend in congestion. We start by presenting a design of a bidding system for optimal allocation of traffic. We analyze the properties of the proposed algorithm and show that it leads to a more efficient allocation of vehicles than the theoretical allocation that could be achieved in the Nash Equilibrium of an uncontrolled transportation network. Subsequently, we verify the proposed auction design via an agent-based simulation model representing the Manhattan area of New York City. The results of our simulation confirm theoretical findings that the introduction of the proposed auction mechanism in a real city settings leads to a more efficient allocation of routes or means of transportation chosen by commuters.

We investigate whether the value of time (VOT) depends on when the corresponding preferences are measured: in advance, just before, or after the time period for which the time preferences are being evaluated. We find that the VOT is highest when elicited just before the time period. This is an indication of the VOT being affected by time-inconsistent, and more specifically, present-biased preferences. We argue that this result may explain why time valuations based on stated preference (SP) data are typically found to be lower than those based on revealed preference (RP) data: most RP surveys evaluate the preferences of respondents close to the time period for which the preferences are being measured, whereas the time instances for which preferences are evaluated in SP surveys tend to be more abstract, or referencing past or future time periods.