Research in Transportation Economics最新文献

The research seeks to quantify the marginal cost impact of transportation cost drivers on the total operating cost of Texas's public schools and how these costs differ between district type and environment setting. The analysis tests the validity of often cited research findings examining the widely used School Bus Routing Problem (SBRP). We present results from fixed effects regressions with panel data for the total transportation operating cost. Finding the marginal cost of an additional student is 2.5 times greater for a rural district than for an urban district. Additionally, we compare mean average values of school bus transportation metrics between rural, town, suburban, and city districts. Concluding, on average, school bus transportation costs for Rural districts are 40% more per student than a City or Suburban district. The dataset includes eleven years of transportation operating costs from 998 Texas public school districts.

Contracting public transport services is one of the traditional topics in the Thredbo conference series. Nine papers were presented in this workshop, leading to in-depth discussions on a better contracting framework for informal sectors and on improving stakeholder relationships. The evidence from papers in this workshop fell broadly into three areas. The first considered contracting frameworks to formalise and better organise the informal passenger transport (IPT) sectors, the second discussed contracting issues on resource and pricing strategies, and the third looked at contracting issues for innovative services. In addition to the detail provided by the evidence in the papers, the workshop discussions identified a trade-off relationship between many aspects of the tendering processes and broadly defined stakeholder relationships. The workshop developed five areas for further research: review mechanisms across regions, settings, and disciplines; stakeholder relationships in contracting and concessions; the importance of social outcomes of contracted/concessioned services; quantifying the informal sector; and innovation.

Workers generally commute on a daily basis, so we model commuting as a repeated game. The folk theorem implies that for sufficiently large discount factors, the repeated commuting game has as a Nash equilibrium any feasible strategy that is uniformly better than the minimax strategy payoff for a commuter in the one shot game, repeated over the infinite horizon. This includes the efficient equilibria. An example where the efficient payoffs strictly dominate the one shot Nash equilibrium payoffs is provided. Our conclusions pose a challenge to congestion pricing in that equilibrium selection could be at least as effective in improving welfare. We examine evidence from St. Louis to determine what equilibrium strategies are actually played in the repeated commuting game.

The rise of new service models for passenger transport is arguably transforming the mobility landscape. Concurrently, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted mobility practices and questioned traditional public transport models. Given the negative externalities of transport, and the key role of shared mobility in reducing these, it is therefore critical to work out what governments can do to ensure that the new service models contribute to making mobility service systems more attractive to users as well as more energy-, space- and cost-efficient. Workshop 5 of the 17th International Conference on Competition and Ownership in Land Passenger Transport set out to address these issues. It included thirteen papers that reported evidence about demand-responsive transport (DRT), ridesourcing, ridesharing, and Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) as well as about innovations within traditional public transport, taxi, and paratransit. The workshop discussed what roles governments have adopted, what types of regulations and policies they have been using, and what is known about the impacts of these governance approaches. Drawing on this discussion, the workshop developed a set of policy recommendations designed to cater for democratic governance processes with transformative impacts as well as a list of potential avenues for further research on the governance of emerging mobility services.

A key focus for this workshop was the interaction between authorities, operators and other corporate actors involved in public transport, with particular reference to how long-established contracting practices are surviving. Interorganisational relationships were considered from a broader perspective to provide a theoretical rationale for the scope of renegotiation and contractual flexibility, for example against the background of technical transitions and external shocks like COVID-19. The workshop outcomes are presented along three main headlines: collaboration vs coordination, contractual arrangements in times of transition and uncertainty, and understanding different organisations forms and inter-mediaries. Collectively, they lead to a proposed tentative policy-oriented framework which could be used to structure further discussions at subsequent conferences. Policymakers are recommended to clearly distinguish (and adapt policies) between risks under legally binding agreements and genuinely unforeseen contingencies in incomplete contracts. While risks may be expressed as probabilities (with an attached calculated cost) and can be shared and put in a contract (as long as they are not too costly), uncertainties may instead have to be treated outside the contract. As presented in the framework, this will have governance implications at the strategic, tactical and operational levels in public transport.

Workshop 3 concentrated its discussion on critical factors for strategic transport planning, implementation, and service provision in the post-pandemic era. The workshop report makes a strong case for social and environmental considerations to be included in transport and land use planning. Bottom-up and top-down processes must converge, and policies that put focus on equity in transport planning are needed. In this also lies a recognition of the benefits of transport services for all and, in turn, the importance of threshold services that are inclusive. In the discussion on service improvement and wider benefits, there is a need to recognise the value of transport and distribution of resources. This is linked to better use of existing resources and working with methods that capture the value of transport improvements. Drawing on the discussion on service improvement, it is also recognised that there is a need to further develop objective decision-making tools that assess the outcomes of planned processes. This includes taking into account a wider social perspective in existing methods and further develop the existing tools traditionally used in transport planning.

The theme of micromobility was introduced for the first time in Thredbo 17 as the growth of shared and privately-owned e-scooters, bicycles and e-bicycles continue to affect the nature and structure of urban transport systems worldwide. And whilst in some cases they challenge the priority afforded to the private car, in others they complement already existing and well-established greener transport modes such as cycling and walking. The discussion in this workshop focused on a number of questions looking at the benefits of micromobility and discussing the main incentives for their use as an urban mode of transport, questioning the role of government and describing the potential threats, if any, to public transport systems, in what we expect for the future of micromobility. Five papers showcased evidence on the use of micromobility, from e-scooters in Norway and Australia, to public bicycles in South Korea and The Netherlands. Each of the questions discussed in the workshop is reported in this paper. The need for multimodal integration is evident and remains essential to ensure complementarity across transport in cities. However, other concerns such as the need for regulation, education/enforcement structures, stronger business models and more effective tendering procedures have been identified and discussed. A long list of future research topics in the area of micromobility is provided and some themes for Thredbo 18 are recommended.

As urban passenger transportation focuses more on economic efficiency and road safety, autonomous driving technology is being introduced in the taxi industry. Interests differ among automobile manufacturers, taxi companies, and the government in promoting the adoption of autonomous taxis (ATs). This paper investigates the impact of multiple factors in the mixed traffic operation mode on the tripartite game using the two-stage Van Damme model. It also analyzes the game-breaking key to automobile manufactures' decision in the dual stable situation. The findings are as follows: (1) Under government non-promotion, independent R&D guides taxi companies to adopt ATs more effectively. Under government promotion, the social acceptance and loss of technology dominance have varying impacts on the game results. (2) Adjusting infrastructure cost and subsidy intensity can lead to a single stable situation when taxi companies and the government adopt a wait-and-see approach. (3) The loss of technology dominance shifts game leader from automobile manufacturers to the government. (4) Taxi companies would only adopt ATs when the social acceptance is moderate, as it exhibits an inverted U-shaped relationship. These findings provide valuable insights for how to better promote the adoption of ATs under both promotion and non-promotion by the government.

Workshop 7 looked beyond the narrow focus on efficiency and sustainable funding of transport systems to a wider view to meet a variety of different users’ needs as well as those of residents and taxpayers, recognising that these are not always the same people. The focus was on identifying the factors which lead to different levels of accessibility for different individuals and households and how these may not be reflected in area-based measures. Whether these differences can be met by more flexible transport systems targeted at specific (groups of) individuals or by providing better access to regular public transport by addressing the first/last mile problem needs careful analysis. Ultimately understanding different needs depends on being able to understand different types of household and their need based on their characteristics including a recognition that many transport demands (and constraints) are created by the need to provide care for other household members. This has implications for both the funding of public transport and how it is priced in a broader approach to underwriting mobility. The Workshop generated a set of recommendations for further research and for the development of policy.

Under the workshop's theme of optimising the impact of technological innovation on achieving sustainable public transport outcomes a total of 7 papers were presented and discussed and participants also completed a public transport contract “experiment”, taking the role of operators and authorities. The experiment benefited from having C-suite level representatives from both sides at the negotiation table with consultants and academics providing advisory support. Following an initial discussion on definitions relevant to sustainable transport outcomes and a recognition of how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed our perspective on sustainability, papers were grouped into three themes to cover various perspectives on the impact of technological innovation on achieving sustainable public transport outcomes – authorities, operators and consumers/end-users. We developed several areas for further research including a requirement for a global benchmarking framework for sustainable transport outcomes and a need to better understand the right balance of uncertainty in innovation. There were also several policy recommendations such as the encouragement of greater sharing of data, information and best practice in sustainable (urban) mobility. This will be facilitated by more flexibility in contracts to allow new technology to be effectively deployed to measure and incentivise sustainable outcomes in public transport service delivery.