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on Transport Economics |
| By: | Moez KILANI; Stefan PROOST; Saskia VAN DER LOO |
| Abstract: | This paper explores reforms of pricing of private and public transport in Paris. Paris has used a policy of very low public transport prices and no road pricing. The Paris transport network is represented as a stylized concentric city with the choice between car, rapid rail, metro and busses as well as two income classes and different transport motives. The model is used to test what are the efficiency gains of introducing road pricing and of increasing public transit prices in the peak. Are both reforms re-enforcing each other or are they largely substitutes? We find that a zonal pricing scheme for the center of Paris combined with higher public transport fares in the peak perform best. The benefits of an overall capacity extension of public transport supply are much lower than the benefits of pricing reforms and could very well not pass the cost benefit test. |
| Date: | 2013–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ete:ceswps:ces13.18&r=tre |
| By: | Coria, Jessica (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University); Bonilla, Jorge (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University); Grundström, Maria (Dept of Biological and Environmental Sciences); Pleijel, Håkan (Dept of Biological and Environmental Sciences) |
| Abstract: | In this paper we investigate the effects of the temporal variation of pollution dispersion, traffic flows and vehicular emissions on pollution concentration and illustrate the need for temporally differentiated road pricing through an application to the case of the congestion charge in Stockholm, Sweden. By accounting explicitly for the role of pollution dispersion on optimal road pricing, we allow for a more comprehensive view of the economy-ecology interactions at stake, showing that price differentiation is an optimal response to the physical environment. Most congestion charges in place incorporate price bans to mitigate congestion. Our analysis indicates that, to ensure compliance with air quality standards, such price variations should also be a response to limited pollution dispersion. |
| Keywords: | air pollution; road transportation; road pricing; assimilative capacity |
| JEL: | L91 Q53 R48 |
| Date: | 2013–10–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0572&r=tre |
| By: | Ageli, Mohammed Moosa |
| Abstract: | The present paper examine the nexus between road traffic accident (RTA) and some relevant variables in Saudi Arabia over the period 1971- 2012, using the autoregressive distributed lag ARDL model (Pesaran and Shin, 1999) for co-integration in Saudi Arabia, with the co-integration test. Results show that the variables are co-integrated in Saudi Arabia, moreover, the overall Granger causality results present that road traffic accidents, population and GDP, road mails, registered vehicles, and the number of driver license are Granger-causes each other in Saudi Arabia. With these findings, we affirm that there is a strong relationship and effect between road traffic accidents and its population, GDP, road mails, registered vehicles, and the number of driver license. The findings suggest that the ECTt-1 coefficients are negative signed and statistically significant in all VECMs, implying that there is bi-directional causality between the variables of interest in the long run. |
| Keywords: | Road Traffic Accident, Granger Causality, (ARDL) Model, Co-integration Test, Saudi Arabia |
| JEL: | O11 R4 |
| Date: | 2013–04–24 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:50616&r=tre |
| By: | Guerra, Erick Strom |
| Abstract: | Mexico City is a suburban metropolis, yet most of its suburbs would be unfamiliar to urbanists accustomed to thinking about US metropolitan regions. Mexico City’s suburbs are densely populated—not thinly settled—and its residents rely primarily on informal transit rather than privately-owned automobiles for their daily transportation. These types of dense and transitdependent suburbs have emerged as the fastest-growing form of human settlement in cities throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Wealthier and at a later stage in its economic development than other developing-world metropolises, Mexico City is a compelling place to investigate the effects of rising incomes, increased car ownership, and transit investments in the dense, peripheral areas that have grown rapidly around informal transit in the past decades, and is a bellwether for cities like Dakar, Cairo, Lima, and Jakarta. I begin this dissertation with a historical overview of the demographic, economic, and political trends that have helped shape existing urban form, transportation infrastructure, and travel behavior in Mexico City. Despite an uptick in car ownership and use, most households—both urban and suburban—continue to rely on public transportation. Furthermore, suburban Mexico City has lower rates of car ownership and use than its central areas. In subsequent chapters, I frame, pose, and investigate three interrelated questions about Mexico City’s evolving suburban landscape, the nature of households’ travel decisions, and the relationship between the built environment and travel behavior. Together, these inquiries tell a story that differs significantly from narratives about US suburbs, and provide insight into the future transportation needs and likely effects of land and transportation policy in these communities and others like them in Mexico and throughout the developing world. First, how has the influence of the built environment on travel behavior changed as more households have moved into the suburbs and aggregate car use has increased? Using two large metropolitan household travel surveys from 1994 and 2007, I model two related-but-distinct household travel decisions: whether to drive on an average weekday, and if so, how far to drive. After controlling for income and other household attributes, I find that the influence of population and job density on whether a household undertakes any daily car trips is strong and has increased marginally over time. By contrast, high job and population densities have a much smaller influence on the total distance of weekday car travel that a household generates. For the subset of households whose members drive on a given weekday, job and population densities have no statistical effect at all. Contrary to expectations, a household’s distance from the urban center is strongly correlated with a lower probability of driving, even after controlling for income. This effect, however, appears to be diminishing over time, and when members of a household drive, they drive significantly more if they live farther from the urban center. The combination of informal transit, public buses, and the Metro has provided sufficient transit service to constrain car use in the densely populated suburban environments of Mexico City. Once suburban residents drive, however, they tend to drive a lot regardless of transit or the features of the built environment. Second, how much are the recent trends of increased suburbanization, rising carownership, and the proliferation of massive commercially-built peripheral housing developments interrelated? To investigate this question, I first disentangle urban growth and car ownership trends by geographic area. The fastest-growing areas tend to be poorer and have had a much smaller impact on the size of the metropolitan car fleet than wealthier, more established neighborhoods in the center and western half of the metropolis. I then zoom in to examine several recent commercial housing developments. These developments, supported by publiclysubsidized mortgages, contain thousands of densely-packed, small, and modestly-priced housing units. Their residents remain highly reliant on public transportation, particularly informal transit, and the neighborhoods become less homogenous over time as homeowners convert units and parking spaces to shops and offices. Finally, I use the 2007 household travel survey to model households’ intertwined decisions of where to live and whether to own a car. As expected, wealthier and smaller households are more likely to purchase vehicles. However, they prefer to live in more central areas where households with cars tend to drive shorter distances. If housing policy and production cannot adapt to provide more centrally-located housing, growing incomes will tend to increase car ownership but concentrate more of it in areas where car-owning households drive much farther. Third, how has the Metro’s Line B, one of the first and only suburban high-capacity transit investments, influenced local and regional travel behavior and land use? To explore this question, I compare travel behavior and land use measures at six geographic scales, including the investment’s immediate catchment area, across two time periods: six years before and seven years after the investment opened. Line B, which opened in stages in 1999 and 2000, significantly expanded Metro coverage into the densely populated and fast-growing suburban municipality of Ecatepec. While the investment sparked a significant increase in local Metro use, most of this increase came from people relying on informal transit, rather than cars. While this shift reduced transit fares and increased transit speeds for local residents, it also increased government subsidies for the Metro and had no apparent effect on road speeds. Furthermore, the Metro remains highly dependent on informal transit to provide feeder service even within Ecatepec. In terms of land use, the investment increased density around the stations but appears to have had little to no effect on downtown commercial development, where it might have been expected to have a significant influence. In short, the effects of Line B demonstrate much of the promise and problem with expanding high capacity transit service into the suburbs. Ridership is likely to be high, but so too will be the costs and subsidies, while the effects on car ownership and urban form are likely to be modest. Individually, each chapter contributes to a specific body of transportation and planning literature drawn from the US as well as developing countries. Collectively, they point to connection between land use and transportation in Mexico City that is different from the connection in US and other rich-world cities. In particular, there is a physical disconnect between the generally suburban homes of transit users and the generally central location of high-capacity public transit. Addressing this disconnect by shifting housing production from the periphery to the center or by expanding high-capacity transit to the periphery would require significant amounts of time and public subsidy. Thus, contemporary policies to reduce car use or increase accessibility for the poor in the short and medium term would do well to focus on improving the flexible, medium-capacity informal transit around which the city’s dense and transit-dependent suburbs have grown and continue to grow. |
| Keywords: | Arts and Humanities, Architecture |
| Date: | 2013–05–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdl:uctcwp:qt4hf3b46g&r=tre |
| By: | World Bank |
| Keywords: | Roads and Highways Banks and Banking Reform Transport Economics Policy and Planning Railways Transport Environmental Economics and Policies Finance and Financial Sector Development Environment Transport |
| Date: | 2013–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wboper:16061&r=tre |
| By: | Gianmarco León; Edward Miguel |
| Abstract: | This paper exploits an unusual transportation setting to estimate the value of a statistical life (VSL). We estimate the trade-offs individuals are willing to make between mortality risk and cost as they travel to and from the international airport in Sierra Leone (which is separated from the capital Freetown by a body of water). Travelers choose from among multiple transport options – namely, ferry, helicopter, hovercraft, and water taxi. The setting and original dataset allow us to address some typical omitted variable concerns in order to generate some of the first revealed preference VSL estimates from Africa. The data also allows us to compare VSL estimates for travelers from 56 countries, including 20 African and 36 non-African countries, all facing the same choice situation. The average VSL estimate for African travelers in the sample is US$577,000 compared to US$924,000 for non-Africans. Individual characteristics, particularly job earnings, can largely account for the difference between Africans and non-Africans; Africans in the sample typically earn somewhat less. There is little evidence that individual VSL estimates are driven by a lack of information, predicted life expectancy, or cultural norms around risktaking or fatalism. The data implies an income elasticity of the VSL of 1.77. These revealed preference VSL estimates from a developing country fill an important gap in the existing literature, and can be used for a variety of public policy purposes, including in current debates within Sierra Leone regarding the desirability of constructing new transportation infrastructure. |
| Keywords: | Value of statistical life; risk taking behavior; Africa; Sierra Leone |
| JEL: | J17 O18 |
| Date: | 2013–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:upf:upfgen:1389&r=tre |
| By: | Yoshitsugu Kanemoto (National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies) |
| Abstract: | The Department for Transport in the United Kingdom has been a pioneer in including indirect benefits in the cost–benefit analysis of a transport project. They identify three types of wider impacts, i.e., (1) agglomeration, (2) increased or decreased output in imperfectly competitive markets, and (3) labor market impacts, and provide detailed guidelines on how to estimate them. Extending a differentiated product model that provides the microfoundations of urban agglomeration economies to include all three types of the wider impacts, this paper examines whether the British methodology of estimating the wider benefits can be justified theoretically. |
| Date: | 2013–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ngi:dpaper:13-20&r=tre |
| By: | Chabane Mazri (INERIS - Institut National de l'Environnement Industriel et des Risques - INERIS); Giulia Lucertini (LAMSADE - Laboratoire d'analyse et modélisation de systèmes pour l'aide à la décision - CNRS : UMR7024 - Université Paris IX - Paris Dauphine); Alessandro Olivotto (Dipartimento di Progettazione e pianificazione in ambienti complessi - IUAV University Venice); Gaëtan Prod'Homme (INERIS - Institut National de l'Environnement Industriel et des Risques - INERIS); Alexis Tsoukiàs (LAMSADE - Laboratoire d'analyse et modélisation de systèmes pour l'aide à la décision - CNRS : UMR7024 - Université Paris IX - Paris Dauphine) |
| Abstract: | People see and evaluate risks in a very different way, this is probably the most changeable variable that we must take into account developing some public policy on risk. People's judgements depend on both their personal experiences and from the context in which they are, thus, these conditions make impossible to evaluate them a priori. In this paper we present a French real case on transport infrastructure and risk management, namely the safety of their users. The aim of this paper is to provide, on the one side, an example of public policy management in which people safety and economic constraints are involved. And on the other side, open a discussion about risk reduction and the policies achieving it. |
| Date: | 2013–10–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-00871092&r=tre |
| By: | Michael Grimm (Erasmus University Rotterdam - Erasmus University Rotterdam, Passau University - Passau University, IZA - Institute for the Study of Labor); Carole Treibich (Erasmus University Rotterdam - Erasmus University Rotterdam, Paris School of Economics - Université Paris I - Panthéon-Sorbonne, AMSE - Aix-Marseille School of Economics - Aix-Marseille Univ. - Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) - École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales [EHESS] - Ecole Centrale Marseille (ECM)) |
| Abstract: | In many domains risky health behavior is still only poorly understood. Analysis is often plagued by incomplete data and a general lack of information. In this study; we try to understand the determinants of helmet use among motorcyclists in Delhi; a context in which road safety is very low. We use a very detailed data set collected especially for the purpose of the study. To guide our empirical analysis; we rely on a simple model in which drivers decide on their speed and helmet use. The empirical findings suggest that risk averse individuals are more likely to wear a helmet. We do not find any systematic effect of risk aversion on speed. Both findings are coherent with our theoretical model. Helmet use also increases with education. Drivers who show a higher awareness of road risks; because for instance; they are better informed about Delhi's actual road traffc accident fatality and injury rates; are both more likely to wear a helmet and to speed less. In turn; those drivers who show a high level of unawareness take the highest risks. Controlling for risk awareness; we observe that drivers tend to compensate between speed and helmet use. The most obvious solution to India's road safety problem and the related high social costs that result from it is to enforce the helmet law and speed limits. An alternative strategy; and probably more feasible in the current context; is to design interventions which raise awareness of road risks. Improvements to the road infrastructure are also a possible solution but these measures bear the risk that drivers will react to the improved road safety by either increasing speed or lowering helmet use. |
| Keywords: | road safety; helmet use; risky health behavior; self-protection; self-insurance; India |
| Date: | 2013–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-00871749&r=tre |
| By: | World Bank |
| Keywords: | Air Quality and Clean Air Environment - Climate Change Mitigation and Green House Gases Transport Economics Policy and Planning Environmental Economics and Policies Energy - Energy Production and Transportation Transport |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wboper:16086&r=tre |
| By: | Verhetsel, Ann; Kessels, Roselinde; Blomme, Nele; Cant, Jeroen; Goos, Peter |
| Abstract: | Due to the globalization and the fragmentation of industrial production processes, the logistics sector, which organizes the linkages between different production plants and the market, is growing fast. This results in an increasing demand for suitable new business locations. Previous research has indicated that accessibility is a key factor in the location decision making process. Though the literature on this subject is extensive, little research has been done to quantify the impact of the different dimensions of accessibility on the location decision process of logistics companies. This paper aims to fill this void in the literature by means of a revealed preference study (using a Geographic Information System (GIS) analysis) and a stated preference study (using a designed discrete choice experiment) in Flanders (Belgium). The results of the revealed preference study served as input to the design of the choice situations in the stated preference study. In this study, the respondents were confronted with a series of choice situations described by means of accessibility variables as well as land rent information. An analysis of the resulting data revealed that land rent is the most important factor in the location choice of logistics companies in Flanders. Access to a port is the one but most important factor, followed by access to a motorway and an inland navigation terminal, and the location in a business park. Finally access to a rail terminal plays no significant role in the location choice of logistics companies in Flanders. |
| Date: | 2013–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ant:wpaper:2013024&r=tre |
| By: | Xue, Yida |
| Abstract: | The rising demand of express delivery service (EDS) and fierce market competition motivate EDS providers to improve service quality by modifying current networks. This project-based dissertation focuses on strategic planning of a large-scale, multi-modal and time-definite EDS network for a top nationwide EDS provider in China, based on its current network. An air-ground Hub-and-Spoke (H/S) network with a fully interconnected/star shaped structure was established to provide trans-city overnight EDS among relatively developed cities in China. The corresponding models are a combination of the hub location problem with fixed cost and the hub set covering problem. The objective function is to minimize the sum of the hub-location fixed cost and transportation cost under the constraints that all demand nodes are covered by their "home" hub. First, the basic model with linear air cost was proposed. Next, the basic model was extended to include air service selection decisions (or aircraft fleet owner-ship decisions) under the consideration of a cost select function for the backbone air service. Finally, two ex-tension models were studied, one to obtain the optimal aircraft fleet composition (Ext.1) and the other under the constraints of current aircraft fleet composition (Ext.2). Due to the large scale of project instances, hybrid genetic algorithms (GAs) were applied to get desirable solutions in an acceptable time period, but without the guarantee of finding optimal solutions. In particular, the overall problem includes three kinds of decisions: 1) hub location decisions, 2) demand allocation decisions and 3) air service selection decisions. A specific algorithm was proposed for each kind of decision, namely, GAs,local search heuristics and integer programming, respectively. These three algorithms were invoked hierarchically and iteratively to solve the original problem. 5 improvement techniques were proposed to different procedures of the original algorithms in order to improve the performance of the algorithms. Computational tests were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms in terms of computational time and solution quality. Tests under small-scale instances with CAB data sets were conducted to evaluate the overall performance of the proposed algorithm by comparing the solutions with the optimal solutions generated by CPLEX. Tests under large-scale instances with AP data sets and project data sets were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed improvement techniques. Since neither the optimal solutions nor solutions by other algorithms under large-scale instances were available to serve as benchmarks,the performance of the tailored algorithms and that of the un-tailored simple GAs was compared. Information about the stability of the algorithms with values of the coefficient of variation (CV) and the reliability of the results with T-tests was also provided. The models and the tailored GAs were applied to real-life instances of the project. This study introduces how the input data were collected and modified and how to deal with pertinent problems. By analyzing and com-paring the basic solutions of Ext.1 and Ext.2, the study not only reveals some important features of the net-work, but also arrives at some general conclusions and provided a dynamic aircraft fleet update strategy to guide the implementation of the project. Finally, scenario planning was executed to help decision-makers balance between costs and corresponding decision risks by identifying critical uncontrollable and controllable factors. |
| Date: | 2013–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dar:wpaper:62214&r=tre |
| By: | Moore, Alexander; Straub, Stephane; Dethier, Jean-Jacques |
| Abstract: | The paper examines the capital structure of regulated infrastructure firms. The authors develop a model showing that leverage, the ratio of liabilities to assets, is lower under high-powered regulation and that firms operating under high-powered regulation make proportionally larger reductions in leverage when the cost of debt increases. They test the predictions of the model using an original panel dataset of 124 transport concessions in Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru over 1992-2011, finding broad support for our predictions. |
| Keywords: | Debt Markets,Emerging Markets,Bankruptcy and Resolution of Financial Distress,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Theory&Research |
| Date: | 2013–10–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:6646&r=tre |