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on Transport Economics |
| By: | Fumitoshi Mizutani (Graduate School of Business Administration, Kobe University); Yusuke Suzuki (Faculty of Commerce, Kyushu Sangyo University); Shuji Uranishi (Graduate School of Economics, Osaka City University) |
| Abstract: | This study estimates and evaluates the social costs of highways in Japan. Five kinds of social costs of vehicular transport are considered: traffic accidents, air pollution, noise, global warming, and traffic congestion. Major findings of this study are as follows. First, social costs increase at an accelerated rate as traffic volume increases. Second, the largest component of vehicular transport’s social costs on highways is traffic congestion, accounting for about 64%. The second largest component is traffic accidents, accounting for 24%. Third, among vehicle types, the social costs of buses are largest, at 105 yen per vehicle-km, about 16 times higher than the social costs of regular cars. Last, total social costs for whole highway networks are about 678,212 million yen, or about 0.13% of Japan’s GDP. Compared with highway fare revenues and the operating costs of highways, social costs equal 62.6% and 98.6%, respectively. |
| Keywords: | Social costs; Car transportation; Highway; External costs |
| JEL: | H4 H5 L9 Q5 R4 |
| Date: | 2015–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:kbb:dpaper:2015-18&r=tre |
| By: | Simon Alder (University of North Carolina at Chapel H) |
| Abstract: | This paper uses a general equilibrium framework as in Eaton and Kortum (2002) to estimate the contribution of transport infrastructure to regional development. I apply the analysis to India, a country with a notoriously weak and congested transportation infrastructure. I first analyze the development effects of a recent Indian highway project that improved connections between the four largest economic centers. I estimate the effect of this new infrastructure on income across districts using satellite data on night lights. The results show aggregate gains from the Indian highway project, but unequal effects across regions. China has followed a different highway construction strategy and has experienced more significant convergence across regions than India. I therefore use the model to gauge the effects of a counterfactual highway network for India that replicates the Chinese strategy of connecting intermediate-sized cities. The results suggest that this counterfactual network would have benefited the lagging regions of India. I also construct additional counterfactuals and discuss their effects on economic development. |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:red:sed015:1447&r=tre |
| By: | Ben Jebli, Mehdi |
| Abstract: | This study investigates the dynamic causal links between carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, real Gross Domestic Product (GDP), combustible renewables and waste consumption, and maritime and rail transport in Tunisia spanning the period 1980-2011. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach and Granger causality tests are employed to examine the short- and long-run relationships between variables. The empirical results suggest a bidirectional short-run causality between CO2 emissions and maritime transport, and a unidirectional causality running from real GDP, combustible renewables and waste consumption, rail transport to CO2 emissions. The long-run estimates reveal that real GDP contributes to the decrease of CO2 emissions, while combustible renewables and waste consumption and maritime and rail transport have a positive impact on emissions. Our policy recommendation is that Tunisia should use more combustible renewables and waste energy and increase the number of passenger’s rail and maritime transport in order to motivate economic activities. However, the level of renewable energy required to reduce emissions caused by transport sector still very weak. |
| Keywords: | Combustible renewables and waste; Transport; Autoregressive distributed lag model; Cointegration; Granger causality; Tunisia. |
| JEL: | L9 |
| Date: | 2015–11–24 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:68038&r=tre |
| By: | Bénédicte Meurisse |
| Abstract: | The significant weight of CO2 emissions resulting from car use in the total of CO2 emissions is enough of a signal to set up policy tools aiming at reducing such emissions. This paper investigates the effects of setting a penalty on the purchase of high emitting cars (i.e. a Malus). With static comparative analyses of a basic model of consumer’s behaviour facing two alternatives: a clean and a dirty vehicles, we essentially find that a rebound effect does not necessarily accompany the reduction in the average fuel consumption per kilometre resulting from the implementation of a differentiated car purchase tax such as a Malus scheme. This is because the improvement of the fuel-efficiency is achieved thanks to a new distribution of vehicles over the fleet, and not solely thanks to a reduction of the vehicles’ fuel consumption. Thereby, it happens that we observe a rebound effect only under certain conditions pertaining to the characteristics of the vehicles that make up the fleet (i.e. their unit consumption and market price). We also show that, from the moment that a rebound effect occurs, the higher the amount of Malus, the higher the rebound effect. It implicitly means that because of the rebound effect, the higher the pricing scheme, the less efficient the purchase tax. |
| Keywords: | Car purchase decision, Car use, CO2 emissions, Rebound effect, Penalty on car purchase. |
| JEL: | D11 H31 Q58 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cec:wpaper:1512&r=tre |
| By: | Mauro Massaro (Istituto Regionale per la Programmazionae Economica della Toscana); Leonardo Piccini; Patrizia Lattarulo (Istituto Regionale per la Programmazionae Economica della Toscana) |
| Abstract: | Local public transport has long been the object of a complex reform process directed at reducing the costs and improving the supply of services. The strategy proposed at European level is competition on the market, similarly to other local public services. Tuscany has been one of the first regions to actually implement the process. The experiment of a unique bidding system is currently under way, so it might represent a relevant case study on the possible effects of reform. Although not over yet, the competitive bid has already entailed some important transformations in the system of local public transport, starting processes of business integration, consolidation of operators by way of shareholding, and cost efficiency. |
| Keywords: | public transport, road transport |
| JEL: | R42 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:irp:report:597&r=tre |
| By: | Askitas, Nikos (IZA) |
| Abstract: | Traffic jams are an important problem both on an individual and on a societal level and much research has been done on trying to explain their emergence. The mainstream approach to road traffic monitoring is based on crowdsourcing roaming GPS devices such as cars or cell phones. These systems are expectedly able to deliver good results in reflecting the immediate present. To my knowledge there is as yet no system which offers advance notice on road conditions. Google Search intensity for the German word stau (i.e. traffic jam) peaks 2 hours ahead of the number of traffic jam reports as reported by the ADAC, a well known German automobile club and the largest of its kind in Europe. This is true both in the morning (7 am to 9 am) and in the evening (5 pm to 7 pm). I propose such searches as a way of forecasting road conditions. The main result of this paper is that after controlling for time of day and day of week effects we can still explain a significant portion of the variation of the number of traffic jam reports with Google Trends and we can thus explain well over 80% of the variation of road conditions using Google search activity. A one percent increase in Google stau searches implies a .4 percent increase of traffic jams. Our paper is a proof of concept that aggregate, timely delivered behavioural data can help fine tune modern societies. |
| Keywords: | stau, traffic jams, highways, road conditions, Google Trends, prediction, forecasting, complexity, endogeneity, behaviour, big data, data science, computational social science, complex systems |
| JEL: | R41 |
| Date: | 2015–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9503&r=tre |
| By: | Ferrarese, Moreno; Sychev, Sergey A.; Badin, Gennady M. |
| Abstract: | The construction sector and the construction yards will have to adapt changes in order to survive, and incorporating and applying production and new organizational techniques from other more advanced sectors such as transport and logistics management. So, construction companies are optimizing their costs through application of lean production - lean construction - and a careful revision of the supply chain from the construction site. The supply chains in construction could be divided into two major groups as materials chain and the construction chain, which would help to separate the procurement and management operations. In this context it should read this study: the need to reduce yards costs and time with a reduction of pollutants from whole construction site, to make the construction sector more competitive in the world scenario. Finally, this paper seeks to introduce, according to the Decision Science, a new optimizing supply chain computational model for the yards construction sector. |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sit:wpaper:15_08&r=tre |
| By: | Corey Allan (Motu Economic and Public Policy Research); Suzi Kerr (Motu Economic and Public Policy Research); Campbell Will (Motu Economic and Public Policy Research) |
| Abstract: | We test whether New Zealand households have become greener consumers by estimating environmental Engel curves (EECs), which describe the relationship between household income and the pollution embodied in a household’s consumption bundle. Our pollutants of interest are greenhouse gases (GHGs). To our knowledge, this is the first paper that tests for a change over time in climate change-related household behaviour. We calculate the greenhouse gases embodied in household consumption bundles using standard environmental input-output (IO) analysis combined with detailed household expenditure data from the 2006/07 and 2012/13 waves of the New Zealand Household Economic Survey. Consistent with international literature, we find that emissions increase less-than-proportionately with household expenditure (a proxy for permanent income). There is significant variation in expenditure elasticities across consumption categories; emissions from household energy are unresponsive to household expenditure, while emissions from transport are highly responsive to expenditure. Household expenditure and composition explain the majority of the cross-sectional variation in household emissions. We conduct a simple test for changes over time in household consumption patterns that affect emissions, taking price changes into account. We find that, controlling for a rich set of household characteristics, household emissions were marginally lower on average in the 2012/13 survey than the 2006/07 survey. This result is largely driven by a reduction in emissions from household energy. We also find that wealthier households had a smaller reduction in emissions between surveys. Our results suggest this is due to higher levels of international air travel by wealthier households. |
| Keywords: | Climate change; greenhouse gas emissions; household behaviour; consumption; input–output model |
| JEL: | Q56 Q57 D12 Q54 D57 |
| Date: | 2015–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mtu:wpaper:15_06&r=tre |
| By: | Vicente Correia Lima Neto; Rômulo Dante Orrico Filho |
| Abstract: | O transporte público consiste em uma função pública de interesse comum (Fpic), sendo base constitucional para a formulação de regiões metropolitanas (RMs) por parte da entidade de governo estadual. Este texto desenvolve uma análise crítica a partir de diversos relatórios estaduais do projeto Governança Metropolitana para quatorze RMs brasileiras, com base em quatro fatores: i) legalidade do serviço; ii) uso do consórcio público como arranjo de governança; iii) presença de planos de mobilidade nos âmbitos metropolitano e municipal; e iv) distribuição de recursos do Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento (PAC). As experiências apontam evidências de possíveis soluções. Os casos de maior organização e sistematização da gestão do transporte metropolitano decorrem de um estado mais presente no planejamento desta função, estruturando instrumentos de planejamento e coordenando o processo de coesão dos municípios The public transportation is known as a public service of common interest and it is the constitutional basis for the formulation of metropolitan areas by the states governments. This article develops a critical analysis from fourteen Brazilian metropolitan regions reports of the Metropolitan Governance project. The appraisal is based on four factors: the legality of the service, the use of public consortium as a governance arrangement, the presence of mobility plans at metropolitan or municipal level and the distribution of funds from the Brazilian`s Growth Acceleration Program. The cases shows evidence of possible solutions. The best cases of the metropolitan transport management processes are related with a more present state in the metropolitan transportation planning, helping with the structuring planning tools and coordinating the process of cohesion of the municipalities. |
| Date: | 2015–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ipe:ipetds:2151&r=tre |
| By: | Åslund, Olof (IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy); Blind, Ina (Institute for Housing and Urban Research (IBF)); Dahlberg, Matz (IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy) |
| Abstract: | We investigate the impact of commuter train access on individual labor market outcomes. Our study considers the introduction of a commuter train on a pre-existing railroad in Sweden, considerably decreasing commuting times by public transit and hence increasing access to the regional employment center. Using difference-in-differences matching techniques on comprehensive individual panel data spanning over a decade, our intention-to-treat estimates show that the reform essentially had no impact on the earnings and employment development among the affected individuals. |
| Keywords: | Infrastructure investment; commuting; job access; labor market outcomes |
| JEL: | J22 J63 R23 |
| Date: | 2015–11–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:ifauwp:2015_025&r=tre |