nep-tre New Economics Papers
on Transport Economics
Issue of 2022‒09‒19
eleven papers chosen by
Erik Teodoor Verhoef
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

  1. How Intelligent Vehicle Technologies Can Improve Vulnerable Road User Safety at Signalized Intersections By Qian, Xiaodong; Xiao, Runhua; Jaller, Miguel; Chen, Shenyang
  2. The Effectiveness of Policy Measures to Reduce CO2 Emissions from Passenger Cars in Austria By Tobias Eibinger; Hans Manner
  3. Coordinating charging request allocation between self-interested navigation service platforms By Marianne Guillet; Maximilian Schiffer
  4. Spatial economic dynamics and transport project appraisal By James Lennox
  5. Results of the 2021-22 Campus Travel Survey By Jain, Aakansha; Miller, Ryan G.
  6. Does Highway Access Influence Local Employment? Evidence from German Municipalities By Luisa Dörr; Stefanie Gäbler
  7. Agglomeration and welfare in a continuous space By Kensuke Ohtake
  8. What Flattened the House-Price Gradient? The Role of Work-from-Home and Decreased Commuting Cost By Jinwon Kim; Dede Long
  9. Dynamic Price Competition: Theory and Evidence from Airline Markets By Ali Hortaçsu; Aniko Oery; Kevin R. Williams
  10. Shifting proximities. Visualizing changes in the maritime connectivity of African countries (2006/2016) By David Guerrero; Patrick Nierat; Jean-Claude Thill; Emmanuel Cohen
  11. Towards the measurement of electromobility in international trade By Ronzheimer, Ira Nadine; Durán Lima, José Elías; Budnevich, Cristóbal; Gomies, Matthew

  1. By: Qian, Xiaodong; Xiao, Runhua; Jaller, Miguel; Chen, Shenyang
    Abstract: Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of accidental deaths in the US. In 2020, 38,824 people lost their lives in car-related crashes. Bicyclists and pedestrians are particularly susceptible—7,448 of these “vulnerable road users” were killed nationwide in 2020, and 29% of all reported crash-related fatalities in California were vulnerable road users. A variety of intelligent vehicle technologies hold promise for improving bicycle and pedestrian safety. Sensors in vehicles and/or used by vulnerable road users themselves could alert travelers of potential conflicts, giving them more time to react. However, these technologies all have unique technical, operational, and financial characteristics, and they might perform differently in different environmental conditions and at different levels of deployment. Little research has been done on how these technologies might affect safety. Researchers at the University of California, Davis combined aggregate historical crash data analysis and micro transportation simulation to examine the safety impacts of four different intelligent vehicle technologies: blind spot detection, a vulnerable-road-user beacon system carried by bicyclists or pedestrians, bicycle/pedestrian-to-vehicle communication, and intersection safety. View the NCST Project Webpage
    Keywords: Engineering, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Intelligent vehicles, Sight distance, Signalized intersections, Traffic safety, Traffic simulation, Traffic volume, Vulnerable road user
    Date: 2022–08–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdl:itsdav:qt106268rb&r=
  2. By: Tobias Eibinger (University of Graz, Austria); Hans Manner (University of Graz, Austria)
    Abstract: Passenger transport plays a crucial role in achieving climate-neutrality. While a switch to zero-emission vehicles is a crucial part in this process, policy makers likely have to resort to a differentiated mix of complementary policy measures to achieve global targets on climate-neutrality. To help policy makers design effective measures, we analyse the effect of environmental policies on CO2 emissions from passenger cars in Austria from 1965-2019. In a first step, we propose an environmental policy stringency index for the Austrian transport sector for the period 1950-2019. In a second step, we analyse the effect of different policies on transport-related CO2 emissions in a structural vector autoregressive model. This allows us to control for possible interdependencies between the variables. We find that taxes on vehicle-related emissions and policies that influence the usage of cars (through, e.g., speed limits, car-free days, road pricing) can significantly reduce CO2 emissions and contribute to an accelerated transition towards a carbon-neutral society. Among tax-based policies, we find emission-based taxes on new vehicles to be most effective. Finally, our results indicate that more efficient fuels can reduce emissions from existing vehicles at a limited magnitude.
    Keywords: Climate change; CO2 emissions; passenger transport; mitigation; policy stringency; vector autoregression.
    JEL: C32 C54 Q54 Q58 R48
    Date: 2022–08
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:grz:wpaper:2022-04&r=
  3. By: Marianne Guillet; Maximilian Schiffer
    Abstract: Current electric vehicle market trends indicate an increasing adoption rate across several countries. To meet the expected growing charging demand, it is necessary to scale up the current charging infrastructure and to mitigate current reliability deficiencies, e.g., due to broken connectors or misreported charging station availability status. However, even within a properly dimensioned charging infrastructure, a risk for local bottlenecks remains if several drivers cannot coordinate their charging station visit decisions. Here, navigation service platforms can optimally balance charging demand over available stations to reduce possible station visit conflicts and increase user satisfaction. While such fleet-optimized charging station visit recommendations may alleviate local bottlenecks, they can also harm the system if self-interested navigation service platforms seek to maximize their own customers' satisfaction. To study these dynamics, we model fleet-optimized charging station allocation as a resource allocation game in which navigation platforms constitute players and assign potentially free charging stations to drivers. We show that no pure Nash equilibrium guarantee exists for this game, which motivates us to study VCG mechanisms both in offline and online settings, to coordinate players' strategies toward a better social outcome. Extensive numerical studies for the city of Berlin show that when coordinating players through VCG mechanisms, the social cost decreases on average by 42 % in the online setting and by 52 % in the offline setting.
    Date: 2022–08
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2208.09530&r=
  4. By: James Lennox
    Abstract: Transport infrastructure is costly to build and very long-lived. Major projects are expected to enhance accessibility, which over time, is likely to a ect the distribution of population and employment. In a Dynamic Spatial Equilibrium (DSE) model, the timing and location of a project's direct costs and benefits can be explicitly represented. Effects of both construction and operational phases are captured in a forward-looking spatial general equilibrium with costly adjustment. Not only are dynamic responses of direct interest to policymakers, but they have crucial implications for welfare analysis. In this paper, we present a flexible DSE model incorporating dynamics of internal migration and occupation choice, and intra- period spatial linkages via commuting and trade flows. We calibrate the framework to Australian data and illustrate its application by modelling a hypothetical fast express rail service in South-East Queensland. In analysing the results, we highlight the roles of general equilibrium effects within and between periods. These are important both to overall welfare benefits and to their distribution. Transport cost changes are exogenous inputs to our simulation. However, we also discuss the potential to link a DSE model to a four-step strategic transport model to enable fully dynamic Land Use-Transport Interactions (LUTI) simulations.
    Keywords: dynamic spatial equilibrium, project appraisal
    JEL: R12 R23 R42
    Date: 2022–08
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cop:wpaper:g-335&r=
  5. By: Jain, Aakansha; Miller, Ryan G.
    Abstract: The UC Davis Campus Travel Survey is an annual survey led by Transportation Services (TS) – formerly known as Transportation and Parking Services (TAPS) – and the National Center for Sustainable Transportation, part of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis. It collects a rich set of data about travel to the UC Davis campus, demographics, and attitudes toward travel. The 2021–22 survey collected data from 4,265 people affiliated with UC Davis about their travel to campus during a single week in October 2021. It used a stratified random sampling method with the intent to gather a representative sample of the campus population. About 21 percent of those invited responded to this year’s survey. For the statistics presented throughout this report, we weight the responses by campus role (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, Master’s, PhD, faculty, and staff) and gender so that the proportion of respondents in each group reflects their proportion in the campus population.
    Keywords: Social and Behavioral Sciences, Campus transportation, College students, Commuters, Graduate students, Mode choice, Surveys, Travel behavior, Travel surveys, Universities and colleges
    Date: 2022–07–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdl:itsdav:qt7x7826v8&r=
  6. By: Luisa Dörr; Stefanie Gäbler
    Abstract: We examine how highway accessibility influences local employment outcomes. We exploit the stagewise expansion of the ”Baltic Sea highway”, the largest contiguous highway construction project in Germany since 1945. Results from difference-indifferences estimations and an event study approach show that highway access influences local employment outcomes in peripheral municipalities within 10 km road distance. Improved accessibility decreases employment by 9%. These effects are driven by reduced commuter flows within the periphery, while we find opposing effects on core municipalities. Improved accessibility also gives rise to a shift of population and economic activity from the periphery to the core, weakening the periphery as a place of work.
    Keywords: Highway, infrastructure, accessibility, commuting, employment, municipalities, local governments
    JEL: H54 H71 O18
    Date: 2022
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ifowps:_377&r=
  7. By: Kensuke Ohtake
    Abstract: Two spatial equilibria, agglomeration and dispersion, in a continuous space core-periphery model are examined to discuss which equilibrium is socially preferred. It is shown that when transport cost is lower than a critical value, the agglomeration equilibrium is preferable in the sense of Scitovszky, while when the transport cost is above the critical value, the two equilibria can not be ordered in the sense of Scitovszky.
    Date: 2022–08
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2208.01972&r=
  8. By: Jinwon Kim (DepartmentofEconomics,SogangUniversity,Seoul,Korea); Dede Long (DepartmentofEconomics,CaliforniaStateUniversity,LongBeach)
    Abstract: During the COVID-19 pandemic, house prices increased more in the suburbs than in city centers, flattening house-price gradients in most US cities.This paper explains this phe- nomenon, focusing on the pandemic-induced adoption of work-from-home(WFH)practices. Our theoretical framework shows that WFH reduces not only the frequency of physical com- mutes in a city but also the time-cost of individual commutes by lowering urban congestion levels, both of which alter residents’ locational preferences and consequently the bid-price for housing. To provide empirical support for our theoretical hypotheses, we leverage granular Google Maps travel time data to develop a novel measure of the change in time-cost induced by the COVID-19 shock, along with a county-level WFH potential index, to explain the shift in house-price gradients during the pandemic. We find that the time-cost change and the city-level WFH potential play a significant role in flattening the house-price gradients, contributing equally to the combined effects.
    Keywords: Inflation, Unemployment, Equity Prices, SearchModels
    JEL: E4 E5
    Date: 2022
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sgo:wpaper:2205&r=
  9. By: Ali Hortaçsu; Aniko Oery; Kevin R. Williams
    Abstract: We introduce a model of oligopoly dynamic pricing where firms with limited capacity face a sales deadline. We establish conditions under which the equilibrium is unique and converges to a system of differential equations. Using unique and comprehensive pricing and bookings data for competing U.S. airlines, we estimate our model and find that dynamic pricing results in higher output but lower welfare than under uniform pricing. Our theoretical and empirical findings run counter to standard results in single-firm settings due to the strategic role of competitor scarcity. Pricing heuristics commonly used by airlines increase welfare relative to estimated equilibrium predictions.
    JEL: C70 C73 D21 D22 D43 D60 L13 L93
    Date: 2022–08
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30347&r=
  10. By: David Guerrero (AME-SPLOTT - Systèmes Productifs, Logistique, Organisation des Transports et Travail - Université Gustave Eiffel); Patrick Nierat (AME-SPLOTT - Systèmes Productifs, Logistique, Organisation des Transports et Travail - Université Gustave Eiffel); Jean-Claude Thill (UNC - University of North Carolina [Charlotte] - UNC - University of North Carolina System); Emmanuel Cohen (AME-SPLOTT - Systèmes Productifs, Logistique, Organisation des Transports et Travail - Université Gustave Eiffel)
    Abstract: As a process, containerization in Africa is still on-going. In the last decades, a number of new port projects have emerged in parallel with the reorganization of services by shipping companies. To reflect these changes, this paper studies several questions on the geographic differentiation of maritime connectivities across the continent as well as on the longitudinal trends in maritime connectivities in relation to evolving economic, trade and logistical contexts. To this end, we propose a synthetic visualization of the country-level containerized links using the Liner Shipping Bilateral Connectivity Indicator (LSBCI). The resulting graph, obtained through Multidimensional Scaling (MDS), shows that West Africa and East Africa appear as relatively separated subsystems, mediated by several countries in the Northern and the Southern parts of Africa. Between 2006 and 2016, West Africa, initially tied to Europe and America, is increasingly tied to Asia. Our results show major improvements in the maritime connectivity of Morocco, Djibouti and several West African ports. Conversely, most of mainland East African countries stagnate or decline. Connectivities have not converged across the continent. In some cases changes in maritime connectivity mostly result from variations in vessel size. We explore a method to identify these situations.
    Keywords: CONNECTIVITY,DEVELOPMENT,LINER SHIPPING BILATERAL CONNECTIVITY INDICATOR - LSBCI,VESSEL SIZE,CONTAINERIZATION,AFRIQUE
    Date: 2022–01–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03738595&r=
  11. By: Ronzheimer, Ira Nadine; Durán Lima, José Elías; Budnevich, Cristóbal; Gomies, Matthew
    Abstract: This document, which was prepared as part of a collaborative project between the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), provides a methodology for disaggregating electric and conventional buses into their parts, in order to analyse international trade flows in electromobility components. The vectors developed are based on the 2017 version of the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System and include all parts needed to build electric or conventional (diesel) buses. The vectors capture global trade related to parts on three levels: raw materials, semi-manufactured parts and manufactured parts. Disaggregation into different parts also enables reconstruction of global value chains for electric buses and identification of the key suppliers of inputs at all three product levels. The methodology can also be employed to determine prospects for productive integration in the manufacturing of buses in Latin America and the Caribbean.
    Keywords: TRANSPORTE, ENERGIA ELECTRICA, COMERCIO INTERNACIONAL, AUTOBUSES, INNOVACIONES TECNOLOGICAS, RECICLAJE, COSTOS, POLITICA COMERCIAL, TRANSPORT, ELECTRIC POWER, INTERNATIONAL TRADE, BUSES, TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATIONS, RECYCLING, COSTS, TRADE POLICY
    Date: 2022–07–19
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ecr:col022:48007&r=

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