https://hdl.handle.net/2123/17661 2026-06-13T10:51:14Z 2026-06-13T10:51:14Z Stopher, Peter https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19429 2026-06-10T05:45:01Z 2003-06-01T00:00:00Z

Cars, Congestion, Public Transport, and Pricing: A Reality Check Stopher, Peter For some little while now, the flavour of the month in transport policy seems to have been to set goals for massive relative increases in public transport ridership, reduction of car use, all resulting in a hoped-for reduction in road congestion. As a result of this policy focus, we have seen various government entities at the metropolitan, state, and national levels set goals for such activities as increased ride sharing, increased use of public transport, implementation of high occupancy vehicle lanes, and, at least in Australia and the U.K., thinking about congestion pricing of some form. Through political rhetoric, it seems that use of the private car, congestion, and declining shares of the market for public transport are all labeled as negatives that should be set right by some type of policy intervention. Since the first introduction of ideas of demand management in the late 1970s, the idea of trying to change behaviour of car users has been an increasingly significant focus of transport policy. This paper seeks to check the reality of these policy directions and questions whether these are desirable, let alone achievable end states. It is noted that major changes in transport market share have never been achieved in the past, and as such, it seems unlikely that such policies will be successful in the long term. Even if such policies can be achieved, it is questionable whether the end results will have desirable consequences or not.

2003-06-01T00:00:00Z Stopher, Peter Bullock, Philip https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19431 2026-06-10T05:45:01Z 2003-06-01T00:00:00Z

TravelSmart: A Critical Appraisal Stopher, Peter; Bullock, Philip Travel behaviour modification, also called TravelSmart®, Indimark® and Travel Blending®, has been offered as a solution to the dependence of urban populations on the car. Travel behaviour modification is a voluntary programme aimed at changing travel behaviour through providing better information about transport options, rather than through investments in public transport, or through disincentive programmes for the car. The policy has been implemented in Australia in Perth, Adelaide, and Brisbane, and is under active consideration at least in Melbourne and Sydney. The basis of this increasingly widespread potential application of travel behaviour modification is the claim that the program can deliver a shift of travel mode choices through the provision of better information about travel behaviour and travel choices. The claims that are made for this programme are that it can lead to reductions in car use of the order of 10 to 14 percent. If these claims are real, then travel behaviour modification is an enormously valuable programme, with the potential to achieve what has never been done before, i.e. provide a doubling or more of public transport ridership and a significant drop in car use. Such a program would be the answer to the dilemma of how to reduce car use significantly and consequently reduce congestion and vehicular emissions. It is, therefore, appropriate to undertake a critical appraisal to determine if travel behaviour modification is able to deliver these major mode shifts, as its proponents claim. In this paper, we review a number of published articles, primarily based on the Australian experience with travel behaviour modification, and also review several reports, and materials from the application areas. From these reviews, analyses are performed to see what the actual expected shift is in mode use for the whole population. It is found that there appears to be evidence that the claims of 10 or more percent shift out of car driver are over-stated, and that real shifts may be of the order of six to seven percent. Second, some sampling issues are discussed that indicate that the numbers reported to date may not be as reliable as one would like. Third, the locations of the test applications are examined and discussed, and it is suggested that there may be some significant bias in these locations towards a larger uptake of the shifts into environmentally-friendly modes of travel. In sum, the paper concludes that travel behaviour modification is capable of making changes in the use of environmentally-friendly modes, but not at the rates that have often been claimed. It is suggested that the target populations may need to be limited and that expectations of the size of the shifts in mode use need to be tempered.

2003-06-01T00:00:00Z Hensher, David A. Greene, William H. Rose, John M. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19441 2026-06-10T05:45:02Z 2003-10-01T00:00:00Z

Using Classical Inference Methods to reveal individual-specific parameter estimates to avoid the potential complexities of WTP derived from population moments Hensher, David A.; Greene, William H.; Rose, John M. nference estimation methods for logit models with Bayesian methods and suggested that the latter are more appealing on grounds of relative simplicity in estimation and in producing individual observation parameter estimates instead of population distributions. It is argued that one particularly appealing feature of the Bayesian approach is the ability to derive individual-specific willingness to pay measures that are claimed to be less problematic than the classical approaches in terms of extreme values and signs. This paper takes a close look at this claim by deriving both population derived WTP measures and individual-specific values based on the classical ‘mixed logit’ model. We show that the population approach may undervalue the willingness to pay substantially; however individual parameters derived using conditional distributions can be obtained from classical inference methods, offering the same posterior information associated with the Bayesian view. The technique is no more difficult to apply than the Bayesian approach – indeed the individual specific estimates are a by-product of the parameter estimation process. Our results suggest that while extreme values and unexpected signs cannot be ruled out (nor can they in the Bayesian framework), the overall superiority of the Bayesian method is overstated.

2003-10-01T00:00:00Z Ray, Pradeep Kanta Rahman, Shams https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19409 2026-06-10T05:45:02Z 2003-06-01T00:00:00Z

Transnational Corporations, Local Adaptation and Inter- Firm Linkages in Developing Countries: Some Contrasts with Local Enterprises in India. Ray, Pradeep Kanta; Rahman, Shams The issue how transnational corporations (TNC) affiliates adapt locally within emerging markets while sustaining their global competitive advantage has been debated and discussed in international business literature. Even so, the actual response of TNC-affiliates to this contradiction has not been systematically explored. Using a rich dataset of over 300 companies in India, we examine if the ability of TNC-affiliates to adapt and strike linkages in host countries is in any way different to those of their local counterparts. Our results show that TNC-affiliates and local enterprises (LE) behave differently across a majority of dimensions predicted. But whereas this difference is robust for mature industries like chemicals, the same cannot be claimed for high technology global industries like electronics and transport equipment. This suggests that the behavioural differences between the two groups of firms may be strongly influenced by market structural variables impinging upon the industries in which they compete. The results have implications for TNCaffiliates striving to streamline their strategy with pressures in their task environment and also for nation-states as to how to best devise policy mechanisms to assist the same.

2003-06-01T00:00:00Z Galilea, Patricia Dios Ortuzar, Juan de https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19434 2026-06-10T05:45:04Z 2003-08-01T00:00:00Z

Valuing Noise Level Reductions in a Residential Location Context Galilea, Patricia; Dios Ortuzar, Juan de The noise levels measured in metropolitan streets are on many occasions over the norms but the consequences of this as a health hazard are only starting to be questioned; this is obviously worse in the large cities of the second and third worlds. A stated preference (SP) experiment was designed to estimate the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for reducing the noise level in a group based residential location context. Important issues were the proper definition of the context and the variable metric for the environmental attribute. The experiment considered variations of the attributes travel time to work, monthly house rent, position of the dwelling with respect to the sun and subjective noise level inside it; objective levels were also measured after the experiment. With this data we estimated Multinomial Logit and Mixed Logit (ML) models based on a consistent microeconomic framework, with linear and non-linear utility functions and allowing for various stratifications of the data. The more flexible ML models also allow to treat the repeated observations problem common to SP data and, as expected, gave a better fit to the data. Based on these models we estimated subjective values of time, that were consistent with previous values obtained in the country, and also sensible values for the WTP for reductions in the subjective noise level at a given location.

2003-08-01T00:00:00Z Bullock, Philip Jiang, Qingjian https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19433 2026-06-10T05:45:04Z 2003-08-01T00:00:00Z

Measuring Bus Performance using GPS Technology Bullock, Philip; Jiang, Qingjian Assessing the running times of bus services has traditionally been a difficult and expensive task for the majority of bus operators in Australia, and in other parts of the world. Up until recently, travel times have been collected by time keepers positioned at key points along a given route or service corridor who record bus arrival and departure times. These data then need to be manually collated before any kind of analysis can be undertaken. The time consuming nature of this process restricts the ability of operators to collect large and meaningful samples of data. Furthermore, it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify congestion points from such data, and to evaluate the impact that they might have on overall service levels. Passive Global Positioning System (GPS) technology offers a low-cost means of collecting large amounts of highly accurate data, which can be used in an on-going performance assessment program. Although raw GPS track points can be viewed on most standard GIS packages, on-screen visual analysis is extremely time consuming for even small amounts of data. Programming skills are therefore required to break continuous GPS data into records that are more meaningful to an operator. A number of important tasks need to be undertaken before analysis can take place. Firstly, periods of in-service or out-of-service running need to be defined, and routes need to be identified. This can be a complicated task because operators often design shifts so that buses may switch between different areas and routes, from run to run, to maximise vehicle utilisation. Once routes are identified, records must then be separated into individual runs and matched with a timetable to compare scheduled and actual running times. This paper provides an overview of a number of software applications developed for processing and analysing large GPS data records collected by a bus operator in Sydney in late 2002/early 2003. The data collection process is described, and some examples are presented of output produced by the main trip processing and timetable query program. It is concluded that passive GPS is a highly attractive method of collecting data on performance, even for very small operators.

2003-08-01T00:00:00Z Rahman, Shams https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19411 2026-06-10T05:45:06Z 2003-06-01T00:00:00Z

Quality Management in Logistics: A Comparison of Practices between Manufacturing and Retail Companies and Logistics Firms. Rahman, Shams In February 2002, the Institute of Transport Studies (ITS), The University of Sydney, initiated a study to investigate world class logistics (WCL) practices in Australia. This research is part of the wider WCL study investigating the state of quality practices in logistics in Australian companies. The study examines the extent to which quality management practices are adopted, impediments to implementation of quality improvement processes, quality management tools (simple) employed, methods used to measure customer expectations, and the extent of satisfaction with quality programs. In addition, the study compares the extent of quality practices between manufacturing and retail organizations, and logistics firms. The results show that manufacturing/service organizations are ahead of logistics firms in the application of quality management practices in the logistics functions.

2003-06-01T00:00:00Z Bullock, Philip Stopher, Peter Pointer, Graham Jiang, Qingjian https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19405 2026-06-10T05:45:07Z 2003-03-01T00:00:00Z

GPS Measurement of Travel Times, Driving Cycles, and Congestion Bullock, Philip; Stopher, Peter; Pointer, Graham; Jiang, Qingjian In the past few years, various types of GPS devices have been developed for use in connection with travel surveys of various types. This paper describes an application in Sydney, Australia, in which GPS devices were used to collect data on automobile trips within the urban area, with the goal of developing information about travel times, driving cycles, and the incidence and severity of congestion. The paper describes steps taken in designing the sample in both cases, and presents the results of the data collection, together with estimates of the sampling errors on segment, link, and corridor travel times. It is concluded that GPS technology represents an accurate and inexpensive method for collecting travel time and speed information, even if samples are relatively small.

2003-03-01T00:00:00Z Alsnih, Rahaf Stopher, Peter R https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19396 2026-06-10T05:45:04Z 2002-10-01T00:00:00Z

Environmental Justice Applications in Transport: The International Perspective Alsnih, Rahaf; Stopher, Peter R This paper focuses on the application of environmental justice principles specifically in the transport context. It begins by giving a background of the environmental justice movement and a definition, and proceeds to describe current legislative mandates in the United States. A holistic approach to transport planning is introduced to highlight the importance of the interrelationships between transport and land use planning. Current practices adopted in terms of environmental justice are illustrated from the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission report as well as a description of the data limitations that result from the models used in current analyses. The paper concludes by providing some recommendations on the areas that need to be developed to address environmental justice principles adequately, and the applicability of these principles internationally.

2002-10-01T00:00:00Z Jong, Robert de Mensonides, Wytse https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19391 2026-06-10T05:45:06Z 2003-02-01T00:00:00Z

Wearable GPS device as a data collection method for travel research Jong, Robert de; Mensonides, Wytse Global Positioning System (GPS) devices are emerging as a potential means to collect improved data on the spatial aspects of personal travel. This paper builds on earlier work by Stopher and others on the use of passive GPS devices, for which additional non-GPS data may be added through a subsequent prompted recall survey. This paper presents sets of rules which can be applied to the raw data acquired by wearable GPS devices to determine the modes of travel used and the trip ends. Experiments have been performed in which the devices were tested for a range of different situations, including collecting data on trains, buses, and ferries, collecting data in urban canyons and also with respect to the cold start phenomenon. The paper also describes the procedures undertaken to download and analyse the data.

2003-02-01T00:00:00Z Rizzi, Luis I Dios Ortuzar, Juan de https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19175 2026-06-10T05:45:02Z 2003-08-01T00:00:00Z

Road Safety Valuation under a Stated Choice Framework Rizzi, Luis I; Dios Ortuzar, Juan de The value of fatal risk reductions is a vital input for road safety cost-benefit analysis. It has been traditionally estimated by means of contingent valuation in spite of growing criticism surrounding this approach. Furthermore, many believe that risk-money trade-offs are not well understood due to the difficulty in internalizing tiny risks. We have succeeded in applying the Stated Choice (SC) approach to tackle this problem, using as one of the attributes the number of accidents with fatal victims (i.e. a proxy for risk). To assess the robustness of SC, we conducted an external validity test based on results for three different studies. We investigated if preferences were well defined according to economic theory (i.e. as initial risk increases, the marginal willingness-to-pay should be higher). We also addressed the generally ignored issue of whether there should be a unique value of fatal risk reductions. We found that people can internalize risk consistently from an economic viewpoint, and that although each sample yields different values of risk reductions, there was a relationship between the risk level and the value of risk reductions in each context examined; this evidence could be most helpful within the context of developing countries. Finally, we offer an hypothesis to explain the differences between our values with those obtained in industrialised countries, highlighting the importance of doing local studies rather than transferring imported values.

2003-08-01T00:00:00Z Hensher, David A. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19112 2026-06-10T05:44:59Z 2003-02-01T00:00:00Z

Contract Areas and Service Quality Issues in Public Transit Provision: Some Thoughts on the European and Australian Context Hensher, David A. The introduction of contract regimes for the provision of bus services such as competitive tendering and performance-based contracts is usually premised on a prior assumption that the size of the physical contract area is given and that any policies related to interactions between contract areas such as integrated ticketing and fares are agreed to. This paper reviews the evolving arguments that promote a review of contract area sizes before recontracting and the positions supporting the benefits of service quality-related issues such as an integrated fares policy. Given that a growing number of analysts (especially in Europe and Australia) are promoting the appeal of increasing physical contract area size to facilitate, amongst other reasons, an integrated fare regime, it is timely to set out the pros and cons for such reform to ensure that they are not counter-productive to the desired outcomes of a reform process. The arguments herein caution the support for too small a number of large contract areas on grounds of internal efficiency losses and limited gains in network economies (but support amalgamating very small contract areas). The existing empirical evidence, limited as it is, tends to support contract areas (and depots) currently serviced by fleet sizes in the range 30-100 regardless of urban development profile. Alternative ways of delivering cross-regional and broad-based network benefits are proposed.

2003-02-01T00:00:00Z Hensher, David A. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19124 2026-06-10T05:45:00Z 2003-02-01T00:00:00Z

Revealing Differences in Willingness to Pay due to the Dimensionality of Stated Choice Designs: An Initial Assessment Hensher, David A. Stated choice (SC) methods are now a widely accepted data paradigm in the study of behavioural response of agents (be they individuals, households, or other organizations). Their popularity since the pioneering contributions of Louviere and Woodworth (1983) and Louviere and Hensher (1983) has spawned an industry of applications in fields as diverse as transportation, environmental science, health economics and policy, marketing, political science and econometrics. With rare exception, empirical studies have used a single SC design, in which the numbers of attributes, alternatives, choice sets, attribute levels and ranges have been fixed across the entire design. As a consequence the opportunity to investigate the influence of design dimensionality on behavioural response has been denied. Accumulated wisdom has promoted a large number of positions on what design features are specifically challenging for respondents (eg the number of choice sets to evaluate); and although a number of studies have assessed the influence of subsets of design dimensions (eg varying the range of attribute levels), there exists no single study (that we are aware of) that has systematically varied all of the main dimensions of SC experiments. This paper reports the findings of a study that uses a Design of Designs (DoD) SC experiment in which the ‘attributes’ of the design are the design dimensions themselves including the attributes of each alternative in a choice set. The design dimensions that are varied are the number of choice sets presented, the number of alternatives in each choice set, the number of attributes per alternative, the number of levels of each attribute and the range of attribute levels. This paper details the designs and how they are used in the search for design impacts on willingness to pay (ie attribute valuation), using a sample of respondents in Sydney choosing amongst trip attribute bundles for their commuting trip.

2003-02-01T00:00:00Z Hensher, David A. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19116 2026-06-10T05:45:02Z 2002-11-01T00:00:00Z

Models of Organisational and Agency Choices for Passenger and Freight- Related Travel Choices: Notions of Inter-Activity and Influence Hensher, David A. The study of traveller behaviour has in the main treated each agent in a decision-network as an independent decision maker conditioned typically (and exogenously) on the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of other agents and at best on a set of exogenous variables representing the (perceived ‘equilibrium’) influence of other agents. In many literatures it has long been recognised that agency interaction plays a (potentially) significant role in the actions of individuals. Examples at the household, community and business level abound. McFadden (2001a,b) recently stated that a high priority research agenda for choice modellers is the recognition of the role of social and psychological interactions between decision makers in the formation of preferences. Manski (2000) came to a similar conclusion and offered a plea for better data to assist in understanding the role of interactions between social agents (promoting the role of experimental choice data). While the interest in (endogenous) interactions between agents involved in passenger travel activity is generally neglected, the absence is particularly notable and of greater concern with the renewed interest in the study of (urban) freight travel activity where a supply chain of decision-makers have varying degrees of influence and power over the freight distribution task. This paper reviews the broad literature on interactive decision making with a specific focus on choices made by interactive agents and the role of individuals in networks. A number of modelling perspectives are presented that use well established discrete choice paradigms. We highlight the challenges in designing data collection paradigms that are comprehensive, relevant and comprehendible by participating agents and suggest an agenda for ongoing research.

2002-11-01T00:00:00Z Rose, John Hensher, David A. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19125 2026-06-10T05:45:03Z 2003-03-01T00:00:00Z

Modelling Agent Interdependency in Group Decision Making: Methodological Approaches to Interactive Agent Choice Experiments Rose, John; Hensher, David A. The past thirty years has seen a growing interest in the development of statistical methods to model choices made by individual agents. The dominant method to emerge, discrete choice modelling, has been applied to a wide number of applications in the areas such as transportation, marketing, environmental science, health economics and public utility regulation. Yet despite the wide level of acceptance, those who employ discrete choice models have often failed to acknowledge that such models assume independency between decision makers. The assumption of independence has significant implications in terms of which contexts discrete choice models should appropriately be applied to. This paper begins by establishing the rationale behind interactive agency choice experiments (IACE), an extension to the traditional discrete choice method that is designed to model agent interdependence. The paper then proceeds to discuss how to model both independent and interdependent decision making processes using the IACE methodology in order to capture information on preferences for all agents within a decision making group. The empirical case study used to illustrate the IACE method focuses on distributive work practice choices.

2003-03-01T00:00:00Z Truong, Truong Hensher, David A. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19108 2026-06-10T05:45:06Z 2003-01-01T00:00:00Z

Congestion Charging and the Optimal Provision of Public Infrastructure: Theory and Evidence Truong, Truong; Hensher, David A. The paper provides a theoretical framework for analysing the effects of public infrastructure provision on private sector productivity using the example of a transport network. Public infrastructure such as a transport network is assumed to be a (congested) public good. When the provision of this good is at the long run equilibrium level, consumers pay a price which reflects the (individually-determined) marginal productivity of the good and the supplier is also recovering all its opportunity costs. In the traditional literature on transport congestion (Walters, 1961; Mohring and Harwitz, 1962), the concept of infrastructure capacity is often defined in term of the maximum level of traffic flow, which is more of a usage concept rather than a ‘capacity’ concept. Congestion is then defined in terms of the difference between the marginal social cost of this traffic flow and the marginal private costs. There has been some debate in the literature on the way travel demand in general, and traffic congestion in particular, has been defined in terms of traffic flow because this will tend to give an ambiguous definition of the concept of ‘congestion’ in some cases. An alternative measure for the concept of traffic demand (and supply), and of ‘congestion’, is in terms of traffic density or volume rather than in terms of traffic flow. In this paper, we explore this alternative definition of ‘capacity utilisation’ and of ‘congestion’ in terms of traffic density. We arrive at an alternative definition for the concept of optimal congestion tax that turns out to be more robust. This is because it can be applied, not only to the situation of ‘low congestion’ but also to the case of bottleneck or ‘hyper-congestion’ which is not well analysed in the traditional literature. The paper also illustrates this new concept with some numerical calculations based on empirical observations on an actual road network.

2003-01-01T00:00:00Z Hensher, David A. Goodwin, Phil https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19126 2026-06-10T05:45:01Z 2003-01-01T00:00:00Z

Using values of travel time savings for toll roads: Avoiding some common errors. Hensher, David A.; Goodwin, Phil There are many empirical studies on the estimation of values of travel time savings (VTTS), with varying degrees of rigour and relevance, mostly based on the observation that travellers are prepared to spend money to save time. These values are applied both to forecasting the effects of speed changes on behaviour, and also to estimation of the social benefit of such savings, in order to calculate value for money of spending public funds on transport investments. The sources of empirical information on such values are not always compatible with the models and software within which the results are used. In recent years, an increasingly important application has been to calculate the potential revenue from tolled roads, and networks with user charges, which offer high speeds at a higher price: here the important issue is not hypothetical willingness to pay, but the actual money which will be handed over. This changes the focus from hypothetical to bankable values of travel time savings. It is shown that some common practices risk substantial error in calculation, affecting the sharing of risk between public and private sectors. A particularly important case is where an average value is taken as representative of a skewed distribution of values – in these circumstances there will be a tendency to overestimate the revenue, and underestimate the traffic impact, of a charge, because for a given mean VTTS, there will be a smaller number of individuals who are prepared to pay the toll. To correct this bias, the main tasks are: establishing a relevant set of trip-purpose specific VTTS distributions and selecting a way of handling the distributions in patronage forecasting, growing VTTS through time, treating the VTTS of car passengers, and establishing an appropriate set of rules for converting disaggregated (or heterogeneous) components of travel time values into a single trip value appropriate to the project being evaluated. Other related problems of the use of values of time relate to the assumption that these values grow in proportion to income, and the extent to which they are confounded with other effects. One troublesome feature is that most, and perhaps all, of the problems discussed tend to produce biases in the same direction, namely to risk overestimating revenue, in the short and long run. This produces a tendency to appraisal bias, which can distort the contractual confidence between partners. Overall, it is likely that current assumptions are underestimating the degree of toll-avoiding behaviour, and overestimating the financial viability of projects.

2003-01-01T00:00:00Z Alsnih, Rahaf Hensher, David A. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19117 2026-06-10T05:45:07Z 2003-03-01T00:00:00Z

The Mobility and Accessibility Expectations of Seniors in an Aging Population Alsnih, Rahaf; Hensher, David A. Populations of post-industrial nations are aging. With a growing number of people living well into their 80’s and maintaining active lives, the transportation system will have to start focussing more closely on understanding their mobility and accessibilty needs, so as to ensure that specific requirements of this large segment are not being ignored through the promotion of traditional ‘solutions’ and historical assumptions. This paper takes a close look at the evidence on the mobility needs and travel patterns of individuals over 64, distinguishing between the “young” elderly (aged 65 to 75 years) and the “old” elderly (over 75 years). This distinction is particularly useful in recognising the threshold of health change that impacts in a non-marginal way on mobility needs. This distinction also focuses transport planning and policy on a commitment to understanding the different needs of these subgroups of the population, identifying services and facilities that better cater for these groups. We review the evidence, in particular, on the mobility characteristics of the over 75 years age group, including how they secure support through migration and settlement patterns. We use the empirical evidence from a number of western nations to identify the role of conventional and specialised public transport as an alternative to the automobile in meeting mobility and accessibility needs.

2003-03-01T00:00:00Z