https://hdl.handle.net/2123/17665 2026-06-13T10:51:11Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19414 Modeling the Impact of Technological Changes on Urban Commercial Trips by Commercial Activity Routing Type Figliozzi, Miguel A An array of noteworthy developments in logistics practice has taken place without an equivalent and comprehensive development in urban freight transportation modeling. Part of the problem is the lack of deep understanding of the workings of distribution processes in relation to the generation of truck traffic. In this paper it is emphasized the role and importance that distribution network size, and information and communication technology have on the truck traffic flows that materializes as the supply chain that flows over the public infrastructure. This paper develops the concept of commercial activity routing types that characterize the interplay between transportation demand requests and routing characteristics. This research contributes to the field proposing a novel and detailed characterization of truck flows in a supply chain context. Using well-known yet simple models and formulas from vehicle routing, operations research, and management science literature, we derive behavioral insights about distributors and carriers’ routing and order sizing decisions, as routing constraints and second order effects are important drivers of truck flows. The main contribution is to bring a new commercial activity-routing perspective and deeper level of operational decision-making analysis to cope with the intricacies of freight transportation modeling. 2006-04-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19458 Community Perceptions of ‘TravelSmart®’ Behaviour in South Australia Bertoia, Tony; Tideman, Jill; Stopher, Peter R. Despite the recent interest in changing community travel behaviours to promote sustainability, most travel behaviour change research to date has centred on a variety of health and safety issues. Insights from the psychology field have led to an alternative to information-based behaviour change campaigns known as community-based social marketing. This approach involves the identification of barriers that prevent individuals from engaging in sustainable behaviours, and the implementation of strategies ('tools') specifically targeted at addressing these perceived barriers. The recommended method for identifying barriers is to compare the frequency and strength of the perceived barriers to change from a group of individuals who are currently engaged in, and those not currently engaged in, the behaviour of interest. This study aims to contribute to travel behaviour change research by enhancing our understanding of the reasons people choose to engage or not engage in sustainable travel behaviours, such as riding public transport, walking, or riding bicycles. A secondary aim of this study is to inform the design and implementation of behaviour change programs and to enable a more strategic approach to travel behaviour change. Faceto- face interviews were conducted on a sample of 392 individuals from western Adelaide metropolitan region. Respondents were categorised according to their level of agreement with a number of key statements and discriminant analysis was conducted to discover the most important travel issues distinguishing those engaged or not engaged in that behaviour. The results suggested potentially important factors to be addressed when developing strategies for changing travel behaviour. 2006-10-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19453 A Panel Approach to Evaluating TravelSmart Initiatives in the Short Term – South Australia Pilot Survey Stopher, Peter; Stephen Greaves, Peter; Xu, Min; FitzGerald, Camden; Swann, Natalie An unusual TravelSmart intervention is being undertaken in South Australia, in which the intervention will take place over a period of about two years, using a variety of techniques to gain increasing acceptance from the population over that time. ITLS has the task of evaluating the travel impacts of this initiative. Two new approaches are being undertaken to evaluate the travel impacts – an odometer panel and a GPS panel. The odometer panel will consist of about 1,000 households that will be asked to provide the odometer readings from all cars used by the household every 4 months for a period of 2-1/2 years. The GPS panel will consist of about 200 households that will be asked to use wearable GPS devices for one week once a year for a period lasting just over 2 years (therefore, participants will use the GPS devices three times). Panel attrition is expected from both panels and participants lost through attrition will be replaced at each wave of each panel. This paper describes a pilot survey for both the odometer and GPS surveys, conducted in the period from March to June, 2005. The paper describes the method used to recruit households, the data collected at recruitment, the procedures used to obtain odometer readings and to have participants use the GPS devices, and summarises the resulting data from the pilot survey. The response rates to recruitment and completion of the panel tasks are noted for both panels. 2006-07-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19419 Delivering Value for Money to Government through Efficient and Effective Public Transit Service Continuity: Some Thoughts Hensher, David A. This paper documents some thoughts on the reform agenda in public transit that is occurring throughout the world. The specific focus is on a growing commitment to competitive regulation through competitive tendering, and the efforts by a few governments (notably in Australia) to take control of the tangible assets used by private operators as a mechanism to exercise the opportunity, if so taken, to put services out to competitive tender. We review the theoretical arguments and the empirical evidence on contracting regimes and asset ownership, and the role that government and operator might play in a setting in which building trusting and collaborative partnerships has merit in delivering services that are in the main funded from the public purse. 2006-08-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19526 The Trip Chaining Activity of Sydney Residents: A Cross- Section Assessment by Age Group with a focus on Seniors Golob, Thomas F; Hensher, David A. In this paper we use a pooled (2002-2004) cross-section of the Sydney travel survey, an annual continuous survey since 1997, to investigate the current profile of trip chaining travel activity of individual’s in 5-year groups, with a particular focus on those over 64 years old (i.e., seniors), given the aging of the population. Multiple Correspondence Analysis is used to establish causality of nonlinear and non-monotonic relationships between socioeconomic descriptors and measures of travel behaviour (assessed as trip chains). A benchmark setting for today not only establishes the way in which the elderly currently ‘cope’ with the existing supply network and the available modal alternatives, given their needs, but also is useful in providing hints as to what might be the key emerging transport policy and planning challenges in the future to serve this growing and increasingly influential population sub-strata. The main policy finding is that after age 64, travel demand shifts from car driving (partly linked to loss of driving license, but partly through choice), to car passenger and then to public transport in complex trip chains, especially for singles and for all women. 2006-10-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19421 Analysis of the Efficiency of Commercial Vehicle Tours: Data Collection, Methodological, and Policy Implications Figliozzi, Miguel Andres The emphasis of this research is on the analysis of commercial vehicle tours. Tours are disaggregated by their routing constraints. The generation of Vehicle Kilometers Traveled (VKT) by tour type is analytically modeled and analyzed. The relative influence of the number of stops per tour, tour duration, and time window constraints on VKT is discussed using an analytical framework. Multistop tours are proven to generate more VKT than direct deliveries even for equal payloads. Intuition about the impacts of network changes and policy implications on VKT is derived. Implications for the calibration of trip generation and distribution models are discussed. It is proved that the percentage of empty trips has no correlation with the efficiency of the tours regarding VKT generation. The shape of Trip Length Distributions (TLD) is discussed. It is shown that the average trip length and the TLD shape are strongly dependent on the tour type, distance from the depot/distribution center to the service area, density of stops, and number of stops per tour. Implications for data collection needs are analyzed. Data and indicators that are needed to estimate and forecast truck VKT are proposed. 2006-09-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19472 Disaggregate Assessments of Population Exposure to Aircraft Noise Greaves, Stephen; Collins, Andrew The dual pressures of rapidly growing air passenger and freight traffic and increasing numbers of people living in close proximity to airports and flight-paths is a major social problem in many major urban centres around the world including Sydney. While this impact is manifested through various externalities (e.g., noise, air pollutants, greenhouse gases), it is noise that is the most tangible and complained about issue among affected residents. Current assessments of aircraft noise, involve identification of a ‘typical’ or ‘average’ day of operations, translating this to the total number of events above some specified noise threshold, determining how many people are affected by each event using ABS Census residential population figures (a person-event), and then summing these person-events to derive a total noise load for that airport. While this approach is a convenient way to condense information, we argue it suffers from two serious limitations. First, aircraft operations are in reality highly variable, both within and between days, implying the use of an average does not relate to a person’s perceptions or experiences with noise. Second, the approach implicitly assumes a static population, when in reality people are of course highly mobile. This paper addresses these dual issues using 1) new GIS-based flight movement data to study the noise variability at a highly disaggregate spatial and temporal level of resolution, and 2) a population tracking procedure we have developed to ‘move’ people over the day. We demonstrate, using empirical evidence from Sydney, these procedures lead to markedly different insights about noise impacts, than are discernible under current methods. This in turn has important ramifications for policy-makers planning flight operations and residential settlement patterns in impacted areas. 2006-09-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19425 Asymmetrical Preference Formation in Willingness to Pay Estimates in Discrete Choice Models Hess, Stephane; Rose, John M; Hensher, David A. Individuals when faced with choices amongst a number of alternatives often adopt a variety of processing rules, ranging from simple linear to complex non-linear treatment of each attribute defining the offer of each alternative. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the choice process as a basis of understanding how best to represent attributes in choice outcome models. In this paper, in the context of choice amongst tolled and non-tolled routes, we investigate the presence of asymmetry in preferences, drawing on ideas from prospect theory to test for framing effects and differential willingness to pay according to whether we are valuing gains or losses. The findings offer clear evidence of an asymmetrical response to increases and decreases in attributes when compared to the corresponding values for a reference alternative. The degree of asymmetry varies across attributes and population segments, but crucially is independent of the inclusion or otherwise of an additional constant for the reference alternative, contrary to earlier findings. 2006-06-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19471 Mixed Method Data Collection in Travel Surveys: Challenges and Opportunities Ampt, Elizabeth; Stopher, Peter The Transport and Population Data Centre (TPDC) has been running the Sydney Household Travel Survey as a continuous survey since 1997/8. It collects information on day-to-day travel in the Greater Sydney Metropolitan Region. Based on the faceto- face personal interview method, it has been seen internationally as a leading example of achieving high quality results in terms of response rates and accuracy of trip reporting. Using this data collection method, the full response rate and part response rate are currently about 55% and 8% respectively. However, in line with recent trends, this rate has declined significantly over the years since 1981 when it was about 79% and since 1997/98 when it was still around 76%. This paper examines the issue of decreasing response rates and sets out to find if using mixed modes of data collection would produce better trip estimates and would be more cost effective. It begins by addressing the intuitive question (can we get a higher response by sampling more households) and explains why this is the wrong question. The correct question is whether new modes of data collection will achieve better response rates – and more importantly better trip estimates and cost efficiencies. By examining the limited existing evidence from both transport and other resources, the paper is able to show in which cases it is likely that multiple modes might make a difference, and when they might not. However, the paper clearly concludes that without some further information and research, it is not possible to make an informed decision on the usefulness of a multi-modal intervention. The report concludes by describing the parameters of a study that could answer the question of whether and what type of mixed mode surveys would improve trip estimates and cost efficiency of the current Sydney Household Travel Survey. 2006-10-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19452 Establishing and Using a Before and After Panel Survey: Case Study of New South Wales Stopher, Peter; Swann, Natalie; Bertoia, Tony This paper describes the use of a panel in a pilot TravelSmart project in New South Wales. The survey was conducted using two-day diaries, for which households were initially contacted and recruited by phone, and then sent diaries in the post. The diaries were returned by post with two postcard and one phone call reminder. During recruitment, households were asked if they would be willing to do the survey a second time about 9 months later, and were recruited only if they agreed to do so. The second wave of the panel was initiated about 9 months later, and only households that had responded to the first survey were contacted again. The survey was completed in early March 2005. Out of 1107 households that completed the before survey, 776 (70 percent) completed the after survey. A significant change was found in vehicle kilometres of travel for those households that received TravelSmart tools, but there were no significant differences found in numbers of trips, or proportions of trips by either mode or purpose. However, the panel approach that was used in this study proved of considerable value. It is demonstrated in this paper that, without the panel, the same sample size would have yielded much less information about possible changes, or alternatively that a much larger sample would have to have been used, with concomitantly higher survey costs. 2006-07-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19416 Quantifying Opportunity Costs in Sequential Transportation Auctions for Truckload Acquisition Figliozzi, Miguel A; Mahmassani, Hani S; Jaillet, Patrick The principal focus of this research is to quantify opportunity costs in sequential transportation auctions. This paper focuses on the study a transportation marketplace with time-sensitive truckload pickup-and-delivery requests. In this paper, two carriers compete for service requests; each arriving service request triggers an auction where carriers compete with each other to win the right of servicing the load. An expression to evaluate opportunity costs is derived. This paper shows that the impact of evaluating opportunity costs is dependent on the competitive market setting. A simulation framework is used to evaluate different strategies. Some results and the overall simulation framework are also discussed. 2006-04-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19412 Variability of Personal Exposure to Fine Particulates for Urban Commuters inside an Automobile Greaves, Stephen P; Bertoia, Tony Over the last decade, a growing body of evidence has emerged to suggest a causal link between short-duration exposure to elevated levels of fine airborne particulate matter and adverse health consequences. It is believed much of this ‘peak’ exposure occurs in transport microenvironments both because of the higher levels of fine particulates associated with road traffic, primarily from diesel exhaust emissions, and the fact people spend a significant amount of time traveling (for instance, 80 minutes/day for residents of Sydney). While previous studies have suggested substantial differences in exposure rates due to factors such as choice of mode, route, in-vehicle conditions, and meteorological factors, current measurement techniques have restricted insights to fairly coarse sampling intervals (e.g., every half hour, every trip). As a consequence, little tangible evidence is available on how pollution varies over a trip and most critically about the location, duration, and magnitude of peak excursions within trips. The current paper reports on a study in which the capabilities of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and real-time particle monitors are combined to address this problem for an urban commute trip in Sydney. This ability to precisely spatially reference pollution data and in particular identify ‘hotspots’ holds considerable promise for both our understanding and reporting of such data in the future. 2006-04-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19427 Pilot Testing a GPS Panel for Evaluating TravelSmart Stopher, Peter; FitzGerald, Camden; Biddle, Tony TravelSmart initiatives are an important element of the national program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from cars. In this paper, the authors report on the design of a long-term panel for evaluating the effects of TravelSmart initiatives, and report on a pilot test of the methodology, using a combination of GPS surveys and collection of odometer readings from participating panel members. Two tests are documented, in one of which respondents provided data for one week, using portable GPS devices, while respondents in the second survey carried devices for four weeks. The results of the tests are compared, and conclusions drawn on the ideal period of measurement. We also speculate on the sample size requirements. 2006-07-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19413 Analysis and Evaluation of Incentive Compatible Dynamic Mechanisms for Carrier Collaboration Figliozzi, Miguel Andres This paper introduces a framework for carrier dynamic collaboration. In particular it proposes and analyzes dynamic collaborative mechanisms that are incentive compatible. The dynamic collaborative environment is characterized by a set of carriers that have a proprietary set of customers that generate a stream of random demands over time. The proposed collaborative mechanism is such that upon each demand arrival, each carrier has the incentive to submit the arrived shipment or service request to the collaborative mechanism. Intuition about the efficiency and workings of the collaborative mechanism is developed. A general framework to formulate and study collaborative frameworks among transportation carriers is proposed. A truckload pickup-and-delivery collaborative environment is simulated and results are analyzed. 2006-04-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19376 Households on the Move: Experiences of a New Approach to Voluntary Travel Behaviour Change Ampt, Elizabeth; Wundke, Jessica; Stopher, Peter Voluntary travel behaviour change approaches have been used in most of the capital cities of Australia over the past few years. In a new approach to this strategy, Canberra carried out a pilot test of applying the strategy specifically to households as they undertake a move to a new residence. Clearly, households that are moving are in a much more flexible situation to adopt new travel habits. The idea of this application was, therefore, to intervene with households at a time when new habits are about to be formed. Two primary groups of households were targeted. The first was households that had just moved (i.e. in the past 4 to 6 weeks). The second was households that have committed to a move, but have not yet made the physical move to a new residence. In the paper, we describe the methods that have been tried to find and identify households in each of these groups and the success rates of the different approaches. Targeting households in this manner poses a number of new issues, with respect to the voluntary travel behaviour intervention, that do not arise in community or suburb applications. We explore a number of these issues in detail and discuss the ways in which these problems have been dealt with in the Canberra project. One of the key issues is to evaluate whether or not this intervention is effective. While evaluation of voluntary travel behaviour change is never easy, there are some very specific issues that arise with households that are moving or have just moved. We describe the issues relating to evaluation and then describe the procedures that have been tried in the Canberra case to overcome the problems. 2006-10-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19244 The Effect of Service Quality and Price on International Airline Competition Jou, Rong-Chang; Lam, Soi-Hoi; Hensher, David A; Kuo, Chung-Wei A game theoretic model, integrated with passenger’s international choice behaviour, for the competition between international airlines is developed and used to identify the role of competing service quality. The empirical evidence suggests that safety, convenience, and service quality have a major influence on the choice decision of air passengers. Passengers respond strongly to decreases in price, safety, service comprehensiveness and increases in convenience. In a Cournot model, airlines are predicted to increase service quality, with China Airlines, a dominant carrier, the winner on safety and service quality. Foreign companies are beneficiaries in providing convenient service quality. In a Stakelberg model, all the airlines will increase safety and diversify service quality to a reference point. Foreign airlines will additionally be winners in safety and convenience with China Airlines a winner in diversifying service quality. This research can be used by the airline companies as a reference for making tactical decisions and gaining a competitive advantage in the air transportation market. By this, we can raise the quality of service of the aviation market as a whole and deliver a win-win situation to all stakeholders. 2006-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19393 Reducing Sign Violation for VTTS Distributions through Recognition of an Individual’s Attribute Processing Strategy Hensher, David A. A number of authors have recently argued that the selection of the distributional assumptions in mixed logit models, used in deriving distributions of valuation of travel time savings (VTTS) to capture taste heterogeneity, has a significant impact on the empirical evidence, including the incidence of sign change across the distribution. The stream of research by Hensher and his colleagues on accounting for the attribute processing strategy (APS) in stated choice studies, the main data source of VTTS, suggests that the existence of intuitively implausible signs for a subset of the sampled population is likely due, to some extent, to the manner in which the information in the stated choice experiment is actually input into the estimation of the choice model.. In this paper we show evidence of what happens when we take into account a specific attribute processing strategy where respondents indicate that they ignored one or more attributes in making a choice. Accounting for the APS significantly reduces the incidence of intuitively implausible VTTS, even with unconstrained distributions. Allowance for APS in real world applications will require information on the incidence of alternative attribute processing rules in constructing VTTS estimates. 2006-06-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19387 Heteroscedastic Control for Random Coefficients and Error Components in Mixed Logit Greene, William H; Hensher, David A. Developments in simulation methods, and the computational power that is now available, have enabled open-form discrete choice models such as mixed logit to be estimated with relative ease. The random parameter (RP) form has been used to identify preference heterogeneity, which can be mapped to specific individuals through re-parameterisation of the mean and/or variance of each RP’s distribution. However this formulation depends on the selection of random parameters to reveal such heterogeneity, with any residual heterogeneity forced into the constant variance condition of the extreme value type 1 distribution of the classical multinomial logit model. In this paper we enhance the mixed logit model to capture additional alternative-specific unobserved variation not subject to the constant variance condition, which is independent of sources revealed through random parameters. An empirical example is presented to illustrate the additional information obtained from this model. 2006-03-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19394 Approximation of Bayesian Efficiency in Experimental Choice Designs Bliemer, Michiel C. J.; Rose, John M; Hess, Stephane This paper compares different types of simulated draws over a range of number of draws in generating Bayesian efficient designs for stated choice studies. The paper examines how closely pseudo Monte Carlo, quasi Monte Carlo and polynomial cubature methods are able to replicate the true levels of Bayesian efficiency for SC designs of various dimensions. The authors conclude that the predominantly employed method of using pseudo Monte Carlo draws is unlikely to result in leading to truly Bayesian efficient SC designs. The quasi Monte Carlo methods analyzed here (Halton, Sobol, and Modified Latin Hypercube Sampling) all clearly outperform the pseudo Monte Carlo draws. However, the polynomial cubature method examined in this paper, incremental Gaussian quadrature, outperforms all, and is therefore the recommended approximation method for the calculation of Bayesian efficiency of stated choice designs. 2006-06-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19392 Pricing in Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problems Figliozzi, Miguel Andres; Mahmassani, Hani S; Jaillet, Patrick The principal focus of this paper is to study carrier pricing decisions for a new type of vehicle routing problems defined in a competitive and dynamic environment. This paper introduces the Vehicle Routing Problem in a Competitive Environment (VRPCE), as an extension of the Traveling Salesman Problem with Profits (TSPP) to a dynamic competitive auction environment. In the VRPCE, the carrier must estimate the incremental cost of servicing new service requests as they arrive dynamically. The paper presents a rigorous and precise treatment of the sequential pricing and costing problem that a carrier faces in such an environment. The sequential pricing problem presented here is an intrinsic feature of a sequential auction problem. In addition to introducing the formulation of this class of problems and discussing the main sources of difficulty in devising a solution, a simple example is constructed to show that carriers’ prices under first price auction payment rules do not necessarily reflect the cost of servicing transportation requests. An approximate solution approach with a finite look-ahead horizon is presented and illustrated through numerical experiments, in competition with a static approach with no look-ahead. 2006-04-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19285 Review of Future Provision of Motorways in New South Wales: Some Comments Stone, Alastair The NSW Government Premiers Department Review of Future Provision of Motorways in NSW (www.premiers.nsw.gov.au) has many of the elements required to improve the procurement of motorways (and public infrastructure generally). However there is considerable mixing up of prescriptions for operational issues with broader policy mechanisms and how they should be governed. A delicious mixed metaphor comes to mind that could describe the Review as fire fighting by “naked Emperors”. Under the Terms of Reference there were a number of issues (bushfires) that had to be dealt with but some of the recommendations ignore fundamental tenets of transport public infrastructure economics (hence naked Emperors). This commentary aims to contribute to a framework that can accommodate the majority of the recommendations and provide a perspective from which the NSW Government can strengthen recent initiatives on public private sector participation in the governance, planning, finance and operation of transport infrastructure services in the State of NSW. Specific comments on detailed conclusions and recommendations in the Review are appended. 2006-03-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19284 Selection Bias in Value of Travel Time Savings Mabit, Stefan L In this paper we investigate the value of travel time savings. Estimation of this is in most cases based on samples using a specific mode. We use a mixed logit model to estimate the VTTS together with an auxiliary probit equation to capture the fact that the sample is non random. The results show that the probit equation in some cases gives extra information that can be used to improve the VTTS estimates from the mixed logit model. Hence this opens a way to investigate the possible selection bias in standard estimations of VTTS. 2006-03-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19287 Influence of Vehicle Occupancy on the Valuation of Car Driver’s Travel Time Savings: Identifying Important Behavioural Segments Hensher, David A. Studies that develop estimates of the value of travel time savings (VTTS) for car travel typically assume that the VTTS of the driver is the only relevant measure of the worth of time savings. Although there is a recogntion that the presence of passenger’s may condition the driver’s choice of route and VTTS, the evidence is somewhat limited on the impact that the number of passengers has on the driver’s VTTS. This is especially problematic when evaluating the role that policy instruments such as HOV lanes might play in delivering travel time savings for a specific occupancy, as well as the growing opportunities to have differentiated congestion charges and tolls according to occupancy. This paper investigates the role that the passenger plays in the VTTS of the non-commuting car driver. We find that the overall mean VTTS varies across the number of passengers (from $19.99 to $13.22 per person hour), declining as the number of passengers increases; however this is largely attributable to the decreasing mean VTTS for slowed down time in contrast to a ‘flat’ mean free flow time. The implications on travel time benefits ignored (through simple averaging) in previous studies, especially tollroad studies, and hence the impact on infrastructure justification, is potentially profound, given the important role played by VTTS and its variation over the number of passengers. 2006-05-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19395 Advances in GPS Technology for Measuring Travel Stopher, Peter; FitzGerald, Camden; Zhang, Jun Since the late 1990s, GPS has begun to be used as a method for measuring personal travel. Early devices were for in-vehicle use only and derived their power from the accessory socket of the car. In the early 2000s, the first wearable devices appeared, using battery power from rechargeable batteries. The early wearable devices were heavy and ungainly, and success in having people use the devices was limited. In 2005, ITLS and NeveITS pioneered the use of a much smaller device with its own internal battery, similar in weight and dimensions to a mobile telephone. Subsequent to the initial deployment of this device, there have been further advances in the sensitivity of the antenna/receiver and we have developed with NeveITS a number of improvements to software. This paper describes some of the tests conducted on these GPS devices and demonstrates the capability of these devices to provide detailed and accurate data on travel movements. The latest technologies for GPS devices indicate its potential to replace many conventional methods of data collection that are flawed because of known errors and inaccuracies. 2006-07-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/2123/19386 Spatial Alliances of Public Transit Operators: Establishing operator preferences for area management contracts with Government Hensher, David A.; Knowles, Louise Scheduled transit services in many countries are provided by operators within geographical jurisdictions protected from competition with other public transit operators, although unprotected from competition by other modes, especially the car. This increased competition in many developed economies has led to a loss of market share of urban transit and contributed to the growing crisis in escalating costs of service provision (leading to pressure for increasing subsidy support). The response to this throughout the 1990s has seen governments progressively introducing market reforms centred on competitive tendering and economic deregulation. In more recent years, performance-based contracts have become popular variants, with an increasing number of incentive payment criteria introduced to not only promote cost efficiency but also aimed at growing patronage. Where such reform has involved area wide contracts, the boundaries of the contract areas have been essentially preserved. In recognition of the growing support for bus-based transit systems (variously referred to as bus rapid transit, busways and transitways), which offer increasing promise in growing public transit patronage, the NSW government in Australia has introduced reforms that require existing operators in the Sydney metropolitan area each currently holding an area contract (87 contracts) to work together under fifteen new spatial contracts. These new contracts overlay the existing contract areas and give incumbent operators the first option to participate. In this paper we assess ways in which operators might coalesce to deliver ongoing and new ‘regional’ services within these new trusting partnerships. Operator business preferences and potential barriers to cooperation are identified through stated preference experiments. 2006-01-01T00:00:00Z