Search

Understanding the socio-psychological mechanisms that determine the public acceptability of road pricing could be a key for its implementation in urban environments where this is a viable scenario. Studying the attitudes of older people is of particular importance due to the aging of the populations in the industrialized democracies, the high political engagement of older people, and their vulnerability to transport-related social exclusion. Research by the present authors had previously identified that older people's beliefs about what is the normal, acceptable, or even expected choice in a particular social context (“social norms”) and their tendency to favor, more than any other age group, what is positively valued by society (“pro-social value orientation”) affect their attitudes to road pricing. The present paper aims to develop an in-depth understanding of these attitude-shaping determinants drawing on the findings of focus groups conducted in Bristol, UK. The findings suggest that there are three distinctive expressions of pro-sociality: pro-environmental values and generativity on the one hand, these two being drivers of support for road pricing, and pro-equity values on the other, which tend to drive opposition. Social norms have two particular expressions: subjective norms (i.e. norms reflecting people’s immediate social environment) and norms referring to others and society in general. Furthermore, a theory-driven thematic analysis indicates that trust in the integrity of the concept and older age as a life stage associated with aging, retirement, lower income, mobility barriers and deteriorating health are important in how attitudes reflecting and affecting public acceptability to road pricing form

Understanding the socio-psychological mechanisms that determine the public acceptability of road pricing could be a key for its implementation in urban environments where this is a viable scenario. Studying the attitudes of older people is of particular importance due to the ageing of the populations in the industrialised democracies, the high political engagement of older people, and their vulnerability to transport-related social exclusion. Research by the present authors had previously identified that older people's beliefs about what is the normal, acceptable, or even expected choice in a particular social context (“social norms”) and their tendency to favour, more than any other age group, what is positively valued by society (“pro-social value orientation”) affect their attitudes to road pricing. The present paper aims to develop an in-depth understanding of these attitude-shaping determinants drawing on the findings of focus groups conducted in Bristol, UK. The findings suggest that there are three distinctive expressions of pro-sociality: pro-environmental values and generativity on the one hand, these two being drivers of support for road pricing, and pro-equity values on the other, which tend to drive opposition. Social norms have two particular expressions: subjective norms (i.e. norms reflecting people’s immediate social environment) and norms referring to others and society in general. Furthermore, a theory-driven thematic analysis indicates that trust in the integrity of the concept and older age as a life stage associated with ageing, retirement, lower income, mobility barriers and deteriorating health are important in how attitudes reflecting and affecting public acceptability to road pricing form.

Background: Microwave Radiometry (MWR) is a new validated method, which allows evaluation of thermal heterogeneity of carotid arteries and is associated with inflammation.Purpose: The aim of this pilot study was to determine if thermal heterogeneity in the carotid arteries is associated with aortic elastic properties in patients with dyslipidemia and whether treatment for dyslipidemia affects thermal heterogeneity. Method: Twenty-nine patients with dyslipidemia (mean age 42 ± 13 years, range 22–75, 19 men) without known cardiovascular disease, underwent assessment of carotid thermal heterogeneity (temperature difference-ΔT) using MWR. Mean common carotid intima-media thickness (CIMT) was also assessed. Twenty-one patients were treated for 6 months with statin or/and ezetimibe and thermal heterogeneity was assessed after treatment. Results: There was a positive correlation between ΔT and cIMT (r = 0.474, p = 0.009). In multivariate regression analysis, after adjustment for potential confounders such as age, sex, mean blood pressure and body-mass index, cIMT showed a positive correlation with ΔT in carotid arteries (Adjusted R2 = 0.258, p = 0.048). Thermal heterogeneity after 6 months of treatment was reduced statistically significant (0.88 ± 0.42 to 0.58 ± 0.29 °C, p = 0.021) (Image). Conclusion: In a group of patients with dyslipidemia thermal heterogeneity in the carotid arteries was positively associated with carotid subclinical atherosclerosis. Moreover, dyslipidemia treatment reduced thermal heterogeneity after a short-term period, implying a beneficial effect of treatment on thermal heterogeneity.

Providing meaningful customer experience is at the core of any successful business activity. Brands can function as vehicles to bundle the ingredients of experience together and give them structure by which consumers are able to understand and interpret products and services. To complement the technical and functional reality and experience, brands create particular narratives around products and services, within the realm of their use experience. This paper aims to contribute to understanding of strategic design and brand contextualization by looking thoroughly into a research-driven student project. The product-service design assignment given to seven teams of four to five post-graduate students was to design a new bike-sharing system, serving the sustainable urban mobility needs of the city of Gothenburg in Sweden. The task was accompanied by a request to create a fictive brand case and specific brand narrative, based on a thorough analysis of pre-selected existing brands. The paper discusses how the teams crafted their brand narratives and how different design and service elements were used to create specific and meaningful brand experiences. In addition to the contribution of the paper to design research and practice, we present a process that might be more widely useful for the education of strategic design and brand management.

Studying the viability of innovative urban access design is the key in achieving optimum results when attempting to transform dogmatism referring to conventional car-orientation into a meaningful driver of modal change founded on the actual societal needs for future transportation. An efficient public bicycle scheme could be the very definition of a system that could encourage and even facilitate, in real terms, such a transition. This paper is discussing how a post-graduate course embraced, through the means of a service-oriented design exercise, the potential introduction of such a system. More specifically, seven research teams, closely guided by the three authors, were affiliated with designing a new hypothetical bike-sharing scheme in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden more captivating than the existing one. The paper reports on: a) the novel educational approach the tutors employed, b) the taught experiences that helped the students utilize their potential as learners but also as inventive designers, c) the research in terms of design results and d) the overall transition from solely serving the needs of automotive mobility in urban environments, to creating a knowledge platform that actually illustrates an improved design-innovation process to tackle future urban demands and eventually have a real-life context impact on the city of Gothenburg.

This study is set to investigate the relationship between older age and the acceptability of road pricing. Specifically, it examines the attitudes of the people aged 60 and over to road pricing in comparison with the attitudes of younger people using relevant literature review findings, secondary data analysis and the results of a questionnaire and three group discussions. Moreover, this research examines whether older people’s support for what is positively valued for society affects these attitudes. Older people are more likely to express positive or negative opinions about road pricing depending on whether they believe it would be good or bad for others, or society. The influence that family, friends or others in general may have on people’s beliefs about road pricing is another subject that is examined. By looking into these issues this work highlights some of the potential opportunities and problems in the present context of the acceptability of road pricing. This will hopefully help policy-makers to decide on actual design criteria and consultation mechanisms that could assist in promoting and communicating better road pricing to older people, making it publicly and therefore politically more acceptable.

The implementation of road pricing schemes is likely to be an inescapable measure in the future of managing road transport demand in highly congested environments. Since public acceptability is the ‘Holy Grail’ of charging policy-making, revealing the special attitudinal issues of older people may help the identification of some of the potential social dilemmas of road pricing. In an ageing society, where older people have a growing influence in politics in general, and potentially in the acceptability of road pricing in particular, their attitudes to road pricing are of particular interest because they face specific types of risk of transport-related social exclusion. Moreover, older people favour, more than any other age groups, what is positively valued for society – a process termed as ‘pro-social value orientation’. Hence in a transport context, older people may be more likely to express positive or negative attitudes to the acceptability of road pricing depending on whether they believe it would be good or bad for others, or society in general. Family and friends may also have a particular influence on older people’s evaluations about their intentions and choices - thus the importance of studying the influence of ‘social norms’ on older people’s attitudes to road pricing. The paper will develop a thorough theoretical and empirical understanding of these issues, based on the findings of a primarily quantitatively-assessed survey of 491 post-back responses combined with secondary data analysis. This will lead to the identification of age-specific differences of public attitudes to road pricing. All in all, some support is provided for the view that attitudes to road pricing do vary with age as pro-social value orientations, social norms and their influence on attitudes also do.

Using bicycles on an ‘as-needed’ basis, usually for a small rental fee and without the externalities and obligations linked to bicycle ownership, is what makes public bicycles a societally affordable medium to enhance the transition to a more sustainable urban transport paradigm. However, despite its distinctive character in terms of its potential to be a mechanism transforming in some degree urban mobility to a shared responsibility regime, bike-sharing still faces some of the same safety concerns associated with ordinary bicycle ridership. The most common problem for cyclists’ wellbeing is that the traffic system is designed predominately from a car-user perspective. Even the cities that have recently implemented public bicycle programmes, and therefore showed some extra care to provide fitting urban conditions for them, have not yet achieved to fully eclipse car-orientation as the prime cornerstone of their development norms. This means that transport systems worldwide do not necessarily take fully into account the main characteristics of cyclists reflecting safety themes: a cyclist is vulnerable (in a crash), flexible (in behaviour), instable (may fall off the bike), inconspicuous (difficult to see), has differing abilities (due to a wide range of the population), is conscious of effort (i.e., highly motivated to minimize energy expenditure), and sometimes seen as intruders in the traffic systems, rather than as an integral part. This work refers to the results of a research scheme that meant to examine road users’ attitudes directly reflecting public acceptability towards two bike-sharing schemes in Drama (Greece, 50.000 residents) and Gothenburg (Sweden, 500.000 residents). Although safety was not the principal initiative for doing this dual study, one key conclusion was that many people could not embrace bike-sharing due to their perceptions that bicycle represents in general an unsafe travel mode and that their cities provide only limited road safety for cyclists.

Urban design, that will formulate resourceful ways to promote more sustainable and socially inclusive mobility patterns, is the key to reversing the alarming energy over-consumption, the environmental degradation, and the negative distributional impacts associated with today's cities that tend to relegate anthropocentric design considerations to the status of a non-issue. Urban access is an innovative and truly trans-disciplinary design axiom that aims to incorporate these considerations to mainstream future urban planning. It does this by ensuring that every member of the society has access to those locations and resources one needs to achieve a sustainable standard of living and productivity without limiting other people’s rights of access. Designing built environments for achieving optimum urban access levels for everyone, regardless of possible age or mobility limitations, serves as the thematic framework for the research studies of the Local Interaction Platform (LIP) Shanghai discussed in this paper. This is a Sino-Swedish research scheme goaled towards increasing capacities, in order to transform current, unsustainable urban development pathways to more sustainable urban futures for the metropolitan environment of Shanghai. This paper presents a research synopsis of the various and diverse urban access driven studies that are on the focus of LIP Shanghai regarding the city’s: existent road network infrastructure limitations, bus systems accessibility design, potential to have a public bicycle programme in place and existing car travel demand management mechanism and its possible alternative.

Mentoring is widely accepted as a developmental process for personal growth and career advancement. Its functions are often carried out within the context of a long-term, continuous and supportive relationship between a skilled or more experienced person (mentor) who serves as a role model to teach, sponsor, encourage and counsel and a less experienced individual (mentee). Although some evidence exists to support the idea that, where mentoring practices are applied in higher education, students tend to perform better as scholars and experience higher confidence and morale, mentoring is still under-utilised when used as a way to help support individuals’ personal and professional development. Meanwhile, larger organisations tend to invest significant resources on talent management activities, as a means to identify how such activities are being utilised to develop current assets within organisations, develop leadership, support change or bridge the gap of insufficiently qualified graduates in industry. \ud This paper presents a structured literature review on mentoring and coaching including similarities and differences in each approach and their appropriateness in transport and logistics higher education. It provides an understanding of each concept and suggests relevant applications as an effective means of maximising the potential of existing and prospective students and employees. Finally, it discusses the extent to which “mentoring and coaching” can be used in transport and \ud logistics higher education as a developmental approach to provide students with a competitive edge when entering the workplace.