Search

Bike-sharing is one of the fastest growing new modes of transport in the world, with more and more schemes opening every year. This paper examines the trends in a bike-sharing scheme that has been in operation in Cork since 2014. While many studies exist on how bike-sharing schemes are changing mobility in cities across the globe, few studies have looked at the dynamics of these schemes in smaller cities. One of the motivations in looking at a small city like Cork is to determine if smaller cites derive benefits from bike-sharing schemes and can bike-sharing schemes provide a prominent role in these cities. This research found that in a small, compact city like Cork, average trip times recorded are short with regular uses displaying habitual trip patterns. This includes using the same bike stations and following similar routes on a daily or weekly basis. The findings also suggest weather has an impact upon usage, with longer trips more likely during better weather conditions. The findings of the paper provide insights to the dynamics of usage of a smaller bike-sharing scheme and results on how bike-sharing is offering citizens a new transport alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes optimization frameworks for discrete road network design considering the land-use transport interaction over time. Unlike existing models, the optimization frameworks can determine the optimal designs automatically without trial-and-error once the objective(s) is/are clearly defined. Moreover, these frameworks allow the evaluation of the impacts of the optimal designs on the related parties including landowners, toll road operators, transit operators, and road users, and help network planners and profit-makers with decision making by eliminating many alternative designs. A numerical study is set up to examine road network design's effects on these related parties under three road construction schemes: exact cost recovery, build-operate-transfer, and cross-subsidization. The results show that the changes in landowner profits are not the same after implementing any scheme. These unequal changes raise the issue of the landowner equity. This implies that the government has to consider trade-offs between parties’ objectives carefully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the metropolitan cities of developed and developing countries, longer journeys are mostly performed by two or more modes. In the event of availability of suburban trains and public buses, commuters prefer to travel a longer stretch of their journeys by train, so as to avoid traffic congestion on roads, and the remaining part by buses to reach local areas if their final destination is not in close proximity to railway stations. Normally suburban trains have fixed corridors and buses have the flexibility to serve remote local areas. Thus design of feeder routes from railway stations to various destinations and the transfer time from trains to buses plays a very important role and can be controlled by transport planners. A considerable amount of research has been done on the independent design of a bus route network without considering the effect of train services. Researchers have made attempts using heuristics, simulation, expert systems, artificial intelligence, and optimization techniques for design of routes and schedules. So far, limited effort has been made in modeling coordinated operations. In this research, a new hybrid algorithm which exploits the benefits of genetic algorithms and a well tested heuristic algorithm for the study area is discussed. More convincing results in terms of feeder routes and coordinated schedules at the selected railway station are obtained by the proposed hybrid algorithm as compared to earlier approaches adopted by the writers for the same study area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fear of crime and a perceived sense of being unsafe have the potential to discourage individuals from using public transport. This paper presents analysis of the results of a survey on aspects of personal safety apps and how individuals perceive them in relation to their personal safety, privacy and their preference to purchase them. It explores their willingness to download for free or purchase such an app, their impression of features that an app might include such as revealing their location, how they would rate police force monitoring if included as a feature of the app and finally how they would rate a personal safety app against other technologies used to improve perceived transport user safety. The results show that the majority of respondents would consider downloading a personal safety app. Lower levels of engagement with technology, a higher level of education, being resident in the city of Dublin (as opposed to surrounding regions) and privacy concerns tended to make females less likely to consider downloading the app. These findings were not repeated for males. The results suggest that younger respondents were more likely to be negatively impacted by the inclusion of a facility to report location in an emergency on the app, while the older age groups were more likely to be unaffected. For the location tracking feature, cluster membership, gender and resident outside Dublin were significant. Less than half of the respondents would be negatively influenced in their decision to buy the app if a cost of €1.79 were introduced. When respondents were asked about the inclusion of police monitoring as a feature of the app, the results suggested that police monitoring had a more definite effect on perceived personal safety than on privacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]