The purpose of this thesis is to attempt to explain the forces behind the past growth of Canadian air travel and to use the explanation as a basis for forecasting the long-run growth of Canadian air travel. The forecasting attitude adopted in this study is that of the Department of Transport wishing to quantitatively forecast, to 1975, total Canadian domestic and international air passenger boardings independent of other modes, on the basis of average total Canadian data. Accurate forecasts are important to the Department of Transport since new airports cannot be constructed instantaneously, but at the same time, premature construction of airports is undesirable. There are a great variety of forecasting methods. Due to the problems of inadequate Canadian air passenger travel data, however, the author felt that the only appropriate quantitative method of forecasting air passenger boardings at the major Canadian airports, would be with dynamic and static, multiple regression models. The dynamic model is a new approach at forecasting air passenger boardings, since at the time of this study, not one example of its use in forecasting air passenger boardings could be found. The dynamic model of this thesis expresses the idea that current decisions are influenced by past behavior i.e. habit formation. Also, although there are many examples of the use of a static model for forecasting air passengers, the form of this study's static models is quite unique since it tries to take into account the increasing air travel elasticity of rising per capita incomes. There are many factors affecting demand but it was not possible to provide explicitely in multiple regression forecasting formulas for all of them because of the complexities involved and the lack of data with respect to some of them. It was found that one of the major factors affecting future boardings per capita will be fare policy. The long-run fare elasticity was found to be approximately -2.30. In forecasting air passenger boardings, five different assumptions were made with respect to future fare levels. The growth patterns of each of this thesis's five air passenger boarding forecasts based on the five future fare assumptions had two things in common: (1) all showed a declining rate of growth both in terms of boardings per capita and total Canadian boardings and (2) all showed absolute annual increments which in general increased from year to year throughout the entire forecast period. These two trends are both major characteristics of a growth industry which has not yet matured. An average annual decrease of 0.1334 current cents in the air passenger yield per passenger-mile seems the most reasonable future fare assumption. If this is so, the growth of total air passenger boardings will progressively decline from a 7.81 percent increase in 1968 to a 6.54 percent increase in 1975 and the growth of boardings per capita will progressively decline from a 5.07 percent increase in 1968 to a 4.35 percent increase in 1975. This forecasted growth is much lower than in the historical period of 1955-1966 when the average percent growth in total boardings was 11.4 percent and in boardings per capita was 8.48 percent. Of course, national forecasts of total domestic and international air passenger boardings are of little value in comparison to air passenger boarding forecasts of individual Canadian cities. Fortunately, the largest twenty-five air transportation hubs, which have accounted for 89 percent to 93 percent of the total of all Canadian air passenger boardings in the past, have through time each maintained a generally consistent relationship to the national total. Thus, by fitting numerous least-squares trend curves through each community's past percentage of national air passenger boardings and modifying where necessary because of the advice of experienced people in Canadian air travel, forecasted percentages of total Canadian boardings were arrived at for each of the largest twenty-five Canadian air transportation hubs. / Business, Sauder School of / Graduate

M.Comm. / The South African economy requires effective low cost passenger transport in order to provide sufficient time and place utility for its population. The role that long distance passenger transport plays within this economic framework is important and ranges from inter city transport of passengers traveling for work and private purposes to that of metro transport. It is also important to note that long distance passenger transport plays an important role in the development of rural areas. Huge potential also exists for long distance passenger transport to assist in the development of the tourism industry. Long distance rail passenger transport forms an integrated part of the long distance passenger market. Due to the characteristics of long distance rail passenger transport this form of transport is specially conducive to providing low cost transport to low income groups. This situation enhances development and social interaction of the community in different geographical areas. Although long distance rail passenger transport plays an important role in the national economy the service has traditionally not generated a profit. The reasons for this situation are diverse and complex. This study addresses some of the traditional managerial approaches towards the business. A model is developed to enable management to focus on detailed service-level management that will enhance a higher service level with lower associated costs. This study focuses on service profitability management with the associated costing and pricing methods, and concomitant management information systems. During the discussion of these specific issues some of the cost and revenue deficiencies are identified, and possible solutions are proposed for these problems. Concerns with the traditional costing method are discussed in this study, where after a new model is developed to incorporate all costs that are necessary for product costing. The main reasons for adapting a different approach to costing of services are as follows'. Accurate costing of services enables management to decide on the improvement, continuation or discontinuation of a certain service. Service costing is used as a decision tool for the determination of fares for each service that is provided. The costing model incorporates the reclassification of expenses and costing of services according to their life cycle. For the purpose of arriving at a revenue level that should satisfy sustainable economical development and specific company requirements namely profitability, this study develops a method for calculating fares for long distance passenger rail transport. This method includes internal as well as external environmental issues. The primary requirement for a service profitability model is for management to obtain the relevant information that would enable such a model to function effectively. Due to the purpose of the study, namely to develop a decision model for management a project management approach for the development of a management information system is discussed. This model is related to a long distance rail passenger organization and highlights specific management information that is required for product profitability modeling. Finally this study recognizes that further research needs to be conducted to develop new strategies to decrease cost and increase revenue, with a satisfactory level of service.

Video surveillance systems have been commonly used in transportation systems to support traffic monitoring, speed estimation, and incident detection. However, there are several challenges in developing and deploying such systems, including high development and maintenance costs, bandwidth bottleneck for long range link, and lack of advanced analytics. In this thesis, I leverage current wireless, video camera, and analytics technologies, and present a wireless traffic monitoring system. I first present an overview of the system. Then I describe the site investigation and several test links with different hardware/software configurations to demonstrate the effectiveness of the system. The system development process was documented to provide guidelines for future development. Furthermore, I propose a novel speed-estimation analytics algorithm that takes into consideration roads with slope angles. I prove the correctness of the algorithm theoretically, and validate the effectiveness of the algorithm experimentally. The experimental results on both synthetic and real dataset show that the algorithm is more accurate than the baseline algorithm 80% of the time. On average the accuracy improvement of speed estimation is over 3.7% even for very small slope angles.

Oil boom in Western North Dakota State brings increasing number of oil trucks. The distinct characteristics of heavy vehicles such as oil trucks: low speed, large size, and slow accelerate and decelerate results in inaccuracy in traffic capacity forecasting and safety analysis. In this research, to calculate passenger car equivalent (PCE) factor of heavy vehicles, such as oil trucks, on two-lane rural highway, an improved analytical method based on headway and delay is introduced. It considers several elements that have effect on PCE factor: vehicle speed, safety passing time, headway distribution, level of service (LOS), and delay to downstream traffic. The new set of PCE factor values are classified into three groups corresponding to different LOS.

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Driving simulators are used to conduct experiments on for example driver behavior, road design, and vehicle characteristics. The results of the experiments often depend on the traffic conditions. One example is the evaluation of cellular phones and how they affect driving behavior. It is clear that the ability to use phones when driving depends on traffic intensity and composition, and that realistic experiments in driving simulators therefore has to include surrounding traffic. This thesis describes a model that generates and simulates surrounding vehicles for a driving simulator. The proposed model generates a traffic stream, corresponding to a given target flow and simulates realistic interactions between vehicles. The model is built on established techniques for time-driven microscopic simulation of traffic and uses an approach of only simulating the closest neighborhood of the driving simulator vehicle. In our model this closest neighborhood is divided into one inner region and two outer regions. Vehicles in the inner region are simulated according to advanced behavioral models while vehicles in the outer regions are updated according to a less time-consuming model. The presented work includes a new framework for generating and simulating vehicles within a moving area. It also includes the development of enhanced models for car-following and overtaking and a simple mesoscopic traffic model. The developed model has been integrated and tested within the VTI Driving simulator III. A driving simulator experiment has been performed in order to check if the participants observe the behavior of the simulated vehicles as realistic or not. The results were promising but they also indicated that enhancements could be made. The model has also been validated on the number of vehicles that catches up with the driving simulator vehicle and vice versa. The agreement is good for active and passive catch-ups on rural roads and for passive catch-ups on freeways, but less good for active catch-ups on freeways.

A unified optimization framework for traffic signal priority scheduling based on the phasetime network models is presented in this research work with two mathematical programming formulations: (i) Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulation and resilient MILP formulation (R-MILP). A heuristic algorithm is developed using the delay generated by the cumulative arrival and departure curves for searching optimum solution in phase-time network. An acceptance and rejection policy is also developed based on the proposed R-MILP. A set of numerical experiment with the proposed policy is conducted for fully adapted and coordinated phase-time network. The third set of numerical experiment is destined for the comparison of the performance of proposed phase-time network with the signal timing given by traditional traffic engineering method and Multi-Modal Intelligent Traffic Signal System (MMITSS) (1). The results show that in each case, the proposed formulation gives shorter delay and arterial travel time than the other two methods.

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