abstract: Priced Managed Lanes (MLs) have been increasingly advocated as one of the effective ways to mitigating congestion in recent years. This study explores a new and innovative pricing strategy for MLs called Travel Time Refund (TTR). The proposed TTR provides an additional option to paying drivers that insures their travel time by issuing a refund to the toll cost if they do not reach their destination within specified travel times due to accidents or other unforeseen circumstances. Perceived benefits of TTR include raised public acceptance towards priced MLs, utilization increase of HOV/HOT lanes, overall congestion mitigation, and additional funding for relevant transportation agencies. To gauge travelers’ interests of TTR and to analyse its possible impacts, a stated preference (SP) survey was performed. An exploratory and statistical analysis of the survey responses revealed negative interest towards HOT and TTR option in accordance with common wisdom and previous studies. However, it is found that travelers are less negative about TTR than HOT alone; supporting the idea, that TTR could make HOT facilities more appealing. The impact of travel time reliability and latent variables representing psychological constructs on travelers’ choices in response to this new pricing strategy was also analysed. The results indicate that along with travel time and reliability, the decision maker’s attitudes and the level of comprehension of the concept of HOT and TTR play a significant role in their choice making. While the refund option may be theoretically and analytically feasible, the practical implementation issues cannot be ignored. This study also provides a discussion of the potential implementation considerations that include information provision to connected and non-connected vehicles, distinction between toll-only and refund customers, measurement of actual travel time, refund calculation and processing and safety and human factors issues. As the market availability of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) is prognosticated by 2020, the potential impact of such technologies on effective demand management, especially on MLs is worth investigating. Simulation analysis was performed to evaluate the system performance of a hypothetical road network at varying market penetration of CAVs. The results indicate that Connected Vehicles (CVs) could potentially encourage and enhance the use of MLs. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering 2018

A demanda por transporte é derivada, e seu resultado está relacionado à necessidade de superar barreiras físicas, envolvendo deslocamentos e, consequentemente, tempo. Como a sociedade moderna é orientada pelo relógio, tempo pode ser considerada uma variável de grande importante na dinâmica diária. Sendo assim, os sistemas de transporte têm papel fundamental para garantir que essa dinâmica seja atendida dentro do esperado. Portanto, os sistemas de transporte devem prover um serviço confiável. Ou seja, a operação dos mesmos deve ser regular, resultando em uma variabilidade mínima no tempo de viagem. Esse trabalho tem por objetivo analisar o comportamento do usuário do transporte aéreo frente à variabilidade do tempo de viagem. Para isso, modelos comportamentais foram estimados a partir de um estudo de caso realizado em Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, com os viajantes que frequentam o Aeroporto Internacional Salgado Filho. Uma comparação entre diferentes abordagens comportamentais, baseadas na teoria da utilidade esperada, também foi contemplada no estudo, com o intuito de encontrar o melhor modelo representativo do comportamento do público estudado. Os modelos estimados apresentam diferentes formas funcionais não lineares, caracterizando diferentes reações dos tomadores de decisão quando em situações de risco. / The demand for transport is derived, and the result is related to the need to overcome the physical barriers involving displacements and hence time. As modern society is driven by the clock, time can be considered a great important variable in the daily dynamics. Thus, the transport systems has a key role to ensure that this dynamic is met as expected. Therefore, transport systems should provide a reliable service. That is, the operation there of is regular, resulting in a minimal variability in travel time. This work aims to study the air transport user behavior against the variability of travel time. To do this, behavioral models were estimated from a case study conducted in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, with travelers attending the Salgado Filho International Airport. A comparison between different behavioral approaches based on expected utility theory, the study was also considered in order to find the best studied model representative of the behavior of the public. The estimated models have different nonlinear functional forms, featuring different reactions of decision-makers when at risk.

Este estudo apresenta uma discussão sobre os congestionamentos, especialmente sobre os fatores estruturais, permitindo que seja visualizado o cenário para os próximos anos. Destaca a possibilidade de adoção de medidas para combater esse problema que afeta as cidades brasileiras de médio e grande portes. São citadas medidas de restrição à circulação de veículos, lembrando que, em países em desenvolvimento, esse tipo de medida enfrenta dificuldades para serem implantadas. A partir disso chama a atenção para as deseconomias que os congestionamentos imputam à sociedade, especialmente em relação ao tempo perdido. Destaca ainda a necessidade de se quantificar essas perdas, pois quando projetos de transportes são analisados, leva-se em conta sua capacidade de reduzir ou eliminar essas perdas, fazendo-se uso de indicadores, como o valor do tempo de viagem. São analisados alguns estudos brasileiros que estimaram os valores de tempo de viagem, comparando-se esses valores a fim de encontrar relações entre eles, discutindo também os fatores que influenciam a atribuição do valor do tempo de viagem. Por fim, o estudo analisa os impactos do uso do valor do tempo na avaliação de projetos, fazendo uso de cinco sistemáticas de cálculo, nas quais o valor do tempo de viagem é obtido através de fórmulas diferentes. Os resultados apresentados indicam uma diferença de mais de 69% entre o menor e o maior valor calculado. / The aim of this study is to analyse road congestion, especially considering structural aspects and the scenarios for the future. It emphasizes the possibility of using special tools for facing these problems which affect medium and biggest cities. Although traffic restrictions are major tools to face congestion, they have presented some problems when used in emerging countries. The study also consider the externalities caused by congestion, especially in terms of travel time spent on queues. The main methods for quantifying the travel time losses were identified in order to estimate the benefits coming from transport projects. Some Brazilian cases that estimate the value of travel time are analysed and the values obtained are compared in order to found relationships amongst them. The main factors affecting the value of time in each study are also considered. Finally, the impacts of the value of time on the appraisal of transport project are analysed based on five ways for calculating such impacts. Thus the value of time is obtained from the five different approaches. The results show a different of more than 69% between the smallest and the biggest value.

Abstract A great deal of research in transportation economics has been motivated by the need to solve traffic congestion problems and to diminish negative environmental effects of road transport. The question, whether the economic measures are efficient, motivates this dissertation on the value of travel time, the rules of optimal pricing and the demands for public transportation and private car use. Three concepts of the marginal value of travel time (MVT) are specified in this thesis. The first concept involves only the direct disutility of the travel time to work in addition to the utility of market goods and leisure. The second concept also includes the disutility from the time spent at work. The third concept furthermore takes into account the effect of the length of working hours, travel time, cost and income. The length of travel time, gender, family structure and flexibility of working hours have different effects on empirical MVTs, but travel costs and income affect them in a similar fashion. The pricing decisions of the firms providing bus services are analysed with and without public subsidies. The consumption externality, i.e. the quantity demanded by other users, affects the individual bus demand. The results indicate that under uniform pricing, a socially optimal subsidy equals the increase in consumer's surplus minus the fare revenue lost from current users due to lower fare. Under nonlinear pricing, the optimal pricing can be achieved when the regulator sets the subsidy so that it is inversely proportional to the network elasticity. The welfare loss due to increasing tax burden and the opportunity cost of providing cash fare service is also taken into account in the optimal pricing rule. A model of bus demand with asymmetric information on the characteristics of bus users is developed. The model allows for habit formation and network effects. The latter effect is due to the positive influence of the aggregate demand for Regional Bus Cards (RBC) on an individual's own demand. The empirical results indicate that in RBC services positive network effects are present and the elasticity of network size is less than one, which implies that the regional bus card is an impure public good. The own price elasticity of RBC in the short run is within the range of -0.3 and -1.1. The demand for RBC cards is more elastic than demand for RBC trips or passenger kilometres. The estimated price elasticity of urban bus demand is in line with that of RBC. A reasonably high cross-price elasticity of RBC trips and the ticket of 40 trips but a lower reverse elasticity were found. A weakly separable demand for car mileage from car ownership and labour supply was rejected as was the exogeneity of car ownership in the mileage model. Therefore, the price elasticity of car mileage with respect to fuel price was estimated from the two equation model of car mileage with endogenous car ownership. The estimated parameters of the Tobit model are consistent but slightly higher than those estimated from the least squares. The fuel price elasticity varies from -0.2 to -0.9 with exogenous and endogenous car ownership, respectively. The findings of this study can be applied in the analysis and implementation of different pricing and subsidy schemes for public transportation, as well as in the evaluation of the effectiveness of economic instruments for managing the growth of private car use.

The accurate and reliable estimation of travel time based on point detector data is needed to support Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications. It has been found that the quality of travel time estimation is a function of the method used in the estimation and varies for different traffic conditions. In this study, two hybrid on-line travel time estimation models, and their corresponding off-line methods, were developed to achieve better estimation performance under various traffic conditions, including recurrent congestion and incidents. The first model combines the Mid-Point method, which is a speed-based method, with a traffic flow-based method. The second model integrates two speed-based methods: the Mid-Point method and the Minimum Speed method. In both models, the switch between travel time estimation methods is based on the congestion level and queue status automatically identified by clustering analysis. During incident conditions with rapidly changing queue lengths, shock wave analysis-based refinements are applied for on-line estimation to capture the fast queue propagation and recovery. Travel time estimates obtained from existing speed-based methods, traffic flow-based methods, and the models developed were tested using both simulation and real-world data. The results indicate that all tested methods performed at an acceptable level during periods of low congestion. However, their performances vary with an increase in congestion. Comparisons with other estimation methods also show that the developed hybrid models perform well in all cases. Further comparisons between the on-line and off-line travel time estimation methods reveal that off-line methods perform significantly better only during fast-changing congested conditions, such as during incidents. The impacts of major influential factors on the performance of travel time estimation, including data preprocessing procedures, detector errors, detector spacing, frequency of travel time updates to traveler information devices, travel time link length, and posted travel time range, were investigated in this study. The results show that these factors have more significant impacts on the estimation accuracy and reliability under congested conditions than during uncongested conditions. For the incident conditions, the estimation quality improves with the use of a short rolling period for data smoothing, more accurate detector data, and frequent travel time updates.

Bicycles are one of the most efficient way to travel within short-distance trips due to its relatively low maintenance and operation costs (Gao, Liu, & Feng, 2012). Besides to their efficiency, bicycles provide more flexibility for their parking and its ease of use. With the increasing transportation demand in major cities, transportation authorities will encourage to use the bicycle more. However, accommodating bicycles would require physical road geometry modifications such as introducing dedicated bicycle-lanes. Cycling appears to be a sustainable form of transportation across virous countries in Europe, as a result the authorities are planning and implementing upgrades to make the transportation system safer, convenient and sustainable which is necessary to encourage more people to use bicycles as a form of transportation. This thesis is a case study which examines current traffic conditions on a bus stop at Långholmsgatan in the city of Stockholm, Sweden and evaluates the effects of different designs for bicycles and buses. At this bus stop in Långholmsgatan, the bicycle lane is located to the right of the traffic road and to the left of the bus stop in the upstream direction. Buses need to cross the bicycle lane in order to arrive and departure the bus stop. Consequently, a conflict will also be created between bicycles and buses that are crossing the bicycle lane. In this thesis, an alternative design is evaluated in which buses and bicycles are separated from each other. However, this will result in a new conflict between bicycles and pedestrians. These two designs are evaluated in terms of travel time and delay and the analysis was done using micro-simulation software VISSIM. The study shows that the current design at the bus stop of Långholmsgatan should be preferred over the alternative design when considering travel time and delay for bicycles. If buses should be considered, the alternative design should be preferred over the current design.

Adaptive ramp metering (ARM) is a critical component of smart freeway corridors under an active traffic management portfolio. While improving capacity through smart corridors and application of proactive traffic management solutions is less costly and easier to deploy than freeway widening, conversion to smart corridors still represents a sizable investment for a state department of transportation. Early evidence of improvements following these projects can be valuable to agencies. However, in the U.S. there have been limited evaluations, of smart corridors in general and ARM in particular, based on real operational data. This thesis explores travel time reliability measures for the eastbound (EB) Interstate 80 (I-80) corridor in the San Francisco Bay Area before and after implementation of ARM using INRIX data. These measures include buffer index, planning time, and measures from the literature that account for both skew and width of the travel time distribution. The measures are estimated for the entire corridor as well as corridor segments upstream of a bottleneck that historically have the worst measures of reliability. A new metric for measuring unreliability that may be derived from readily available INRIX data is also proposed in the thesis using data from the study corridor. While the ARM system is relatively new, the results indicate positive trends in measures of reliability even as the number of incidents on the corridor has increased in line with the national crash trends. The spatio-temporal trend evaluation framework used here may be used in the future to obtain more robust conclusions. However, since multiple smart corridor components were installed simultaneously, it may not be possible to fully isolate the effects of the ARM, or any of the other systems, individually.

MURP / Department of Urban and Regional Planning / The study investigated commuters’ perceptions towards the implementation of bus rapid transport (BRT) system in Polokwane Local Municipality. This was achieved through determining the commuters’ perceptions of the implementation phases of Polokwane BRT. The assessment considered whether the implementation of the Polokwane BRT meets commuters’ travel needs and preferences with respect to the operational characteristics. The study used the stated preference and checklist technique to collect data. Questionnaires were spatially distributed per settlement cluster, targeting the general commuters. Data was also collected through interviews with the company implementing the system and the Polokwane municipal officials. The study was based on a comparison of two scenarios, which are: “protraction of public transport system without BRT and a combination of both public transport and the BRT system”. The collected data was analysed using Scenario-Based Analytical Approach (SBAA), with the aid of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and Microsoft Excel software. The collected data was represented and interpreted using both quantitative and qualitative data presentations formats. The study noted that commuters’ travel needs were limited to comfort, time, fare (affordability), safety and security. The results revealed that the methods used to introduce the implementation of BRT system influenced the perceptions of commuters towards the system. Most of survey respondents (55%) were not aware of BRT system implementation, while (56%) indicated that the methods used were extremely ineffective. Furthermore 43% of the survey respondents were not willing to shift from the public transport to use the BRT system. Therefore, many of the survey respondents (52%) negatively perceived and associated the system with negative transport changes within the Municipality. However, it was also established that the operation of the system within the municipality would attract (77%) commuters towards public transportation such as BRT system, only if the system incorporates commuters’ preferred operational characteristics. On the other hand, the scenarios revealed that without the intervention of BRT system, the municipality is likely to continue experiencing transport problems, although there are also challenges associated with the implementation of BRT system. The use of effective and familiar methods of communication, integrating the system with existing modes of transport, development densification, provision of mixed land use and transit oriented development along BRT corridors and BRT routes extensions to residential and socio-economic areas, are some of the recommendations in support of the BRT system. / NRF

The concept of ecosystem services is getting more used in planning. One important type of cultural ecosystem services is recreation, which has to be consumed where it is provided in contrast to services that can be transported to the beneficiaries. This creates a demand for users to move to the site of the service, making accessibility an important characteristic of the service. In a sustainable region the access to different services, including recreation, has to be considered in planning. With general transit feed specification data available, storing spatial information and time tables for public transport, the possibility to create time table dependent travel time models emerge. This study utilizes a prototype tool for a geographic information system software to create a network model using time tables to calculate travel times between different origins and water related, cultural ecosystem services via the public transport network in Stockholm County, Sweden. This allows for mapping of spatial variation of access within a region, and by combining this with current census data and population forecasts potential visitors to different recreational sites now and in the future can be estimated. By consulting regional planners in the design of the study the results were made useful for the study area Stockholm County as planning support system.

La congestión vehicular en Lima es caótica dada la escaza infraestructura vial y el acelerado aumento del parque automotor. En contraste, esta investigación propone implementar el sistema de semaforización inteligente, Ramp Meter, basado en el algoritmo AMS-AG, para reducir los tiempos de viaje vehicular en el óvalo Habich, ubicado en el distrito de San Martín de Porres. La metodología propuesta consta en la recolección de datos estáticos y registro de una lista de verificaciones. Luego se procede con la toma de datos de entrada para construir el modelo, tales como; flujos, velocidades y tiempos de viaje. El primer paquete de datos es utilizado para la construcción y calibración del modelo en el software de microsimulación PTV Vissim 9.0, y el segundo para la validación del modelo. De acuerdo con los resultados de los parámetros de performance vehicular (demora, tiempo de viaje y velocidad) y peatonal (tiempo de viaje, velocidad) de la situación actual y lista de verificaciones, se realiza la propuesta de solución. Del mismo modo, a una proyección a 15 años se estima su funcionalidad en el mediano plazo. Se concluye que la propuesta de mejora a través de la implementación del Ramp Meter, basado en el algoritmo AMS-AG, ofrece mejoras en relación con el performance vehicular, sin embargo, pierde rendimiento a medida que incrementa el flujo vehicular. Cumple con el objetivo principal de la investigación de reducirse los tiempos de viaje vehicular. Por último, se afirma que la inversión económica que demanda es una alternativa viable y rentable. / Vehicle congestion in Lima is chaotic given the lack of road infrastructure and the rapid increase in the number of vehicles. In contrast, this research proposes to implement the intelligent traffic light system, Ramp Meter, based on the AMS-AG algorithm, to reduce vehicle travel times at the Habich roundabout, in San Martin de Porres district. The proposed methodology consists of the collection of static data and registering a checklist. Then, we proceed with taking input data to build the model, such as flows, speed and travels times. The first data packet is used for the construction and calibration of the model in the PTV Vissim 9.0 microsimulation software, and the second one is used for model validation. According to the results of the parameters of vehicular performance (delay, travel time and speed) and pedestrian (travel time and speed) of the current situation and checklist, the proposed solution for roundabout is made. Similarly, at a projection to 15 years its functionality is estimated in the medium term. It is concluded that the improvement proposal through the implementation of the Ramp Meter, based on the AMS-AG algorithm, offers improvements in relation to vehicle performance, however, it loses performance as vehicle flow increases. It fulfills the main objective of the research to reduce vehicle travel times. Finally, it is stated that economic investment that it demands is viable and profitable alternative. / Tesis