No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Aberdeen University, 2009. / Title from web page (viewed on June 26, 2009). Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

This study examines policies which provide support to rural bus services and the extent to which these policies meet the accessibility needs of rural communities in Scotland. In recent years, accessibility opportunities have improved for the vast majority of rural people because of increased ownership of the private car.  However, the minority of people who do not have access to a car can face considerable difficulties in accessing all opportunities and may consequently be socially excluded.  The Government wishes to promote modal shift from the car to public transport wherever possible in rural areas.  Policies which provide support to bus services represent a mobility approach to tackling rural accessibility needs. In this study, the methodology used is the ‘Accessibility Policy Assessment Tool’ (APAT), which is used to systematically assess the accessibility impact of policies through a mixed methods approach.  This approach is used to ascertain the ways in which bus support policies could delivery more effective accessibility impacts to rural communities, and is critiqued as part of the study.  The main results of the study were that there are particular characteristics of some policies which enabled them to be more effective at delivering accessibility benefits to some rural communities.  Specifically, those policies which were delivered in a bottom-up fashion allowed local accessibility needs to be better understood and the services put in place could be more responsive to these needs.  In conclusion, it is suggested that bus support policies delivered in a top-down fashion may not effectively be meeting accessibility needs, and thus tackling social exclusion, and that it appeared difficult for urban-delivered policies to meet the accessibility challenges present within rural communities.

Demand Responsive Transport (DRT) is a relatively new form of public transport provision; it is an intermediate form somewhere between conventional bus and taxi services. Over the last decade, DRT services have grown in popularity mainly influenced by the development of transport telematics. The telematics-based DRT system, which forms the focus of this research, allows new generation DRT services to have greater flexibility in time and route design, and to enable immediate advance booking and response to travel requests. These DRT services have shown important advantages and benefits in several European cities and regions particularly as an alternative solution of public transport in low/dispersed demand areas and times. Moreover, DRT services have an important role to tackle social exclusion. However, several previous works reveal that many existing DRT services are still not performing to their true potential and there is still a research need to investigate DRT services from the passengers’ perspective. Therefore, this research studies DRT services from the passengers’ perspective by selecting the LinkUp DRT scheme as the case study. LinkUp is a telematics-based DRT scheme which operates as a public transport service in Tyne and Wear, UK with fully flexible routes in defined operating areas. A discrete choice model with latent variables is applied to model the passengers’ usage rate of the LinkUp DRT services. The assumption of the usage rate model developed in this research is that each passenger has an underlying utility for using the LinkUp services and the passengers who use LinkUp at different levels of frequencies have different levels of utility. The individual’s utility has an underlying latent variable and his usage rate of LinkUp in terms of number of trips per week serves as choice indicators. This study hypothesises that characteristics, and attitude and perception towards the LinkUp services of the passenger affect his utility. The passengers’ attitude and perception are constructed as latent variables (models) in the usage rate model. Therefore, the usage rate model consists of two sub-models: latent variable and discrete choice models which are specified as Multiple Indicators and MultIple Causes (MIMIC) and ordered probit models respectively. Three latent variables are proposed to quantify the passengers’ attitude and perception, which are latent Awareness, Satisfaction, and Relative Advantage. Consequently, the usage rate model is represented by the utility, which is hypothesised to be the function of the individual passenger’s characteristics and three latent variables. The results provide useful information for improving the LinkUp DRT scheme, implementing and developing telematics-based DRT services, further developing the travel behaviour model for DRT passengers, as well as for the DRT operators and policy makers.

Rural communities face a range of challenges associated with accessibility and connectivity. Though real-time passenger information systems (RTPIS) have been long heralded as offering the potential to mitigate some of these challenges their deployment in rural areas has been very limited. The lack of real-time passenger information has been identified as a contributing factor to a multitude of issues, such as high car usage, low public transport use and travel uncertainty. There is considerable potential for appropriate technologies to contribute to the alleviation of these issues, as evidence exists that they can influence travel behaviour, and cultivate positive attitudes towards the service and the operator. This thesis investigated the interplay between rural passenger experience and real-time information provision. Overall, this work aims to provide an initial stepping point on to understanding the interplay between passenger behaviour, disruptions, passenger experience, and real-time information. In order to explore the aforementioned, first, a series of interviews and focus groups with rural public transport passengers, rural transport operators, government agencies and members of academia have been carried out to study the rural passengers' responses to planned and unplanned travel disruption. Based on these i) a conceptual model that aims to describe the passenger recovery phases to disruption and the associated passenger information requirements, ii) and a framework that highlights characteristics of transport behaviour, and aligns them with drivers of transport behaviour adaptation have been created. Next, through a series of co-designed sessions in various rural areas throughout the UK a mobile technology probe, which provides public transport real time information to the passengers has been developed. Then using the technology probe a two-week before-and-after intervention study with 15 participants has been carried out. The results indicate that real-time information provided through the technology probe adjusted the travel behaviour of the participants. Namely, it improved the utilisation of waiting time of the participants, improved the efficiency of their travelling, and enabled them to find alternatives when needed. Further, to get a better picture of the effect of real-time information on rural travellers, during the intervention study 6 of the participants in their everyday travels for 7 days have been actively observed by the author. The outcomes from this supplemented the data from the study and illustrated how the rural public transport travellers used the system in their day-to-day travels. Finally, all our findings have been combined to co-create a system design with rural public transport passengers that aims to improve their experience during disruption. The final design mainly concentrated on providing information regarding pre-trip, on-trip and on boarding point, journey planning, supporting the rural passenger experience through social media, and disruption. In order to evaluate the applicability and suitability of the design, and explore how it relates to the needs of the rural passengers, two focus groups have been conducted. The results of the evaluation activity illustrate that the mobile RTPI system design was perceived as highly useful and relevant to the needs of the rural passenger.

Thesis (M.Tech.: Marketing)-Dept. of Marketing, Durban University of Technology, 2008. xiii, 135 leaves. / South Africa will host the Soccer World Cup in 2010. About 2.7 million local spectators and 400,000 visitors need to be transferred to and from the 10 host cities in 43 days. This is a huge challenge to the intercity bus transport industry, because the current transport system may not meet the demand for one of the world’s largest sporting event. The purpose of this study is to identify the current barriers to good service quality in the intercity bus transport industry. It focuses on the measurement of service quality and communication. In this research, the literature survey defined the service quality “gap” in this industry, identified the role of effective communication in the service delivery system, measured the variables affecting current service delivery using the SERVQUAL instrument, and prioritized the importance of the factors influencing service delivery in this industry. A questionnaire with 25 questions was designed to collect data. This study used convenience sampling to select 400 passengers as a sample, viz. 348 South Africans and 52 foreigners at the Durban bus station, since Durban is one of the ten host cities of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The data was analysed using SPSS. The results of this research pointed to the importance of external communication in the industry. Specific recommendations are made to improve the productivity, reduce vacancy rate and maximize the benefits to this industry in 2010 and beyond.

Bike-n-Bus includes any number of methods where bicycle serves as the access mode to some form of bus transit. This study examines bike-n-bus operations in the United States based on telephone interviews with transit professionals from 33 transit agencies across the lower 48 states. It reviews past trends in research and gives some history of bike-n-bus in the U.S. and abroad. A brief explanation of methodology is followed by a description of the various facets of U.S. bike-n-bus operations, based on both interviews and the literature, with commentary by survey respondents. The study ends with a long term vision for bike-n-bus based on the characteristics of that mode-couple. Conclusions are addressed to various audiences: transit agency, community leader/ policy maker, and researcher. Included are suggestions for possible next steps in research and implementation. These findings would be of interest to those studying transit and bicycle travel, developing travel demand models, managing a transit agency, or those with influence over bicycle policy and infrastructure. Most transit agencies have installed front-mounted bicycle racks on their entire bus fleet, and expressed satisfaction that the amenity accommodates bicyclists. However, agencies have made only moderate efforts to follow-up on this success. Studies suggest that cycling to transit can be competitive with the private automobile in journey-to-work trips and attracts new riders to transit. Better bicycling infrastructure is the most significant way to increase the number of bike-n-bus riders. However, transit agencies seem reluctant to support these improvements.

Thesis (M.Tech.: Marketing)-Dept. of Marketing, Durban University of Technology, 2008. xiii, 135 leaves. / South Africa will host the Soccer World Cup in 2010. About 2.7 million local spectators and 400,000 visitors need to be transferred to and from the 10 host cities in 43 days. This is a huge challenge to the intercity bus transport industry, because the current transport system may not meet the demand for one of the world’s largest sporting event. The purpose of this study is to identify the current barriers to good service quality in the intercity bus transport industry. It focuses on the measurement of service quality and communication. In this research, the literature survey defined the service quality “gap” in this industry, identified the role of effective communication in the service delivery system, measured the variables affecting current service delivery using the SERVQUAL instrument, and prioritized the importance of the factors influencing service delivery in this industry. A questionnaire with 25 questions was designed to collect data. This study used convenience sampling to select 400 passengers as a sample, viz. 348 South Africans and 52 foreigners at the Durban bus station, since Durban is one of the ten host cities of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The data was analysed using SPSS. The results of this research pointed to the importance of external communication in the industry. Specific recommendations are made to improve the productivity, reduce vacancy rate and maximize the benefits to this industry in 2010 and beyond.

Because existing models have their limitations, there is a significant need for a model to estimate demand for intercity bus services, especially in rural areas. The general objective of this research was to develop an intercity mode choice model that can be incorporated into a statewide travel demand model to estimate demand for rural intercity bus services. Four intercity transportation modes were considered in the study: automobile, bus, rail, and air. A stated preference survey was conducted of individuals across the state of North Dakota, and a mixed logit model was developed to estimate a mode choice model. Results from the mode choice model showed the significant impacts of individual, trip, and mode characteristics on choice of mode. Gender, age, income, disability, trip purpose, party size, travel time, travel cost, and access distance were all found to have significant impacts on mode choice, and traveler attitudes were also found to be important. The study demonstrated how the mode choice model can be incorporated into a statewide travel demand model, and intercity bus mode shares were estimated for origin-destination pairs within the state. Alternative scenarios were analyzed to show how mode shares would change under different conditions or service characteristics. This study was conducted in the largely rural state of North Dakota, but results could be transferable to other areas with similar geographic characteristics. / U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT)