abstract / toc / Transport Policy and Planning / Master / Master of Arts in Transport Policy and Planning

Doctor of Philosophy / During the 1990s, governments, managements and unions have been focused upon improving the cost efficiency of firms. This focus has been strongest for firms in the public sector where improved outcomes can be expected to significantly improve the Gross Domestic Products of whole economies. This case study looks at the cost efficiency of NSW rail passenger services over a 41 year period to 1991/92, long suspected (but hitherto only tentatively demonstrated) as a paradigm of cost inefficiency. The case study focuses upon the use of the total factor productivity (TFP) index, as a datum point for measuring change in productivity in four markets: suburban, internrban, country and interstate passenger services since 1951/52. From this datum, changes over the years in management, technology and other external factors can be identified and assessed. The thesis identifies management quality (the organising element in the firm) as the preeminent factor in determining productivity change, and the role that new technology plays in its impact on failures in management. We establish the linkages between management and innovation, with TFP, pricing efficiency and economic resource use efficiency, to present a rich paradigm for assessing the economic performance of any business firm. Borrowing from systems theory and other management practices such as total quality management, we disaggregated the case firm into its component systems, sub-systems and processes, for separate study in relation to impact on TFP. The database for 41 years of rail behaviour is the richest ever compiled for any railway in Australia, and with enhanced modelling, enables a systematic treatment of the performance through time of State Rail's passenger services.

Fractional aircraft ownership programs offer companies and individuals all the benefits of owning private jet, such as safety, consistency, and guaranteed availability, at a fraction of the cost of owning an aircraft. In the fractional ownership model, the partial owners of an aircraft are entitled to certain number of hours per year, and the management company is responsible for all the operational considerations and making sure an aircraft is available to the owners at the requested time and location. This thesis research proposes advance optimization techniques to help the management company to optimally operate its available resources and provides tools for strategic decision making. The contributions of this thesis are: (i) The development of optimization methodologies to assign and schedule aircraft and crews so that all flight requests are covered at the lowest possible cost. First, a simple model is developed to solve the crew pairing and aircraft routing problem with column generation assuming that a crew stays with one specific aircraft during its duty period. Secondly, this assumption is partially relaxed to improve resource utilization by revising the simple model to allow a crew to use another aircraft when its original aircraft goes under long maintenance. Thirdly, a new comprehensive model utilizing Benders decomposition technique and a fleet-station time line is proposed to completely relax the assumption that crew stays with one specific aircraft. It combines the fleet assignment, aircraft routing, and crew pairing problems. In the proposed methodologies, real world details are taken into consideration, such as crew transportation and overtime costs, scheduled and unscheduled maintenance effects, crew rules, and the presence of non-crew-compatible fleets. Scheduling with time windows is also discussed. (ii) The analysis of operational strategies to provide decision making support. Scenario analyses are performed to provide insights on improving business profitability and aircraft availability, such as impact of aircraft maintenance, crew swapping, effect of increasing demand by Jet-card and geographical business expansion, size of company owned aircraft, and strategies to deal with the stochastic feature of unscheduled maintenance and demand.

After decades of standstill in intercity passenger rail in the United States, the Obama administration recently started major initiatives to implement high-speed ground transportation projects that are expected to improve the nation's transportation system significantly, addressing most prevailing issues like congestion and energy prices while having positive effects on the economy. This study evaluates and compares two high-speed ground transportation systems that have the potential to improve intercity passenger transportation in the United States significantly: the wheel-on-rail high-speed system and the high-speed maglev system. Both high-speed ground transportation systems were evaluated with respect to 58 characteristics organized into 7 categories associated with technology, environmental impacts, economic considerations, user-friendliness, operations, political factors, and safety. Based on the performance of each system in each of the 58 characteristics, benefit values were assigned. In order to weight the relative importance of the different characteristics, a survey was conducted with transportation departments and transportation professionals. The survey produced weighting factors scoring each of the 58 characteristics and the 7 categories. Applying a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approach, the overall utility values for either system were calculated based on the benefit values from the systems comparison and the weighting factors from the survey. It was shown that the high-speed maglev system is generally slightly superior over the wheel-on-rail high-speed system. Because the magnitude of the difference in the overall performance of both transportation systems is not very big, it is recommended that every project in the high-speed intercity passenger transportation market consider both HSGT systems equally.

Changes in climate caused by changes in anthropogenic (i.e. "man-made") greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have become a major public policy issue in countries all over the world. With an estimated 28.4% of these emissions attributed to the transportation sector, attention is being focused on strategies aimed at reducing transportation GHG emissions. Quantifying the change in GHG emissions due to such strategies is one of the most challenging aspects of integrating GHG emissions and climate change into transportation planning and policy analysis; the inventory techniques and methods for estimating the impact of different strategies and policies are still relatively unsophisticated. This research developed a method for estimating intercity passenger transportation energy and carbon footprints and applied this method to three US DOT-designated high speed rail (HSR) corridors in the U.S.-- San Francisco/Los Angeles/San Diego; Seattle/Portland/Eugene, and Philadelphia/Harrisburg/Pittsburg. The methodology consists of estimating the number of trips by mode, estimating the direct CO₂ emissions, and estimating indirect CO₂ emissions. For each study corridor the impacts of different strategies and policies on carbon dioxide emissions were estimated as an illustration of the policy application of the developed methodology. The largest gain in CO₂ savings can be achieved by strategies aiming at automobile emissions, due to its sizeable share as main mode and access/egress mode to and from airports and bus and train stations: an average fuel economy of 35.5 mpg would result in a 38-42% savings of total CO₂ emissions; replacing 25% of gasoline use with cellulosic ethanol can have a positive impact on CO₂ emissions of about 13.4-14.5%; and a 10% market share for electric vehicles would result in potential CO₂ savings of 3.4-7.8%. The impact of a 20% or 35% improvement in aircraft efficiency on CO₂ savings is much lower (0.88-3.65%) than the potential impacts of the policies targeting automobile emissions. Three HSR options were analyzed using Volpe's long-distance demand model: HSR125, HSR150, and HSR200. Only the HSR150 and HSR200 would result in CO₂ savings, and then just for two of the three corridors: the Pacific Northwest (1.5%) and California (0.8-0.9%). With increased frequency and load factors, a HSR150 system could result in CO₂ savings of 5.2% and 1.8% for the Pacific Northwest and California, respectively. This would require a mode shift from auto of 5-6%. This shift in auto mode share would mainly have to be a result of pricing strategies. From these results, HSR may not be such an obvious choice, however, with increased ridership and diversions from other modes, CO₂ savings increase significantly due to the lower emissions per passenger mile for HSR. The framework developed in this study has the ability to determine the GHG emissions for such HSR options and increased diversions.

For over a decade proposals for connecting the metropolitan areas of Austin and San Antonio, Texas via passenger rail have been studied. In the Texas Department of Transportation’s 2010 Rail Plan several ideas, including high-speed rail, regional Amtrak service, and a new passenger rail service have been proposed as a means to provide an alternate mode of transportation along the I-35 corridor. Union Pacific Railroad currently owns and operations a rail line that connects the Austin and San Antonio metropolitan areas; each of the passenger rail projects proposes sharing this corridor with Union Pacific. A literature review reveals that a key factor in negotiating with a freight railroad for shared use of a corridor is safety. One element of the safety risk analysis is the evaluation of at-grade highway-railroad crossing. This study discusses the Austin-San Antonio corridor, its current mobility challenges and the proposed passenger rail projects. It then discusses rail safety as expressed in the literature and provides background about safety at highway-railroad crossings. Crossing inventory and accident data, as maintained by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), is then analyzed using regression modeling in an attempt to better understand the relationship between the physical and operational characteristics of highway-railroad crossings and accidents on corridors shared by freight and passenger rail. It analyzes a five-year accident history (2005 to 2009) from of a sample of shared use highway-rail crossings throughout the US. The findings are then used to analyze the at-grade highway-railroad crossings along the Austin-San Antonio corridor. And finally, the implications of the findings are discussed. The findings of this report recommend that characteristics of the built environment such as land use, number of traffic lanes, and function classification of the roadway should be considered when assessing accident risk at highway-railroad crossings. In addition, this analysis reveals the need for a way to better measure safety risks at private highway-railroad crossings. / text

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Transport Policy and Planning / Master / Master of Arts in Transport Policy and Planning

Air transport is of critical importance to move passengers and cargo from one place to another on a global scale. Subsistence, sustenance, growth and profitability of the air transport industry are dependent on the demand for transport from passengers and cargo as the main sources of revenue of the airline industry. The forces of globalization and liberalization, coupled with the very rapid development of low-cost operators, have tempered the growth and profitability of the aviation industry whilst, at the same time, greatly increasing the consumer (passenger and air freight user) advantages in terms of expanding the gamut of their choices, better quality and lower prices. The ever-expanding markets in the Asia and Pacific region hold great promise for a rapid growth of the aviation industry in years to come. / Currently, the international civil aviation community is faced with many challenges evolving from globalization, liberalization of economic regulations, privatization of airlines and airports, commercialization of government services providers, increasing environmental controls, and the emerge of new technologies. To deal effectively with these challenges and issues will require a high level of cooperation among civil aviation authorities, airlines, airports, and providers of air services and products. Airlines under the new free trade regimes have been exposed to many changes and although GATS has an important role to play in this important field, the convergence of economic, safety, security and environmental issues makes a strong case for keeping regulation in these critical issues under the ICAO aviation umbrella. / As air transport experiences structural, policy and regulatory environment changes, in the era of free trade it would be interesting to critically examine the impact of the aforementioned changes on the rights and protection of passengers. In this relation, it becomes very important to review the international, regional, and national efforts which have been made to enhance consumer protection and also have an important bearing on the rights of airline passengers. The thesis also addresses some emerging, non-traditional consumer protection issues, such as health, racial discrimination and the rights of disabled passengers. / In view of the above, the well-developed consumer protection regimes in the United States and the European Union (EU) would be examined in depth and the results of its analysis would be used to develop a suitable model airline passenger protection in the rapidly expending economies of the Asia and Pacific Region.

Doctor of Philosophy / During the 1990s, governments, managements and unions have been focused upon improving the cost efficiency of firms. This focus has been strongest for firms in the public sector where improved outcomes can be expected to significantly improve the Gross Domestic Products of whole economies. This case study looks at the cost efficiency of NSW rail passenger services over a 41 year period to 1991/92, long suspected (but hitherto only tentatively demonstrated) as a paradigm of cost inefficiency. The case study focuses upon the use of the total factor productivity (TFP) index, as a datum point for measuring change in productivity in four markets: suburban, internrban, country and interstate passenger services since 1951/52. From this datum, changes over the years in management, technology and other external factors can be identified and assessed. The thesis identifies management quality (the organising element in the firm) as the preeminent factor in determining productivity change, and the role that new technology plays in its impact on failures in management. We establish the linkages between management and innovation, with TFP, pricing efficiency and economic resource use efficiency, to present a rich paradigm for assessing the economic performance of any business firm. Borrowing from systems theory and other management practices such as total quality management, we disaggregated the case firm into its component systems, sub-systems and processes, for separate study in relation to impact on TFP. The database for 41 years of rail behaviour is the richest ever compiled for any railway in Australia, and with enhanced modelling, enables a systematic treatment of the performance through time of State Rail's passenger services.

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