published_or_final_version / Geography and Geology / Master / Master of Arts

M.Com. (Business Economics) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

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by Stanley B. Gershwin, David M. Orlicki. / Bibliography: p. 58-59. / "March 1982." / U. S. Department of Transportation Contract DOT-TSC-RSPA-81-9

This thesis describes the work done in the second stage of the implementation of the Automatic Passenger Counter (APC) system at the Roanoke Valley - Metro Transit Company. This second stage deals with the preparation of a few reports and plots that would help the transit managers in efficiently managing the transit system. The reports and plots give an evaluation of the system and service operations by which the decision makers can support their decisions. For an efficient management of the transit system, data on ridership activity, running times schedule information, and fare revenue is required. From this data it is possible to produce management information reports and summary statistics. The present data collection program at Roanoke Valley Metro is carried by using checkers and supervisors to collect ridership and schedule adherence information using manual methods. The information needed for efficient management of transit operations is both difficult and expensive to obtain. The new APC system offers the management with a new and powerful tool that will enhance their capability to make better decisions when allocating the service needs. The data from the APC are essential for the transit properties' ongoing planning and scheduling activities. The management could easily quantify the service demands on a route or for the whole system as desired by the user. / Master of Science

Thesis (MBA)--Stellenbosch University, 2006. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: OnTime is a passenger transport company that was established in 1999 when the insurance giant Sanlam decided to outsource its transport services for its top officials. This document examines the challenges that OnTime faces as it seeks to grow its market by acquiring business from more corporates in order to lessen its dependence on Sanlam. The chauffeur industry in Cape Town is characterised by a lack of regulation and, as a result, there is no official data that can be used to describe the size of the industry. The lack of regulation means competition among industry players favours the two big companies to the detriment of the smaller ones. Smaller companies are constantly experiencing dwindling profits because of the dominance of these two big companies. At the other extreme, there are many pirate operators who compete on price by undercutting everyone else. The industry as a whole is experiencing growth due to the increasing number of corporations and government departments which have outsourced their passenger transport services for their top officials. While this move to outsource the passenger transportation is supposed to create new opportunities for small companies to benefit from the new business being generated, it appears that the smaller passenger transport companies have not yet benefited from this extra business. The main reason is that smaller passenger companies have been created without adequate support systems or a steady client base to sustain them through their early growth phase. On the flip side, the two big passenger transport compames are experiencing increasing volumes of business from those very same big corporations which were supposed to be the lifeblood of smaller passenger transport firms. The main reason for the phenomenal business growth for the two passenger transport companies is the fact that they belong to groups of companies which are constantly growing through the acquisition of other companies. The passenger transport unit then provides the transport needs of the entire group. Moreover, these two big passenger transport service providers have fonned alliances with most of the major airlines, hotels, and guest houses in order to be in a position to capture any business that flows from these airlines and hospitality service providers. In an industry where customers are conscious of the type of vehicles they are driven in, it is not surprising that the two big passenger transport companies are able to offer a variety of vehicles from which customers can choose. This is in sharp contrast to the small passenger transport companies whose fleet size limits the options they can offer their customers when it comes to choosing the type of vehicles they would like to be driven in. The findings contained in this document will influence the recommendations for formulating a business strategy for OnTime. The main challenge for OnTime is to grow its business by implementing drastic changes.

Thesis. 1975. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Civil Engineering. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 325-329. / Ph.D.

M.Phil. / Considerable research on public policymaking has been carried out over the years. A number of theoretical frameworks have been developed to try to understand the complexities of the policy process. Nevertheless, the implementation of policy remains, as deLeon and deLeon (2001) state “the most devilish of wicked problems”. It is this wicked problem that this thesis attempts to comprehend a little better in the context of public transport. There is a broadly expressed belief in South Africa that while we have developed some fairly robust public transport policies, we fall down when it comes to the implementation of these policies. However, policies are not equally complex in nature and surely therefore not equally demanding in implementation. While it is accepted that a number of political, economic and social factors are necessary for policy implementation, it is nevertheless hypothesised that the nature and complexity of a policy will influence the paradigm within which implementation will take place. Furthermore, the ‘success’ of the implementation process needs to be located within the context of the specific implementation paradigm. The objective of this thesis has been to (i) identify and (ii) apply an appropriate policy implementation framework or model to the implementation of the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) programme in South Africa to understand the BRT policy implementation process that has emerged thus far and whether its very nature and characteristics place it within a certain policy implementation paradigm.

M.Comm. / Metro Rail has to make a thorough study of how to compete and flourish in this dynamic Industry. It has become vital that the company refocuses its efforts to meet or even to exceed its customer's expectations. The overall objectives of this study are the following: To describe the theoretical basis of the different types of macro environmental variables and they're likely impact on the decision making process of a transport user. To discuss the different stages involved in the consumer and buyer decision making process. The ultimate goal is to ensure that the most appropriate strategy guidelines are set to exploit opportunities in the passenger transport industry. To look at how modal integration will enhance the passenger transport industry if adopted.

Motivated by the imbalance between demand (i.e., passenger requests) and supply (i.e., available vehicles) in the ride-hailing market and severe traffic congestion faced by modern cities, this dissertation aims to improve the efficiency of the sharing economy by building an agent-based methodological framework for optimal decision-making of distributed agents (e.g., autonomous shared vehicles), including passenger-seeking and route choice. Furthermore, noticing that city planners can impact the behavior of agents via some operational measures such as congestion pricing and signal control, this dissertation investigates the overall bilevel problem that involves the decision-making process of both distributed agents (i.e., the lower level) and central city planners (i.e., the upper level). First of all, for the task of passenger-seeking, this dissertation proposes a model-based Markov decision process (MDP) approach to incorporate distinct features of e-hailing drivers. The modified MDP approach is found to outperform the baseline (i.e., the local hotspot strategy) in terms of both the rate of return and the utilization rate. Although the modified MDP approach is set up in the single-agent setting, we extend its applicability to multi-agent scenarios by a dynamic adjustment strategy of the order matching probability which is able to partially capture the competition among agents. Furthermore, noticing that the reward function is commonly assumed as some prior knowledge, this dissertation unveils the underlying reward function of the overall e-hailing driver population (i.e., 44,000 Didi drivers in Beijing) through an inverse reinforcement learning method, which paves the way for future research on discovering the underlying reward mechanism in a complex and dynamic ride-hailing market. To better incorporate the competition among agents, this dissertation develops a model-free mean-field multi-agent actor-critic algorithm for multi-driver passenger-seeking. A bilevel optimization model is then formulated with the upper level as a reward design mechanism and the lower level as a multi-agent system. We use the developed mean field multi-agent actor-critic algorithm to solve for the optimal passenger-seeking policies of distributed agents in the lower level and Bayesian optimization to solve for the optimal control of upper-level city planners. The bilevel optimization model is applied to a real-world large-scale multi-class taxi driver repositioning task with congestion pricing as the upper-level control. It is disclosed that the derived optimal toll charge can efficiently improve the objective of city planners. With agents knowingwhere to go (i.e., passenger-seeking), this dissertation then applies the bilevel optimization model to the research question of how to get there (i.e., route choice). Different from the task of passenger-seeking where the action space is always fixed-dimensional, the problem of variable action set emerges in the task of route choice. Therefore, a flow-dependent deep Q-learning algorithm is proposed to efficiently derive the optimal policies for multi-commodity multi-class agents. We demonstrate the effect of two countermeasures, namely tolling and signal control, on the behavior of travelers and show that the systematic objective of city planners can be optimized by a proper control.