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

M.Com. (Business Management) / The purpose of the study is to examine the current state of public passenger transport in the area of Ekurhuleni and to make recommendations to improve the situation and in order to fulfil this, the assignment assesses current national, provincial and local government public transport plans. The primary objectives of the study are to illustrate the current scenario of public passenger transport in the area of Ekurhuleni and to make recommendations for the improvement thereof. The secondary objectives are to undertake research in the area to help establish the general sentiment of the public transport users towards public passenger transport. Primary and secondary research methodologies were applied in the research process. The primary research methodology encompassed personal interviews conducted with members of the general public as well as public officials whilst secondary research methodology contributed in the form of published and unpublished data sourced from official reports, the internet and other sources. The study is based on road and rail primary modes of public transport. From the rail mode perspective the study discusses the role that Metrorail and Gautrain fulfil within the research area and from the road transport mode perspective the study reviews the role that is being fulfilled by the taxi and bus operations in the area. The survey investigation undertaken in the study is done for the purposes of gaining an indication of the modal split by usage as well as passenger sentiments on the levels of service the study modes are offering. It must be mentioned though that the researcher is aware of other similar surveys that have been conducted and the intention of conducting this survey is for validation purposes. The survey conducted was done so in areas where due to the proximity of services there was an equal opportunity for a random sample selecting a road and/or rail public transport user for interviews. From the survey conducted as mentioned above the current situation is that there are noteworthy areas of improvement that need to be considered. These areas of improvements stem from both road and rail modes transport. In order to make sizeable improvements from the current state of affairs it is important according to world-renowned public transport expert Vukan R. Vuchic to “understand the inherent characteristics of different modes and that one must free oneself from those real-world...

This dissertation asks how activists, planners, and politicians reshaped transport institutions to prioritize buses over cars in London and Paris. The policy studied in both cities is the creation of a network of bus priority, known as the Red Routes and London Bus Priority Network in London and the Mobilien network in Paris. Using media analysis, archival research, and 30 interviews across the two cities, it traces the process of change in both cities and maps the deliberative system, the actors engaged in the decision-making process. It finds that empowered but not autonomous local governments—the boroughs in the case of London and the city of Paris in the case of Paris—were major actors in the change process, putting forth alternatives and deliberating with regional bodies to shape policies that took into account a variety of competing needs. It also finds that public conversation, debate, and conflict were essential to the process of institutional change, through which road governance was decentralized and local actors were empowered to control their own streets. These findings follow Iris Marion Young’s proposal that empowered but not autonomous local actors, subject to regional governments, is the most just model of urban governance.

Policy-makers of today's public transportation investment projects engage in debates in which the reasonableness and clarity of their judgment are tested many times. How to recommend the transportation system that achieves project's goals and different stakeholders' needs in a most logical and justifiable manner is the main question of this dissertation. This study develops a new decision-making approach, Belief Reasoning method, for evaluating public transportation systems in the planning process. The proposed approach applies a reasoning map to model how experts perceive and reason transportation alternatives to lead to the project's goals. It applies the belief measures in the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence as the mathematical mechanism to represent knowledge under uncertainty and ambiguity and to analyze the degree of achievement of stated goals. Three phases are involved in implementing the Belief Reasoning method. First, a set of goals, a set of characteristics of the alternatives, a set of performances and impacts are identified and the reasoning map, which connects the alternatives to the goals through a series of causal relations, is constructed. Second, a knowledge base is developed through interviewing the experts their degree of belief associated with individual premises and relations, and then aggregating the expert opinions. Third, the model is executed and the results are evaluated in three ways: (i) the transportation alternatives are evaluated based on the degree of belief for achieving individual goals; (ii) the integrity of the reasoning process is evaluated based on the measures of uncertainty associated with information used; and (iii) the critical reasoning chains that significantly influence the outcome are determined based on the sensitivity analysis. The Belief Reasoning method is compared with the Bayesian reasoning, which uses the probability measures as the measure of uncertainty. Also it is compared with the Analytical Hierarchy Process method, which uses a hierarchical tree structure and a weighting scheme. The numerical examples in transit planning are developed for comparison. The proposed Belief Reasoning method has advantages over these traditional evaluation and reasoning methods in several ways. • Use of a reasoning map structure together with an inference process, instead of a tree structure together with a weighting scheme, allows modeling interdependency, redundancy and interactions among variables, usually found in transportation systems. • Use of belief measures in Dempster-Shafer theory can preserve non-deterministic nature of inputs and performances as well as handle incomplete or partial knowledge of experts or citizens, i.e. "I don't know" type opinion. The "degrees of belief" measures allow experts to express their strength of opinions in the conservative and optimistic terms. Such operation is not possible by the probability-based approach. • Dempster-Shafer theory can avoid the scalability issue encountered in Bayesian reasoning. It can also measure uncertainty in the reasoning chains, and identify information needed for improving the reasoning process. • Use of Dempster's rule of combination, instead of the average operator in probability theory, to merge expert opinions about inputs or relations is a better way for combining conflicting and incomplete opinions. In the dissertation, the Belief Reasoning method is applied in real-world Alternatives Analysis of a transit investment project. The results show its potential to analyze and evaluate the alternatives and to provide reasons for recommending a preferred alternative and to measure the uncertainty in the reasoning process. In spite of some shortcomings, discussed in the dissertation, the Belief Reasoning method is an effective method for transportation planning compared with the existing methods. It provides means for the planners and citizens to present their own reasons and allows review and analysis of reasoning and judgments of all participating stakeholders. The proposed method can promote focused discourse among different groups of stakeholders, and enriches the quality of the planning process. / Ph. D.

The governance of urban transport involves a complex amalgam of intergovernmental actors, revenue sources and normative justifications. In recent decades, there has been a clear shift toward decentralized approaches to urban transport investment. This devolution of responsibility supports the development and deployment of new governance strategies that rely heavily on sub-regional implementation strategies and that justify urban transport in terms of economic development, not mobility impacts. This dissertation provides a grounded view of the devolution of urban transport planning through an in-depth case study of the implementation of a modern streetcar investment in Kansas City, Missouri. Using a combination of institutional analysis and phronesis, it illuminates the antecedents of local governance strategies, like value capture and non-profit governance, and shows how local conditions and history are shaping transport policy in unanticipated ways. While new governance strategies support enhanced investment, they also shape who benefits from new investments. In the Kansas City case, policies in the streetcar’s proximity emphasized the importance of lifestyle diversity and nurturing the development of an emerging arts community but eschewed notions of race and income diversity in ways that reflect and exacerbate the city’s dismal history of segregation. Devolution is facilitating new governance arrangements that reflect local conditions but, as this case shows, these new strategies may also be setting urban transport on a troubling institutional trajectory that – without intervention – will only lead us away from equitable and inclusive cities.

The continuing evolution of urban travel patterns and changing policy goals and priorities requires that transportation researchers and practitioners improve their abilities to plan and forecast the demand for travel. Walking and bicycling - the primary forms of active travel - are generating increasing interest for their potential to reduce automobile use, save governmental and consumer costs, and improve personal and social health outcomes. Yet, current transportation planning tools, namely regional travel demand forecasting models, poorly represent these active travel modes, if at all. More broadly, travel models do an incomplete job of representing the decision-making processes involved in travel choices, especially those factors influencing walking and bicycling. In addition to limitations of data and statistical analysis methods, the research upon which modeling tools are based has yet to settle on a comprehensive theory of travel behavior that accounts for complex relationships around a variety of personal, social, and environmental factors. While modeling tools have explained travel primarily through economic theories, contributions from the geography and psychology fields prove promising. A few scholars have attempted to link these travel behavior explanations together, some with a focus on walking and bicycling, but these theories have yet to make a significant impact on travel modeling practice. This thesis presents a unifying interdisciplinary framework for a theory of travel decision-making with applications for travel demand modeling and forecasting and a focus on walking and bicycling. The framework offers a guide for future research examining the complex relationships of activities, built environment factors, demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, attitudes and perceptions, and habit and exploration on individual short-term travel decisions (with considerations of the influence of medium- and long-term travel-related decisions). A key component of the theory is a hierarchy of travel needs hypothesized to be considered by travelers in the course of their decision-making processes. Although developed to account for the factors that particularly influence decisions surrounding walking and bicycling, the framework is postulated to apply to all travel modes and decisions, including frequency, destination, mode, time-of-day, and route. The first section of the thesis reviews theories from the fields of economics, geography, psychology, and travel behavior that have a large influence on the development of the theory of travel decision-making. In the next and largest chapter, the components and relationships in this theory, including the hierarchy of travel needs, are defined and presented with supporting empirical evidence from travel behavior research. This thesis's final section views the theory of travel decision-making through the lens of applicability to travel demand modeling and forecasting. The state of current travel forecasting tools, travel behavior research, data, and analysis methods with respect to each aspect of the theory is reviewed. Research and data needs are identified. In closing, some opportunities for operationalizing the theory in travel demand models and using these transportation planning tools for analyzing walking, cycling, and other policies are hypothesized and discussed. This thesis, and the theory and applications discussed within, contribute to the academic study of travel behavior, the practical modeling of travel demand, and walking and bicycling research and planning.

Bibliography: leaves 213-224.

abstract: Bicycle sharing systems (BSS) operate on five continents, and they change quickly with technological innovations. The newest “dockless” systems eliminate both docks and stations, and have become popular in China since their launch in 2016. The rapid increase in dockless system use has exposed its drawbacks. Without the order imposed by docks and stations, bike parking has become problematic. In the areas of densest use, the central business districts of large cities, dockless systems have resulted in chaotic piling of bikes and need for frequent rebalancing of bikes to other locations. In low-density zones, on the other hand, it may be difficult for customers to find a bike, and bikes may go unused for long periods. Using big data from the Mobike BSS in Beijing, I analyzed the relationship between building density and the efficiency of dockless BSS. Density is negatively correlated with bicycle idle time, and positively correlated with rebalancing. Understanding the effects of density on BSS efficiency can help BSS operators and municipalities improve the operating efficiency of BSS, increase regional cycling volume, and solve the bicycle rebalancing problem in dockless systems. It can also be useful to cities considering what kind of BSS to adopt. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Urban and Environmental Planning 2018

New York’s transit system serves millions of riders each day; the local newspapers complain about the lack of funding for infrastructure projects; and the City Council regularly hosts hearings about Bus Rapid Transit, bike-share, road safety, e-hail taxis, and gondolas. Transportation issues matter to New Yorkers, but these debates, at the policy level, often focus on technology, budgets, and regulations rather than the needs and experiences of passengers. This focus on “technical” matters allows planners and politicians to confine transportation debates to the realm of experts rather than engage the broader public in them. The failure to address the needs of passengers in Brooklyn and Queens has led to the development of dollar vans. Dollar vans are hybrid bus-taxis, also known as jitneys, that provide vital transportation links to more than 120,000 riders per day and operate beyond the control of the formal transit system governed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). While this ridership pales in comparison to the daily ridership on the subway or bus, it does rival bus ridership in cities like Dallas and Milwaukee and dwarfs the 50,000 peak ridership achieved by Citi Bike, New York’s celebrated bike-share system. More important, the durability of the vans reveals the failures of the existing formal system to serve all New Yorkers. I argue that this failure is important for three reasons. First, the vans respond to a geographically specific problem: adequate access to inadequate service. The vans thrive in busy transit corridors where MTA-owned buses come too infrequently, are overcrowded, or are regularly stuck in traffic. On these busy routes, the vans provide a more reliable ride and alternative for transit-dependent populations looking to bypass the faltering bus system. Second, regulations fail to reflect daily practice. This gap between practice and policy leaves van operators and passengers in an awkward limbo that criminalizes an industry and jeopardizes the mobility of entire neighborhoods. Third, since the vans operate outside of the formal system, traditional metrics, such as ridership, travel time, vehicle revenue miles, etc., are not collected and compared against the metrics of other modes operated by the MTA. As long as the vans remain an unknown quantity, it is impossible for the City and State to serve transit-dependent populations in Brooklyn and Queens. In this dissertation, I use a mixed-methods research design to probe the world of the vans and argue that continued regulatory uncertainty, long the friend of the vans, has the potential to upend them as development pressures and capital investment in Central Brooklyn intensifies.

In recent decades skateboarding has expanded from recreation into a form of transportation. Skateboarders appear to use roadways much as other non‐motorized modes do. However, there is little academic research on the needs and characteristics of the skateboard as a mode. This research reports demographics, multi‐modal and travel behavior findings, and other data from an exploratory mixed‐methods study of skateboarding as a mode of transportation.