The Specification of the Planning Systems; Report of the 1993 Questionnaire Survey

This report describes a survey carried out as part of a research project undeaaken hy the Institute for Transport Studies and the School of Computer Studies at the University of Leeds, funded by the Science and Engineering Research Council. The project was concerned with the specification of trip planning systems, which are systems which provide information to travellers and potential travellers ahout all aspects of their journey, but in this case principally route and timetable information for public transport users and route information for car travellers before the journey is made. Previous evidence had suggested that travellers may make sub-optimal travel decisions, meaning that they may make longer, slower or more expensive journeys than necessary because of imperfect information. Other parts of the project addressed sub-optimality in the choice of mode and time of travel but a main objective of the survey described in this report was to examine sub-optimality of route choice separately for journeys with which respondents were familiar and journeys with which they were unfamiliar. Other objectives were concerned with the travel information currently used, or desired by, the respondents, who were randomly-selected travellers from the West Yorkshire town of Mirfield. Maps were widely used by car drivers - about one in five used them for familiar trips and ahout three quarters used them for unfamiliar trips. For public transport trips, timetables were used hy about half of the travellers making familiar trips and 95 per cent making unfamiliar trips. Information on delays would have been welcomed by both private and puhlic transport travellers: nearly three-quarters of familiar and unfamiliar car trips would have liked congestion information as would a significant minority of bus users. Most of all, public transport-users would have welcomed information on service delays and cancellations. It would seem that real-time information on delays would be a key feature of a successful trip planning system. The sub-optimality for car journeys averaged at 2.6 minutes per trip for familiar trips and 6 minutes per trip for unfamiliar trips. Sub-optimality was directly related to trip distance for familiar trips hut not for unfamiliar trips. This indicates a modest hut significant reduction in car journey times could be brought about by trip planning systems. Public transport trip sample sizes were too small to permit reliable estimates to be made of their sub-optimality

The nuisance due to the noise of automobile traffic: An investigation in the neighborhoods of freeways

An inquiry was held among 400 people living near freeways in an attempt to determine the characteristics of traffic noise nuisance. A nuisance index was compiled, based on the answers to a questionnaire. Nuisance expressed in these terms was then compared with the noise level measured on the most exposed side of each building. Correlation between the nuisance indexes and the average noise levels is quite good for dwellings with facades parallel to the freeway. At equal noise levels on the most exposed side, the nuisance given for these latter dwellings is lower than for others

“Landscape and Heritage of Hydroelectricity in Portugal”

Hydroelectric power plants provided countries with scarcity of coal, such as Portugal, with a vital source of energy for the production of electricity in large quantities. Therefore, since the late 19th century the use of waterfalls as producers of electric power was a topic of study and interest among engineers and the matter was regularly discussed at the Association of Portuguese Civilian Engineers. The great hydroelectric power plants, considered by many as the cathedrals of the second industrial revolution are an important industrial heritage which is important to value and appreciate. Hydroelectricity also gave origin to new landscapes and the problem today regards the management of this new landscape and the construction of new patrimonial values

Geography and economic performance: exploratory spatial data analysis for Great Britain

This paper uses the techniques of exploratory spatial data analysis to analyse patterns of spatial association for different indicators of economic performance, and in so doing identify and describe the spatial structure of economic performance for Great Britain. This approach enables us to identify a number of significant local regimes – clusters of areas in which income per worker differs significantly from the global average – and investigate whether these come about primarily through spatial association in occupational composition or in productivity. Our results show that the contributions of occupational composition and productivity vary significantly across local regimes. The ‘winner’s circle’ of areas in the south and east of England benefits from both above average levels of productivity and better than average occupational composition, while the low income regime in the north of England suffers particularly from poor occupational composition. Keywords; regional disparities, income per worker, productivity, occupational composition, spatial autocorrelation JEL Classification: O18, O4, R11, R12

Les autoroutes et le commerce interurbain dans la région de Montréal

C'est entre 1959 et 1977 que la région montréalaise s'est dotée d'un système autoroutier régional. Parmi les agglomérations reliées à la métropole par ce réseau, sept sont qualifiées de satellites: Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Granby, Saint-Hyacinthe, Sorel, Joliette, Saint-Jérôme et Valleyfield. Très tôt les nouvelles voies rapides ont incité certains promoteurs à construire en banlieue d'immenses centres commerciaux, modifiant ainsi en leur faveur les habitudes d'achat des résidents des villes satellites. Les nouvelles habitudes de consommation induites par les autoroutes nuisent à l'augmentation des ventes au détail à l'intérieur de ces villes. Certaines ont cependant vu croître leur accessibilité suite à la mise en place du réseau autoroutier. D'autres, par contre, en plus de subir une concurrence accrue du Grand Montréal, n'ont pu, à cause de leur localisation, tirer profit d'une accessibilité accrue. Le déplacement des activités commerciales a enfin favorisé l'émergence de puissantes chaînes nationales qui contrôlent une partie croissante de la vente de détail au pays.Over the period 1959-1977 a network of highways has been established in the Montréal region. Among the agglomerations linked to Montréal by this network, seven can be considered as satellite towns: Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Granby, Saint-Hyacinthe, Sorel, Joliette, Saint-Jérôme and Valleyfield. Almost from the beginning, these new expressways induced major development corporations to construct large suburban shopping centres, thereby modifying to their advantage the shopping habits of the residents of the satellite towns. New consumer practices, stimulated by further development of the highways, have had a negative effect on the growth of retail activity within these cities. Some centres have however experienced improved accessibility following the construction of the expressways. Others, by virtue of their location, have suffered increasing competition from Greater Montréal. Finally this shift in the location of commercial activities had facilitated the development of powerful national retail chains that control an increasing proportion of the retail activities in Canada

A 39: une autoroute sous observation

On en parle officiellement depuis plus d'une dizaine d'années, certains l'ont attendue avec impatience, d'autres redoutent ses effets, et depuis juin 1998, elle est devenue réalité : entre Bourg-en-Bresse et Dole, l'autoroute A 39 dessert maintenant le sud-ouest du territoire franc-comtois. Son tracé, qui ne quitte jamais le fossé bressan, suit le vigoureux plissement du Revermont et rejoint ensuite les plaines alluviales du Doubs et de la Saône. À hauteur de Lons-le-Saunier, l'A 39 pénètre en terre comtoise pour rejoindre Dole, puis, se dirigeant vers Dijon par une section en service depuis octobre 1994, elle se connecte successivement aux autoroutes A 36 et A 31

Permanent observatories as tools for ex-post assessment: The French case study

In France, the obligation to conduct an ex-post assessment is relatively recent (1982) but it has in fact revealed some methodological problems that flow from the retrospective nature of the exercise. This report shows that some of those difficulties can be overcome through the establishment of permanent observatories. It presents examples of such observatories, with a particular focus on motorway ("autoroute", or "freeway" in North American usage) investments. A particular case is then investigated, concerning the socioeconomic observatory on the effects of the Sud-Europe-Atlantique [South-Europe-Atlantic] high-speed train line that is now under construction. This major project (€7.8 billion) has been let under a concession. The concession contract calls for the establishment of an observatory that also covers the construction period and is to remain in operation for 10 years after the line comes into service, or until 2027. Besides an overall presentation of the mechanism, the report deals in particular with the metrological precautions that must be taken in order to monitor the multimodal offer of transport for the areas concerned. One of the key issues here, in fact, is to explain the discrepancies between forecast and projected and actual traffic, an explanation that may be more complete than in the ex-post evaluation procedure