Financial impacts of and financing methods for high-speed rail in Portugal

Thesis (S.M. in Transportation)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 178-188).High-speed rail (HSR) becomes a very hot topic recently when all Portugal, the United Stated, China, Japan, Spain, etc. are ambitious in building their HSR systems. Although HSR is expected to shrink the temporal distance between cities, reshape the travel patterns of people toward environment friendly ones, create an image effect for the country building it, promote regional economics, etc., HSR is more capital intensive than other transportation projects in both unit cost (the cost per lane km) and total cost. Due to its high costs and public or private budget constraints, HSR may have significant financial impacts on other transportation investments. And it is important to lower the costs of HSR building and explore more funding opportunities to make HSR investments more financially viable. This research aims to understand the financial impacts of HSR investments and to explore financing methods for them. Firstly, this research examines the crowding out effect of HSR investments on other transportation investments-whether financing HSR makes the funds for other transportation projects less available due to public or private budget constraints. In addition, this research compares HSR financing with the financing of other transportation projects to figure out the uniqueness of HSR financing. Finally, this research explores innovative financing methods and identifies megaregion revenues to make HSR investments more financially viable. We find that HSR investments crowd out other transportation investments based on the worldwide experience. In the end, we propose the use of monoline wrapped bonds and the establishment of Portuguese infrastructure bank to lower the financial costs of Portuguese HSR investments. And we recommend the use of value capture mechanisms to capture the megaregion economic benefits of HSR and gain additional revenues for Portuguese HSR investments.by Teng Huang.S.M.in Transportatio

Three Essays on Socio-Institutional Ecosystems & Labor Structures

In three essays, this dissertation explores the relationship between the social and the economic, with an eye to how social and institutional formations affect economic outcomes. In the first essay, I construct a theoretical base by developing the metaphor of ‘ecosystem’ as a frame for thinking of the various interrelations between social processes and economic phenomena – the socio-institutional ecosystem analysis. In invoking ecosystem as a central metaphor, this dissertation calls into focus the interaction between the economic and the non-economic, recognizing the multiplicity of causal inter- and intra-relationships between the two. I deploy this analysis in two substantive case studies. The second essay explores labor regimes in colonial East Africa, examining how the British authorities who sought to occasion a paid labor agricultural force faced different possibilities and constraints in Kenya (a Crown Colony) and Tanganyika (a League of Nations Mandate Territory). It explores how the more repressive Kenyan regime led to increased proletarianization through the Great Depression, while Tanganyika saw an increase in peasantization, and how these developments affected the long-term historical trajectories of both countries. The third essay examines the appearance and distribution of worker cooperatives in the United States as a function of their proximate socio-institutional environments, and finds that political ideology of the surrounding area correlates heavily with the presence of worker cooperatives, and explores what this means for policy and for economic theory of worker cooperatives

Observatory of Strategic Developments Impacting Urban Logistics (2017 version)

Urban freight living labs need to operate in full recognition of the challenges that will shape the mobility of goods in urban areas in the future. These challenges are several: macroeconomic, micro-economic, demographic, technological, societal, and legal. To help CITYLAB cities implement their urban freight initiatives, a better understanding of These challenges is necessary. This is what this Observatory of strategic developments impacting urban logistics intends to do, by providing data and analysis on some of the most important, or less well known, trends that will shape the urban mobility of goods in the future. This second version (2017) of the Observatory provides data and analyses on 1) Logistics Sprawl; 2) E-commerce; and 3) Service trips. Our findings about the main impacts of these three trends for cities involved in urban freight living labs are the following: - The number of logistics facilities (in their diversity: warehouses, fulfilment centres, distribution centres, cross-dock terminals) is increasing in cities, especially cities of some logistics importance as large consumer markets and/or logistics hubs processing the flow of goods generated by the global economy. These facilities are generally located in suburban areas, but a new niche market of urban warehouses is emerging. - Both e-commerce and logistics sprawl generate a rise in freight vehicles in urban areas, dominated by small vehicles, while medium to large lorries are relatively less important. These vehicles performing delivery operations are visible in neighbourhoods and at times of day when they were not identified before: residential neighbourhoods, residential building blocks, side streets, in the early evening and on week-ends. Emerging new types of vehicles (clean delivery vehicles, two and three wheelers) are now visible in urban centres. - Innovations in the urban supply chains include diverse forms of pick-up points and click-and-collect solutions, while the recent but extremely rapid rise in Technologies and algorithms supporting instant deliveries (on-demand deliveries within less than two hours) brings with it a flourish of new companies connecting customers, suppliers and independent couriers, often using bicycles. - The overall impact of these new trends on energy and carbon emission related to urban freight is difficult to assess. Urban freight in general, for the Paris region, brings the following environmental impact: the share of traffic-related CO2, NOx and PM10 due to urban freight is 2.5 times larger than the share of vans and trucks in the regional traffic. The contribution of urban freight to air pollution is larger in the city of Paris. Social costs of air pollution caused by road traffic in general amount to 0.9% of the regional GDP in 2012. Some of the new trends bring more CO2 emissions, such as the relocation of logistics facilities far away in the suburbs, as deconsolidated shipments are delivered to urban consumers and businesses in smaller and more numerous vans. Some trends bring less CO2 emissions, with a rise in cleaner vehicles and innovative solutions such as drop-off/pickup points or bikesupported instant deliveries. Substitution patterns between personal mobility and professional freight mobility can be a good, or a bad, thing for CO2 emissions, depending on the initial circumstances and the way personal shopping was done before online orders. - What is certain is that these changes bring diversity in the urban traffic flow. Instant couriers are using all sorts of transport modes, including foot, bicycles, electrically assisted cargocycles, motorbikes, and various types of vans and lorries. This can negatively impact traffic management, road safety and conflicts in road uses, congestion, air pollution. Also, the trends we have looked at bring new types of urban jobs, with many unresolved legal issues and poor working conditions in many instances. New types of logistics buildings bring architectural diversity and innovation in cities, but also complaints about noise, aesthetics, as well as congestion and pollution at entrance and exit points. - These environmental and social impacts have been so far poorly documented and researched. Consumers are the main drivers of the changes we have observed, but they are also the residents or visitors of urban areas, and for that they carry an important share of the burdens, as well as the benefits, of the new landscape of urban logistics. - Service trips are trips in commercial traffic induced by service oriented activities. According to the German study KiD 2010 service traffic accounts for 11.8% of traffic in terms of trips and for 19.9% in terms of kilometres travelled. There are differences in terms of vehicle types and economic sectors but few variations in Terms of spatial types. - An observatory on service traffic must take into account light duty vehicles and passenger cars in general. Establishment based analysis as well as vehicle based analysis can give detailed insight in traffic generation and traffic behaviour in Service traffic

The Right Track: Building a 21st Century High-Speed Rail System for America

Provides an overview of U.S. investment in high-speed intercity passenger rail, its economic and environmental benefits, analyses by region, and key steps for building an efficient network, including balancing private investment with public safeguards

Carolina Planning Vol. 39: Collaborations in Planning

This year’s Carolina Planning attempts to provide examples of collaborations that may be of use to planners everywhere. The issue includes articles on initiatives that sit at the intersection of different disciplines, as well as many examples of diverse and unique partnerships that are attempting to address some of the biggest challenges in planning. Our hope is that planners and anyone interested in the future of their own communities finds value in this year’s issue and Carolina Planning continues to further thought and dialogue in the field of planning

Recent Progress in Urbanisation Dynamics Research

This book is dedicated to urbanization, which is observed every day, as well as the methods and techniques of monitoring and analyzing this phenomenon. In the 21st century, urbanization has gained momentum, and the awareness of the significance and influence of this phenomenon on our lives make us take a closer look at it not only with curiosity, but also great attention. There are numerous reasons for this, among which the economy is of special significance, but it also has many results, namely, economic, social, and environmental. First of all, it is a spatial phenomenon, as all of the aspects can be placed in space. We would therefore like to draw special attention to the results of urbanization seen on the Earth's surface and in the surrounding space. The urbanization–land relation seems obvious, but is also interesting and multi-layered. The development of science and technology provides a lot of new tools for observing urbanization, as well as the analyses and inference of the phenomenon in space. This book is devoted to in-depth analysis of past, present and future urbanization processes all over the world. We present the latest trends of research that use experience in the widely understood geography of the area. This book is focused on multidisciplinary phenomenon, i.e., urbanization, with the use of the satellite and photogrammetric observation technologies and GIS analyses

Sociotechnical co-production of planning information : opportunities and limits of crowdsourcing for the geography and planning of bicycle transportation

Urban planners deploy civic technologies to engage publics with digital tools in a relative vacuum of theory, understanding of challenges, or benefits. The issue, Lewis Mumford might have framed, could be of authoritarian and democratic technics—whether the technology contributes more to top-down control or bottom-up understanding. Building from collaborative planning theory, co-production suggests ways people can leverage technologies to build urban solutions with or without professional planners. Empirical research shows that crowdsourcing to address planning questions with digital civic platforms can help fill or mitigate information gaps, including support for bicycling as a safe and comfortable travel mode. However, no research has addressed how crowdsourced information for bicycle planning offers new insights for safety, the geography of participation, or how its social construction impacts its representation of bicycling in a community. A new framework for evaluating co-productive planning is proposed, considering legitimacy, accessibility, social learning, transparency, and representation (LASTR). This dissertation addresses these concerns of safety, geography, and social construction through the LASTR framework using mixed-methods case studies in Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas. Bicycle volumes and street ratings through the crowdsourcing platform, along with geographic information system environmental data, and interviews with thirty-three informants form the basis for evaluating these issues. Viewed from pragmatism and social construction of technology, the social processes of planning and technological developments are intertwined and traced in tandem. The first three chapters frame the problems, build a background in theory, and describe the research questions, planning contexts, and data for analysis. The next three chapters are empirical, evaluating the use of crowdsourced information for bicycle safety, comparing the geography of crowdsourced participation with in-person meetings from both cities’ most recent bicycle planning process, and tracing the sociotechnical representation of crowdsourcing bicyclist information through interviews and case materials. The final chapter summarizes the findings and implications for practice and research. This dissertation shows that the biased representation of bicycling in these two crowdsourcing cases pose opportunities to identify safer bicycling routes and expand public participation geographies, but could exacerbate problems with aligning public improvements with the users of a specific technological approach. Further, the construct of crowdsourcing for urban planning remains flexible and therefore merits further study and knowledge transfer for practitioners and students.Community and Regional Plannin

A services operations performance measurement framework for multimodal logistics gateways in emerging megaregions

Gateways in emerging megaregions have the available transport infrastructure that could support modal shift and sustainable development and more could be made of them. A gateway is not a defined administration area but rather a functional economic area. Typically it has some port, airport, rail hub and logistics clusters and is key to the regional economy. Existing policies try to achieve an optimisation of the performance of multimodal logistic chains and transport infrastructure, including making greater use of inherently more resource efficient modes, where other technological innovations may be insufficient (e.g. long-distance freight). Emerging megaregions rely heavily on global logistics operations to supply their population, the majority of which is living in metropolitan areas with a higher concentration of greenhouse gases and a heavy concentration of multiple-layer logistics and transport operations, and other urban functions. To address these issues, there is a need for more efficient traffic management solutions, a stronger shift away from road transportation towards more environmentally friendly modes both for freight and for passengers but most importantly the adoption of an integrated methodological approach when assessing existing and planned transport infrastructure by the decision makers with respect to sustainable development. This research provides a novel approach to the literature of performance evaluation of modal shift and transport infrastructure service quality by capturing the involved stakeholders’ perceptions and expectations. The application and combination of the importanceperformance analysis (IPA) and analytical hierarchical process (AHP) model in an intermodal transport infrastructure regional case study provides a straightforward methodology for the assessment of sustainable development as a result of an industrial survey. In addition added value is provided to the literature for long term scenarios’ planning for sustainable transport infrastructure