The economics of crowding in urban rail transport

Crowding is a major source of inconvenience for public transport users in densely populated metropolitan areas globally, while eliminating crowding requires costly investments. Crowding can be considered as a cornerstone phenomenon of public transport theory, as the interaction between demand and supply side policies. This PhD thesis aims to improve our understanding of the mechanics behind crowding, using microeconomic modelling techniques. From a demand perspective, the crucial precondition of any objective economic analysis is to reliably quantify the inconvenience caused by crowding. In pursuit of this goal, the thesis develops a statistical model to infer the user cost of crowding from metro passengers' route choice decisions. As an important intermediate research outcome, the thesis delivers a novel passenger-to-train assignment algorithm that recovers the network-level crowding pattern of a metro system. Our method is a unique contribution in the sense that it is based on large-scale automated datasets: we use smart card and automated vehicle location data only. The theoretical part of the thesis provides new insights into crowding pricing and capacity optimisation. One of the key messages of the thesis is that crowding in certain time periods and network segments is an unavoidable feature of optimal public transport provision, when demand fluctuates by time and space, but capacity cannot be differentiated between jointly served markets. We show that pricing can be an efficient tool to tackle the deficiency caused by this technological constraint. The thesis devotes special attention to two policy relevant applications: (i) the external cost of seat occupancy, an externality inversely proportional to the density of crowding, and (ii) the inefficiency of unlimited-use travel passes. Our conclusions may assist researchers and practitioners in better understanding the true cost of public transport usage and the related aspects of optimal policy design, including pricing, subsidisation and capacity provision.Open Acces

Environmental and climate policy

This book offers an insight into some of the most important questions of environmental policy, along two main themes. First, it offers a general overview of the most important tools of environmental policy and the main features of EU environmental policy. Second, it presents the issue of climate change, including drivers, impacts and the current standing of international efforts to address it. Finally, these two themes are combined in a detailed discussion of the climate policy of the EU. As a guide to both the fundamentals and the current state of play of environmental and, specifically, climate policy, this book can be useful to students, academics and anyone looking to deepen their knowledge about these important issues. Anna Széchy (PhD) is an assistant professor at the Corvinus University of Budapest, where she has been teaching environmental policy, environmental economics and corporate environmental management for over a decade. She has first-hand experience regarding the process of EU environmental policymaking, having previously worked as advisor to a member of the environment committee of the European Parliament in Brussels and Strasbourg

Flowing matter

This open access book, published in the Soft and Biological Matter series, presents an introduction to selected research topics in the broad field of flowing matter, including the dynamics of fluids with a complex internal structure -from nematic fluids to soft glasses- as well as active matter and turbulent phenomena.Flowing matter is a subject at the crossroads between physics, mathematics, chemistry, engineering, biology and earth sciences, and relies on a multidisciplinary approach to describe the emergence of the macroscopic behaviours in a system from the coordinated dynamics of its microscopic constituents.Depending on the microscopic interactions, an assembly of molecules or of mesoscopic particles can flow like a simple Newtonian fluid, deform elastically like a solid or behave in a complex manner. When the internal constituents are active, as for biological entities, one generally observes complex large-scale collective motions. Phenomenology is further complicated by the invariable tendency of fluids to display chaos at the large scales or when stirred strongly enough. This volume presents several research topics that address these phenomena encompassing the traditional micro-, meso-, and macro-scales descriptions, and contributes to our understanding of the fundamentals of flowing matter.This book is the legacy of the COST Action MP1305 “Flowing Matter”

Environmental Sustainability in Maritime Infrastructures

This Special Issue is entitled “Environmental Sustainability in Maritime Infrastructures”. Oceans and coastal areas are essential in our lives from several different points of view: social, economic, and health. Given the importance of these areas for human life, not only for the present but also for the future, it is necessary to plan future infrastructures, and maintain and adapt to the changes the existing ones. All of this taking into account the sustainability of our planet. A very significant percentage of the world's population lives permanently or enjoys their vacation periods in coastal zones, which makes them very sensitive areas, with a very high economic value and as a focus of adverse effects on public health and ecosystems. Therefore, it is considered very relevant and of great interest to launch this Special Issue to cover any aspects related to the vulnerability of coastal systems and their inhabitants (water pollution, coastal flooding, climate change, overpopulation, urban planning, waste water, plastics at sea, effects on ecosystems, etc.), as well as the use of ocean resources (fisheries, energy, tourism areas, etc.)

Loss allocation in a distribution system with distributed generation units

In Denmark, a large part of the electricity is produced by wind turbines and combined heat and power plants (CHPs). Most of them are connected to the network through distribution systems. This paper presents a new algorithm for allocation of the losses in a distribution system with distributed generation. The algorithm is based on a reduced impedance matrix of the network and current injections from loads and production units. With the algorithm, the effect of the covariance between production and consumption can be evaluated. To verify the theoretical results, a model of the distribution system in Brønderslev in Northern Jutland, including measurement data, has been studied