Robustness as a Third Dimension for Evaluating Public Transport Plans

Providing attractive and efficient public transport services is of crucial importance due to higher demands for mobility and the need to reduce air pollution and to save energy. The classical planning process in public transport tries to achieve a reasonable compromise between service quality for passengers and operating costs. Service quality mostly considers quantities like average travel time and number of transfers. Since daily public transport inevitably suffers from delays caused by random disturbances and disruptions, robustness also plays a crucial role. While there are recent attempts to achieve delay-resistant timetables, comparably little work has been done to systematically assess and to compare the robustness of transport plans from a passenger point of view. We here provide a general and flexible framework for evaluating public transport plans (lines, timetables, and vehicle schedules) in various ways. It enables planners to explore several trade-offs between operating costs, service quality (average perceived travel time of passengers), and robustness against delays. For such an assessment we develop several passenger-oriented robustness tests which can be instantiated with parameterized delay scenarios. Important features of our framework include detailed passenger flow models, delay propagation schemes and disposition strategies, rerouting strategies as well as vehicle capacities. To demonstrate possible use cases, our framework has been applied to a variety of public transport plans which have been created for the same given demand for an artificial urban grid network and to instances for long-distance train networks. As one application we study the impact of different strategies to improve the robustness of timetables by insertion of supplement times. We also show that the framework can be used to optimize waiting strategies in delay management

The design dimension of China’s planning system: urban design for development control

This paper investigates the design dimension of China's legal planning framework. It aims to identify the design principles which have been followed in practice, those design elements which have been considered by designers and planners as part of development control, and the extent to which urban design outcomes have been adopted in specific legal plans. It examines 14 urban design cases from Nanjing which were produced in conjunction with the relevant legal plans between 2009 and 2013. The study suggests that in China, urban design has been facing a number of challenges, including limited coverage of design elements, inconsistencies in the design principles followed, an incompatibility between design outcomes and legal plans, and an underestimation of the role of urban design in the delivery process of development control. Nevertheless, recent years have seen a rise in the standard of urban design practice in the country, and an emerging recognition of the role of urban design in local planning policies

Understanding the role of performance targets in transport policy

The measurement of performance in the public sector has become increasingly important in recent years and it is now commonplace for transport organisations, and local and national governments, to publish performance goals for service supply and quality. Such commitments, when time referenced, are known as targets. This paper explain how changes in management style, consumer rights legislation, contractual obligations and other factors have combined to make management-by targets increasingly common in the public sector. The advantages and disadvantages of management-by-targets are illustrated through discussion of the processes and experience of setting transport targets in UK national transport policy. We conclude that while some of the targets have had a significant impact on policy makers, managers and their agents, the effects have not always been as intended

Robustness Tests for Public Transport Planning

The classical planning process in public transport planning focuses on the two criteria operating costs and quality for passengers. Quality mostly considers quantities like average travel time and number of transfers. Since public transport often suffers from delays caused by random disturbances, we are interested in adding a third dimension: robustness. We propose passenger-oriented robustness indicators for public transport networks and timetables. These robustness indicators are evaluated for several public transport plans which have been created for an artificial urban network with the same demand. The study shows that these indicators are suitable to measure the robustness of a line plan and a timetable. We explore different trade-offs between operating costs, quality (average travel time of passengers), and robustness against delays. Our results show that the proposed robustness indicators give reasonable results

Towards Improved Robustness of Public Transport by a Machine-Learned Oracle

The design and optimization of public transport systems is a highly complex and challenging process. Here, we focus on the trade-off between two criteria which shall make the transport system attractive for passengers: their travel time and the robustness of the system. The latter is time-consuming to evaluate. A passenger-based evaluation of robustness requires a performance simulation with respect to a large number of possible delay scenarios, making this step computationally very expensive. For optimizing the robustness, we hence apply a machine-learned oracle from previous work which approximates the robustness of a public transport system. We apply this oracle to bi-criteria optimization of integrated public transport planning (timetabling and vehicle scheduling) in two ways: First, we explore a local search based framework studying several variants of neighborhoods. Second, we evaluate a genetic algorithm. Computational experiments with artificial and close to real-word benchmark datasets yield promising results. In all cases, an existing pool of solutions (i.e., public transport plans) can be significantly improved by finding a number of new non-dominated solutions, providing better and different trade-offs between robustness and travel time

Meta-evaluation of the impacts and legacy of the London 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games : Developing methods paper

This report brings together the interim findings from the Developing Meta-Evaluation Methods study, which is being undertaken in conjunction with the Meta-Evaluation of the Impacts and Legacy of the London 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games. The work on methods is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The aim of this paper is to review the existing evidence on conducting meta-evaluation, and provide guidance appropriate to the Meta Evaluation of the Games as well as other meta-evaluation studies

An indexing model for stormwater quality assessment: stormwater management in the Gold Coast

In the age of climate change and rapid urbanisation, stormwater management and water sensitive urban design have become important issues for urban policy makers. This paper reports the initial findings of a research study that develops an indexing model for assessing stormwater quality in the Gold Coast

Economic Institutions and Economic Growth in the Former Soviet Union Economies

The aim of this paper is to assess the importance of economic institutions, measured by an index built from the E.B.R.D. (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) indicators, for the pattern of economic growth. Though it focuses on a particular set of transition economies, it is also related to the literature on institutional development and economic growth. Indeed it draws on the literature on the economics of transition, looking at the breakdown of the U.S.S.R. as an extremely powerful “natural” experiment. From an empirical point of view, the study takes into consideration the period between 1991 and 2008 for fifteen countries, namely the Former Soviet Union economies, and is performed by means of a panel model. The first part of the econometric analysis sees our index as the only independent variable. A static model and a dynamic one are specified and different estimation techniques used. The second phase includes other covariates, among which the classical determinants of growth, to test whether the institutional environment, that is to say, the economic institutions index, maintains the magnitude and has a major impact on the pattern of economic growth.economic growth, economic institutions, economic policy, Former Soviet Union economies, static and dynamic models, panel analysis