A Track Record of Success: High-Speed Rail Around the World and Its Promise for America

Highlights the economic and transportation benefits of high-speed rail in Japan and Europe, including creating jobs, saving energy, protecting the environment, and encouraging sustainable land use and development. Details lessons for the United States

Modelling and simulation of rail passengers to evaluate methods to reduce dwell times

The paper outlines a feasibility study using modelling and simulation to reduce dwell times and increase rail network capacity. We use agent based modelling, where passengers are treated as a separate entities, basing their movements on rules from the Social Force Model (SFM), proposed by Helbing to model pedestrian dynamics. Implementing this SFM, together with a novel decision making system for passengers' door choices, a mesoscopic model is produced of the platform, train and passengers. An outline of the modelling process is presented, along with a critical analysis of the final model. Analyses are conducted to evaluate novel concepts in train and platform design, to reduce loading times, using passengers with a range of attributes. In a simulation experiment, four concepts (wider doors, designated boarding/alighting doors, and an active passenger information system) are assessed, with the latter two giving reductions in loading times of 7.0% and 7.3%

Analysing passengers' behaviours when boarding trains to improve rail infrastructure and technology

Concentrated boarding describes the phenomenon when rail passengers congregate in certain areas of the platform and board the train carriages that stop near these areas. This influences the distribution of passengers throughout the carriages, which can negatively affect passenger comfort, safety at the platform-train interface, efficiency of the rail network, and the reputation of rail travel as a whole. This project aimed to determine whether concentrated boarding occurs in stations in the UK in order to understand its relevance for future rolling stock, infrastructure design and its associated manufacturing research. Video recording technology was used to observe the movements of passengers in Oxford Station and data was collected for nine individual trains. By reviewing the recordings, the number of passengers boarding through each door of the trains was determined, and the boarding distribution along the length of the platform was plotted. Several reasons for noted trends are offered, and potential solutions proposed. The use of real time information could be invaluable to minimise concentrated boarding, as it would allow passengers to make informed decisions as to where they could board trains to have a better journey experience. These findings indicate the relevance of a human-centred design process, particularly the user research stages, in the process of defining priorities for manufacturing and engineering

The next stop: An analysis into the expansion of inter-regional public transportation within British Columbia\u27s Lower Mainland

Public transportation is crucial in helping to grow cities sustainably. Good public transportation allows for less car-dependence, healthier and less polluted communities, and more equitable communities. Within BC’s Lower Mainland, the current lack of inter-regional transit options, combined with the high level of congestion, pollution, and growing population in the Fraser Valley and Metro Vancouver’s eastern communities presents opportunities to explore different methods to better connect the Fraser Valley and Metro Vancouver with mass transit. The study looks at data from a jurisdictional scan and expert interviews to analyze several different inter-regional transit proposals that have been discussed within the Lower Mainland. The findings can help to aid urban planning within the Lower Mainland and look at how to best address this gap in the region’s transportation infrastructure

Designing and Operating Safe and Secure Transit Systems: Assessing Current Practices in the United States and Abroad, MTI Report 04-05

Public transit systems around the world have for decades served as a principal venue for terrorist acts. Today, transit security is widely viewed as an important public policy issue and is a high priority at most large transit systems and at smaller systems operating in large metropolitan areas. Research on transit security in the United States has mushroomed since 9/11; this study is part of that new wave of research. This study contributes to our understanding of transit security by (1) reviewing and synthesizing nearly all previously published research on transit terrorism; (2) conducting detailed case studies of transit systems in London, Madrid, New York, Paris, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C.; (3) interviewing federal officials here in the United States responsible for overseeing transit security and transit industry representatives both here and abroad to learn about efforts to coordinate and finance transit security planning; and (4) surveying 113 of the largest transit operators in the United States. Our major findings include: (1) the threat of transit terrorism is probably not universal—most major attacks in the developed world have been on the largest systems in the largest cities; (2) this asymmetry of risk does not square with fiscal politics that seek to spread security funding among many jurisdictions; (3) transit managers are struggling to balance the costs and (uncertain) benefits of increased security against the costs and (certain) benefits of attracting passengers; (4) coordination and cooperation between security and transit agencies is improving, but far from complete; (5) enlisting passengers in surveillance has benefits, but fearful passengers may stop using public transit; (6) the role of crime prevention through environmental design in security planning is waxing; and (7) given the uncertain effectiveness of antitransit terrorism efforts, the most tangible benefits of increased attention to and spending on transit security may be a reduction in transit-related person and property crimes

Passenger Flows in Underground Railway Stations and Platforms, MTI Report 12-43

Urban rail systems are designed to carry large volumes of people into and out of major activity centers. As a result, the stations at these major activity centers are often crowded with boarding and alighting passengers, resulting in passenger inconvenience, delays, and at times danger. This study examines the planning and analysis of station passenger queuing and flows to offer rail transit station designers and transit system operators guidance on how to best accommodate and manage their rail passengers. The objectives of the study are to: 1) Understand the particular infrastructural, operational, behavioral, and spatial factors that affect and may constrain passenger queuing and flows in different types of rail transit stations; 2) Identify, compare, and evaluate practices for efficient, expedient, and safe passenger flows in different types of station environments and during typical (rush hour) and atypical (evacuations, station maintenance/ refurbishment) situations; and 3) Compile short-, medium-, and long-term recommendations for optimizing passenger flows in different station environments

Japanese Modernism And Cine-Text : Fragments And Flows At Empire\u27s Edge In Kitagawa Fuyuhiko And Yokomitsu Riichi

This article notes that Kitagawa Fuyuhiko\u27s writings from the 1920s and 1930s, together with the contemporaneous works of prose author Yokomitsu Riichi, are strongly marked by the confluence of the literary and the cinematic. Kitagawa and Yokomitsu\u27s engagement with film was not limited to a fascination with the precision, objectivity, or mobility of the “camera eye.” Rather, it extended to the entire ability of the cinematic apparatus to capture the temporality of objects in motion, and of the ability of the filmmaker to organize segments of space into a new synthetic whole. The article explores this confluence through a brief examination of four instances of “cine-text”: Kitagawa\u27 poetry collection War, Yokomitsu\u27 novel Shanghai, the concept of literary formalism Yokomitsu proposed around the year 1930, and the theory of the “prose film” that Kitagawa unveiled in the following decade