Short-Term prediction of vehicle occupancy in Advanced Public Transportation Information Systems (APTIS)

Most ITS applications to transit systems are oriented to the efficient management of Public Transportation (PT) operator’s resources, that is crew and fleet of vehicles. However, the potential of ITS application to transit system goes further than the efficient management of the fleet of vehicles. In fact, information on the real-time actual network state, if communicated to travelers, may be an effective tool for improving quality and effectiveness of services and, hence, for diverting people to PT modes. In this paper, we focus on Advanced Public Transportation Information System (APTIS) deploying shared en-route descriptive information. The case study of the city of Naples (Italy) is analyzed. Here PT travelers have reacted positively to being provided information on waiting time at stops and have expressed great interest in receiving additional information such as passenger occupancy of future vehicles. The latter information can be efficiently obtained by means of a modeling framework simulating travelers path choice and the way in which they propagate over the network, as well as Origin-Destination (OD) travel demand pattern. Such a modeling framework is described in this paper. This is based on the schedule based approach and simulates within-day dynamics in transit networks, on both the demand and supply side. Preliminary applications to a small-scale example network are also presented in the paper

LUTI models, freight transport and freight facility location

The subject of this book is the new scientific research in the field of modelling the interaction between land use and transport (LUTI modelling). Transport and the location of activities in space have been important themes of study in engineering, social sciences and urban and regional plannin

Simulating the Effects of Shopping Attitudes on Urban Goods Distribution

Studies of urban freight mobility traditionally focused only on restocking flows and usually neglected the linkage with shopping activities even if end consumer's choices in relation to the type of retail undoubtedly impact on freight distribution flows. The paper focuses on the distribution of urban freight facilities, the choices of type of retail and the travel mode used and some models for simulating the choice of retail outlet and the transport mode are presented. The models, jointly with urban freight demand models were used to assess the effects of some land-use scenarios and to define optimal spatial distribution of urban freight facilities able to improve city sustainability and to meet the interests of end consumers, freight operators and society. The results of an application of this method to a test site are also reported and discussed

Urban Freight Transport Policies in Rome: Lessons Learned and the Road Ahead

Given that few studies have investigated the effects of implementing city logistics measures, this paper focuses on actions implemented in the inner area of Rome in the last 10 years in order to improve both livability and freight distribution, providing insights into the effectiveness of such measures. The analysis covers the famous inner area of the city where the main tourist monuments are located and includes several pedestrianized shopping streets. Evaluation is based on data collected in 1999 and 2008 consisting of traffic counts and interviews with retailers and truck drivers. The implemented measures provided effective in abating through-traffic, in reducing the share of transport on own-account and in increasing the use of less polluting vehicles. Further, the increase in the number of stops per tour, in the average quantity delivered and hence in the average loading factor was revealed. Although all these changes improved the freight transport within the city, some critical issues remain and further measures have to be implemented

Marginal Activity Access Cost (MAAC): a new indicator for sustainable Land Use/Transport (LUT) planning

The paper presents the ‘Marginal Activity Access Cost’, an accessibility indicator providing estimation in monetary terms of the impacts on mobility and on the environment of locating a single new activity in a specific zone of the urban area. In the first part of this paper, the new indicator is presented and compared to other accessibility indicators proposed in literature. In the second part, the MAAC is validated through an application to the urban area of Rome. The paper concludes with brief remarks on using the proposed accessibility indicator as index of performance for sustainable spatial planning

Dynamic optimal travel strategies in intelligent stochastic transit networks

This paper addresses the search for a run-based dynamic optimal travel strategy, to be supplied through mobile devices (apps) to travelers on a stochastic multiservice transit network, which includes a system forecasting of bus travel times and bus arrival times at stops. The run-based optimal strategy is obtained as a heuristic solution to a Markovian decision problem. The hallmarks of this paper are the proposals to use only traveler state spaces and estimates of dispersion of forecast bus arrival times at stops in order to determine transition probabilities. The first part of the paper analyses some existing line-based and run-based optimal strategy search methods. In the second part, some aspects of dynamic transition probability computation in intelligent transit systems are presented, and a new method for dynamic run-based optimal strategy search is proposed and applied

Changing accessibility, dwelling price and the spatial distribution of socio-economic activities

In this paper we present an activities location choice model with endogenous price which simulate, based on Expected Random Utility principle, the behavior of several agents of the urban system (i.e. the workers distinguished by income, the firms by economic sector) to estimate the spatial distribution of socioeconomic activities within the study area as well as the impact of differentiated changing accessibility on the dwellings price. The study area for this research is the metropolitan area of Napoli (South-Italy), for which we show the results of the model estimation and the results of a “backcasting” application to future transportation scenarios

Accessibility and socioeconomic activities location

This paper aims at analyzing to what extent changing accessibility affects the distribution of residential and economic activities in a region. The study is carried out by mean of empirical and modeling analyses. The case study is that of the Regione Campania, one of the 20 administrative regions of Italy. The empirical study consists of before-and-after analyses correlating the variation of zone accessibility to the variation of population and other economic activities (Commerce, services, etc) over a 20 years long period. The results of the analyses carried on show that the impact of accessibility on the location of certain economic sectors is negligible (e.g. for Public services, Wholesale), while it is significant for Residents, Retail, Private Services location. In the latter case, however, it is evident that there are other factors affecting such location choice even stronger than accessibility (e.g. housing prices, congestion of the urban system, and so on). In order to deeper investigate such issues, an integrated modelling framework simulating land-use and transport interaction is proposed. The results of the aggregated calibration of the model parameters are presented and discussed in the paper