Spatiotemporal Dynamics in Public Transport Personal Security Perceptions: Digital Evidence from Mexico City's Periphery

The potential for information and communication technologies (ICTs) to revolutionise transportation is of long-standing interest. Just as the telegraph, trans-oceanic cable communications, the telephone, and the fax surely influenced travel behaviours and supply of transportation infrastructures and services, related developments, especially in computing, have changed the way we analyse and plan systems. The most recent wave of ICT-related technological advances – epitomised by high-powered sensing and realtime computing capabilities – promises a new era of seamless services, autonomous vehicles, and high resolution system micro-simulation, to name a few emerging opportunities.Singapore. National Research FoundationSingapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology Center. Future Urban Mobilit

When the Tides Come, Where Will We Go?

For coastal urban areas, an increase in flooding is one of the clearest climate change threats. The research presented in this paper demonstrates how a land use-transport model can be used to forecast the short-and longer-Term impacts of a potential 4-ft sea level rise in greater Boston, Massachusetts, by 2030. The short-Term scenario represents the immediate transport system response to inundation, which provides a measure of resiliency in the case of an extreme event, such as a storm surge. In the short run, the results reveal that transit captive users will suffer more. Transit, in general, displays less resiliency, at least in part because of the center city's vulnerability and Boston's radial transit system. Trip distances would modestly decrease, and average travel speeds would go down by more than 50%. Rail transit ridership would be decimated, and overall transit usage would go down by 66%. The longer-Term scenario predicts how households and firms would prefer to relocate in the so-called new equilibrium when more than 10 mi2 of land disappears and the transport network inundations become permanent. Assuming no supply constraints, new residential growth centers would emerge on the peripheries of the inundated zones, primarily in the inner-core suburbs. Some regional urban centers and traditional industrial towns would boom. Firms would be hit harder, because of their heavy concentration in the inner core; firm relocation would largely follow households. Transit usage would again be decimated, but walking trips would increase. Results, however, should be viewed as cautious speculation

Fiscal federalism and prospects for metropolitan transportation authorities in Portugal

Fiscal federalism refers to the attribution of public finance functions among different levels of government. We examine Portugal's metropolitan transportation sector through the fiscal federalist lens, in light of the country's decentralization efforts and new relevant legislation. We clarify basic principles of fiscal federalism and adapt them to the finance of metropolitan transportation systems – typically characterized by multiple jurisdictions, numerous externalities and equity concerns – showing the inadequacy of general practice. Portugal's overall public finance system partially adheres to fiscal federalist principles; the transportation sector less so. Metropolitan transportation faces particular troubles, with few direct user fees, prices inadequately reflecting costs, and heavy reliance on central government subsidies for public transportation investments and operations. A new law creating metropolitan transportation authorities is only modestly consistent with fiscal federalist principles, since it inadequately details financial responsibilities and remains under heavy central government control. Absent additional reforms, the new metropolitan authorities should aim to make the transportation finance system explicit and test incentive grants to induce inter-municipal cooperation.MIT Portugal Progra

Mainstreaming sustainable urban transport: putting the pieces together

The term ‘sustainability’ has ploughed itself into mainstream development dialogue and literature, if not entirely into popular jargon. One does not need to look far to find references to sustainable housing, consumption, forestry, agriculture etc. The concept of sustainability – meeting present needs while maintaining the capability to meet future needs – has proved invaluable in making society explicitly aware of the need to pass on natural resources to future generations. Sustainability has also come to encompass a broader development agenda, focused on the balance of environmental, social and economic objectives. In this sense, sustainability has been useful in establishing a more level rhetorical playing field among possibly competing objectives. At the same time, the broadening of the meaning of sustainability and the increasing ubiquity of the term’s use runs the risk of watering down the meaning of the concept. When sustainability becomes associated with more and more, does it start to mean less and less

Transport, Climate Change and the City

Book review of "Transport, Climate Change and the City.

Metropolitan Governance for Sustainable Mobility

Land use and mobility interactions in the modern metropolis manifest themselves in two competing, age-old, forces: centripetal forces pulling us together into agglomerations and centrifugal forces pushing us ever further into the metropolitan hinterland. Thus, mobility is a fundamental part of urbanization and metropolitanization processes. Furthermore, mobility also serves as the core metric in defining metropolitan areas, helping identify functional urban areas. This chapter aims to elucidate some of the challenges to governing metropolises for sustainable mobility, defined by the author as the ability to provide non-declining accessibility in time. The chapter analyzes mobility governance and interrelating theories with concrete examples from the United States, Portugal, and Mexico, offering a glimpse of the complexity and posing central yet still unresolved questions. In whose ultimate interest is metropolitan mobility and who should pay for it? How related are the form of governance with the quality of the governance outcome? By what outcomes can metropolitan mobility performance be compared? Can these outcomes be meaningfully compared across metropolises? The chapter concludes noting a contradiction: while the finance system is a critical factor in determining metropolitan mobility governance, formal metropolitan mobility finance systems rarely exist. The author argues that using money to move the metropolis in the right direction offers hope, largely unfilled to date, to improve, and ultimately sustain, accessibility

The Use of CoAXs in Tshwane to Communicate Transport Impacts in Stakeholder Engagement

Collaborative Accessibility-based Stakeholder Engagement (CoAXs) is an interactive planning tool intended to enhance public participation in planning public transport systems. To assess its applicability in various contexts, it has been implemented in the United States, in Chile, and, as presented in this paper, in Tshwane, South Africa. Tshwane is two years behind its plans to expand the A Re Yeng Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) network, largely due to initial resistance by private vehicle users to the city’s Line 2B expansion plan. Using an adapted version of CoAXs that allows users to create scenarios by selecting Line 2B route options and visualise the corresponding accessibility impacts, four public engagement workshops were conducted in July 2018 in Tshwane. Using surveys and observations during the workshops, this study finds that CoAXs moderately broadened the users’ scope of expected impacts of the BRT route options and prompted different user groups, especially private vehicle users, to empathize with users of other transport modes. CoAXs was effective in facilitating and supporting public engagement conversations, although more understanding and consideration of the variation in appetite for such engagements across interest groups and over the project timeline will be helpful in the future.Papers presented at the 38th International Southern African Transport Conference on "Disruptive transport technologies - is South and Southern Africa ready?" held at CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa on 8th to 11th July 2019

The Kyoto Protocol and Sustainable Cities: Potential Use of Clean-Development Mechanism in Structuring Cities for Carbon-Efficient Transportation

This paper assesses the possibility for changing urban development patterns to reduce transportation greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The analysis was carried out as part of a larger project exploring the possibility of using the clean development mechanism (CDM) to reduce transportation GHG emissions in Santiago, Chile. The paper provides an overview of the analytical approach, which includes an integrated travel demand model with sensitivity to mesolevel land use variations, a method to generate optimal land use scenarios that relate to emission reductions, and a process to estimate the level of subsidies needed to produce those land use scenarios. Limitations to the approach and suggestions for future research are discussed. The paper concludes with an assessment of the results in the face of the fairly strict requirements for project development and implementation implied by the CDM

Scenario Planning for Strategic Regional Transportation Planning

This paper proposes a framework for using business and organizational scenario-planning techniques for regional strategic transportation-planning purposes. The paper provides a brief history of scenario planning as it emerged from business-strategic planning activities and gives an overview of its goals and limitations. The paper then reviews the context for scenario planning in regional transportation planning as well as precedents of its application in this field. The paper continues with a presentation of a scenario-planning framework for transportation as refined and applied to the Houston metropolitan area. The major findings and lessons from this application are discussed, together with conclusions and observations regarding further potentials and refinements. Key Words: metropolitan transportation planning; scenario planning; forecasting; Houston, Texa