The Impact of Policy Drivers on the Logistics Supply Chain.

This report is designed to highlight the impact of policy drivers on the freight logistics supply chain. This section will define the term policy drivers and outline the different types of impacts the can have upon the logistics supply chain. In Section Two a list of policy drivers is presented, along with associated policy levers. An attempt to assess what impact each policy lever has on the logistics supply chain is made in Section Three and in Section Four a number of policies levers are selected to take forward as possible scenarios to be evaluated in the University of Leeds cost modelling work. Policy drivers are defined as broad aims, targets or statements that are considered to be desirable by the various bodies of government or non-government organisations in satisfying their overall goals such as “maximising social welfare”, “staying in power” etc... The types of policy drivers vary by organisation and may be complimentary or contradictory. They may also change over time as new doctrine is implemented or new research findings put into practise. In the Government’s, ‘Transport 2010 - The 10 Year Plan’ (DFT, 2000) the policy drivers are outlined under the heading ‘Vision’ and are presented below, · Fully integrated public transport information, booking and ticketing systems; · Safer and more secure transport accessible to all; and, · A transport system that makes less impact on the environment. Policy levers are the policy instruments used to attain policy drivers and can be used to achieve more than one Both policy drivers and policy levers can be categorised under two headings as outlined below, a) Fiscal Drivers; and, b) Physical & Regulatory Drivers The implementation of these policies leads to both direct and indirect outcomes that will make some contribution to achieving the policy drivers set out by the government. The policy levers will impact upon the freight industry in a positive, negative or neutral manner and for the purposes of the next section three definitions have been formulated which have been related to the impact of policy levers on costs and externalities. In Section Four a broader range of impacts are discussed for the policy levers that have been selected as possible scenarios. A Positive Impact - Any outcome that, 1) Lowers operating cost without increasing externalities, and/or; 2) Lowers externalities without increasing costs. A Neutral lmpact – Any outcome that, 1) Maintains defacto operating costs without changing externalities, and/or; 2) Maintains defacto externalities with out changing operating costs. A Negative Impact – Any outcome that, 5 1) Increases operating costs, and/or; 2) Increases externalities. Making a judgement as to whether any one policy is beneficial or not is difficult in the absence of any data and will differ depending upon who you are. The judgements that will be made in this paper will apply to the freight logistics industry only and the externalities they produce. It is stressed that they are not exact. The next section will outline in more detail some of the possible policy drivers that either currently apply to or could be applied to the freight logistics industry. The likely policy levers that could arise from the policy drivers are then discussed along with the possible transport outcomes and their impact

Stated Preference Analysis of Driver Route Choice Reaction To Variable Message Sign Information

Highway Authorities in many parts of the world have, for some years, been using variable message panels mounted above or beside the camageway to communicate short messages to motorists. Most such applications have been concerned with hazard warning and speed advice. However, their use to deliberately affect route choice is an area of great current interest. It is recognised that they have a potential role in managing demand to match the capacity available, not only to alleviate acute problems caused by roadworks and accidents, but also to contribute to satisfactory performance of networks operating close to capacity over extended periods of high, but variable, demand. The installation and operation of the panels is not cheap and there is a widespread belief that overuse, or inappropriate use, of the messages may lead to them losing their credibility with the motorists and thus ceasing to be effective. It is therefore very important to understand the likely response of motorists to various messages before displaying them and even before selecting sites for the installation of panels. A number of researchers have explored drivers' responses to traffic information and route advice offered via variable message signs (VMS). Evidence from traffic counts suggests that messages can persuade somewhere between 5% and 80% of drivers to divert. Clearly this range of estimates is far too wide to support the use of VMS for fine tuning the pattern of demand. A major contributor to the uncertainty, however, is the varying, and often unknown, proportion of drivers whose destination makes the message relevant to them. More detailed studies involving driver interviews downstream of the VM!3 site to determine the relevance of the message, as well as the response to it, include those by Kawashima (1991) and Durand-Raucher et al. (1993). These studies have produced more precise estimates of compliance but the results are obviously limited to those messages which were on display at the time the interviews were being conducted. A number of researchers have sought to overcome this restriction by examining response to a range of messages presented via a stated preference exercise (see for example Hato et al., 1995; Shao et al., 1995 and Bonsall and Whelm, 1995), via a route-choice-simulator (see for example Firmin, 1996; Bonsall and Merrall, 1995 ; Bonsall and Palmer, 1997) or via a full scale driving simulator or system mock-up (see for example Mast and Ballas, 1976 and Brocken and Van der Vlist, 1991). This research has suggested that response is highly dependent on message content, subjects' network knowledge, and on the extent of any implied diversion. We see particular value in extending this earlier work to consider a wider range of messages and to determine whether the route-choice-simulator results can be repeated and extended using a somewhat cheaper methodology - namely stated preference analysis. The objectives of the work reported in this paper were thus: to extend to our existing database on drivers' response to traffic information and route advice provided in variable message signs, to include a wider range of messages. to construct explanatory models of drivers' route choice behaviour in response to a variety of messages to explore the factors influencing this response to compare these results with previous results obtained using a variety of data collection methods to draw policy conclusions, where appropriate, on the use of variable message signs to influence drivers' route choice to draw conclusions, where appropriate, on our data collection and modelling methodology

Forth Road Bridge Closure Survey: Analysis of Commuter Behaviour: Final Findings Report May 2016

No abstract available

Road User Charging – Pricing Structures.

This project considers the extent to which the public could cope with complex price or tariff structures such as those that might be considered in the context of a national congestion pricing scheme. The key elements of the brief were: • to review existing studies of road pricing schemes to assess what information and evidence already exists on the key issues; • to identify what can be learned about pricing structures from other transport modes and other industries and in particular what issues and conclusions might be transferable; • to improve the general understanding of the relationship between information and people’s ability to respond; and • to recommend what further research would be most valuable to fill evidence gaps and enable conclusions to be drawn about an effective structure

Investigating the use of semantic technologies in spatial mapping applications

Semantic Web Technologies are ideally suited to build context-aware information retrieval applications. However, the geospatial aspect of context awareness presents unique challenges such as the semantic modelling of geographical references for efficient handling of spatial queries, the reconciliation of the heterogeneity at the semantic and geo-representation levels, maintaining the quality of service and scalability of communicating, and the efficient rendering of the spatial queries' results. In this paper, we describe the modelling decisions taken to solve these challenges by analysing our implementation of an intelligent planning and recommendation tool that provides location-aware advice for a specific application domain. This paper contributes to the methodology of integrating heterogeneous geo-referenced data into semantic knowledgebases, and also proposes mechanisms for efficient spatial interrogation of the semantic knowledgebase and optimising the rendering of the dynamically retrieved context-relevant information on a web frontend

Improving the capabilities and use of strategic decision making tools.

Recent research has shown that a substantial proportion of local authorities do not use models for strategy formulation or scheme design and appraisal. Models were perceived to be unable to reflect the range of policy instruments which local authorities now use; and were seen as too complex for local authority staff and stakeholders to use themselves. To overcome these issues the MARS model has been enhanced to provide a transparent and easy to use tool with a flight simulator front-end. This paper describes the model along with improvements to the representation of public transport by inclusion of quality and crowding factors and the incorporation of urban heavy rail

European Railway Comparisons: Final Report

The Institute for Transport Studies (ITS), University of Leeds and the British Railways Board (BRB) carried out a major comparative study of Western European railways in the late 1970s (BRB and University of Leeds, 1979). Follow-up work was carried out by ITS financed by the Social Science Research Council and reported by Nash (1985). It was deaded to revive this work at ITS for a number of reasons: It is over ten years since the last set of comparisons (for 1981) were made at ITS and therefore a review of the changes in costs and productivity may be timely. There has been a number of technical developments that make the use of statistical cost analysis more promising. These developments include the use of more flexible functional forms such as the translog, and the development of comprehensive total factor productivity indices (see, for example, Dodgson, 1985 and, more recently, Hensher and Waters, 1993). There is increasing interest in the organisational structure of railway industries as a result of the 1988 Transport Act in Sweden, the EC directive 91/4-40 and the publication of proposals for privatising British Rail in July 1992 (see, for example, ECMT, 1993). Given the explosion in information technology, there were some hopes that data availability would have improved. (Continues..

Cyber-noir: Cybersecurity and popular culture

Cybersecurity experts foster a perception of cybersecurity as a gloomy underworld in which the good guys must resort to unconventional tactics to keep at bay a motley group of threats to the digital safety of unsuspecting individuals, businesses, and governments. This article takes this framing seriously, drawing on film studies scholarship that identifies certain aesthetic themes as associated with moral ambiguity in noir films. This article introduces the term “cyber-noir” to describe the incorporation of noir elements in cybersecurity expert discourses. It argues that the concept of cyber-noir helps explain the persistence of practices that blur legal, moral, and professional lines between legitimate and malicious activity in cyberspace. Consequently, changing cybersecurity requires not only institutional and technological measures, but also a re-constitution of cybersecurity identities themselves. Security and Global Affair

The Roles of ‘Conventional’ and Demand-Responsive Bus Services

Purpose - The roles of ‘conventional’ (fixed-route and fixed-timetable) bus services is examined and compared to demand-responsive services, taking rural areas in England as the basis for comparison. It adopts a ‘rural’ definition of settlements under a population of 10,000. Design/methodology/approach - Evidence from the National Travel Survey, technical press reports and academic work is brought together to examine the overall picture. Findings - Inter-urban services between towns can provide a cost-effective way of serving rural areas where smaller settlements are suitably located. The cost structures of both fixed-route and demand-responsive services indicate that staff time and cost associated with vehicle provision are the main elements. Demand-responsive services may enable larger areas to be covered, to meet planning objectives of ensuring a minimum of level of service, but experience often shows high unit cost and public expenditure per passenger trip. Economic evaluation indicates user benefits per passenger trip of similar magnitude to existing average public expenditure per trip on fixed-route services. Considerable scope exists for improvements to conventional services through better marketing and service reliability. Practical implications - The main issue in England is the level of funding for rural services in general, and the importance attached to serving those without access to cars in such areas. Social implications - The boundary between fixed-route and demand-responsive operation may lie at relatively low population densities. Originality/value - The chapter uses statistical data, academic research and operator experience of enhanced conventional bus services to provide a synthesis of outcomes in rural areas