TRAVEL ADJUSTMENTS AFTER ROAD CLOSURE: WORKINGTON

The closure of all roads links between south and north Workington following the floods of November 2009 produced an unusual travel situation. Provision of a frequent and free train service and the erection of a footbridge brought good access between both parts of the town by foot, cycle and train, but a heavily congested 18 mile detour by road. This paper describes the findings of a survey of over 400 Workington residents about how they adapted and how that has affected the way they travel now that road connections have been restored. Adaptations included changing mode, time of travel and changing destinations. Many respondents report personal hardships, including loss of job, health impacts, reduced family visits to relations and the stress caused by extra travelling time. The paper also describes adaptations by organisations and authorities such as providing feeder bus services, opening a temporary supermarket and offering different worksites or changed hours to help their employees. The paper considers how the severing of connections required services to be rethought. The discussion questions whether the findings are relevant to more predictable changes such as rising fuel prices and climate change mitigation measures

MEASURING THE COSTS AND BENEFITS OF BUSES USED FOR LEISURE TRIPS

Rural bus services are being hit hard by local government spending reductions. Many such services are used partly or primarily for leisure, some are supported by Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, National Parks or other local authorities and make easy prey for budget cuts. Their supporters would point to their value: providing socially inclusive access to natural areas, promoting health and wellbeing, replacing car journeys, bringing spending to local rural economies and claim they offer exceptional value for money. Yet there is no standardised method of evaluating these benefits against the costs of providing the services. This paper reports on an ESRC funded project to measure the benefits of individual services and the results of surveys in seven pilot areas in the season of 2010. The package developed includes a survey template and a programme to help input the data and produce instant reports on performance. The paper also presents the results of an exercise involving practitioners and policy makers (April 2011) to determine the relative value of benefits (converting apples, pears, bananas and raspberries into a common measure of ‘fruit’) and their views about alternative sources of funding for leisure buses such as tourism taxes and business levies. The next step in the project is to develop tools to extrapolate the survey findings to estimate the total benefits of the service for a year or season and compare them to the total costs. Once developed, the tools will have application for most rural transport services and will allow comparative evaluations of the relative benefits and costs of bus, train and taxi services. The paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of using such a framework and whether it can be trusted to give ‘the right answers’, especially in a time of changing values and priorities. Summary With rural buses under threat, how can we decide which ones provide value for money? Our package (survey template, inputting and reporting programme) records the benefits (modal shift, social inclusion, health, local spending) of rural buses used for leisure trips. Thus benefits can be evaluated against costs for public transport and other services. We present the results and dilemmas of an exercise to determine the relative value of benefits and findings from seven pilot areas. Alternative sources of funding (eg tourism taxes, business levies) and the pros and cons of using the evaluation framework in political decisions are discussed

Travel Adjustment after Road Closure: Workington

The closure of all road links between south and north Workington, Cumbria, UK following flood damage in November 2009 produced an unusual travel situation. A free train service and temporary footbridge brought good access across the river by foot, cycle and train, but a heavily congested 18 mile detour by road. This paper describes travel adaptations including: changing mode, time of travel and destinations to the new situation, which also brought personal hardships and stress from extra travelling time. It describes how organisations helped to mitigate the impact of the new imposed geography. The relevance of the findings to other changes in travel provision is discussed

Volcanic ash cloud disruption to air travel

The severity and suddenness of disruption to European air travel caused by the volcanic ash cloud in April exposed the current reliance on air travel for maintaining social, family and business networks. This paper presents the results of an on-line survey of those affected, conducted during and just after the event. It shows how ICTs were used to inform choices, but sometimes failed because service providers were overwhelmed and people away from home could not access them. The impact of the disruption ‘rippled’ through the home networks of the stranded travellers, as they supported the traveller with practical assistance, information searches and fulfilled the duties they were unable to perform. The paper discusses whether the findings can provide insights into the consequences of reducing the volume of flights for environmental reasons and if the price of fuel increases

How can you estimate the value of a bus service? Evaluating buses in tourist areas

Bus services are currently threatened with cuts to reduce local government spending. Services provided for leisure activities in rural areas are particularly at risk as leisure travel is seen as less important than utility travel and the people using the buses are often from outside the area. This paper reports the findings of an ESRC funded project monitoring the benefits of such services and how their benefits to the area and passengers can be quantified. Although the goals of reducing car use, increasing social inclusion and access to areas of recreation, generating local spending and improving health and well-being are largely shared by different organisations, the project found very different priorities among stakeholders. Also, value for money was not the only criterion when budgets were allocated

Travel Disruption: Three Case Studies

This report draws together the findings of three studies of travel disruption and its impacts on travellers: the volcanic ash cloud which disrupted aviation in Europe in 2010, the loss of road bridges between November 2009 and April 2010 at Workington, Cumbria and the severe winter weather across the UK in the winter of 2010-2011. It proposes a six phase cycle: normality, when transport provision matches expectations drawn from experience, tickets, timetables, etc;, disruption, when the transport provision fails to meet expectations; touching the new context when travellers seek to assess how the changed conditions affect their travel plans; the revised plan, when travellers make new plans on the basis of what they know about the context, the consequences, which includes counting the cost of changed travel plans in terms of extra expenditure of time, money, effort, prolonged absences as well as any benefits emanating from the experience; reflection and incorporation whereby the experience of disruption is assimilated int the new normality; this can include trust of agents, information, travelling more prepared for disruption or being aware of new channels of information or help

Cycle tourism development in the Peak District National Park, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT Protected areas are at the centre of nature-based tourism, which is increasingly popular across the world. As visitor numbers increase, so does awareness of the harmful effects that large crowds may have on both natural resources and individuals’ recreational experience. This volume considers the challenge of transportation to and within natural and protected areas, the improvement of which has already been recognised as having great potential for mitigating the environmental impacts of ecotourism. While several books have focused considerable attention to the management of protected areas in general, little has been said about the specific issue of sustainable transport, an emerging trend that is already reshaping visitation patterns in natural settings. This book provides current knowledge on issues associated with the transportation of visitors in natural and protected areas, and a comprehensive overview of the technical and strategic options available to tackle these issues. It approaches the subject via three main topics: preferences, or the visitors' attitudes towards transportation; practices, where current approaches are assessed through examples and case-studies of successful experiences and methodologies from around the world; and policies, where suggestions and recommendations are put forward for both local scale strategies and broad-scale regulatory action with global relevance. Contributors include academics in the field of natural resource management and tourism, with extensive experience in protected area management and active partnerships with natural park administrations

Time-Sensitive Bayesian Information Aggregation for Crowdsourcing Systems

Crowdsourcing systems commonly face the problem of aggregating multiple judgments provided by potentially unreliable workers. In addition, several aspects of the design of efficient crowdsourcing processes, such as defining worker's bonuses, fair prices and time limits of the tasks, involve knowledge of the likely duration of the task at hand. Bringing this together, in this work we introduce a new time--sensitive Bayesian aggregation method that simultaneously estimates a task's duration and obtains reliable aggregations of crowdsourced judgments. Our method, called BCCTime, builds on the key insight that the time taken by a worker to perform a task is an important indicator of the likely quality of the produced judgment. To capture this, BCCTime uses latent variables to represent the uncertainty about the workers' completion time, the tasks' duration and the workers' accuracy. To relate the quality of a judgment to the time a worker spends on a task, our model assumes that each task is completed within a latent time window within which all workers with a propensity to genuinely attempt the labelling task (i.e., no spammers) are expected to submit their judgments. In contrast, workers with a lower propensity to valid labeling, such as spammers, bots or lazy labelers, are assumed to perform tasks considerably faster or slower than the time required by normal workers. Specifically, we use efficient message-passing Bayesian inference to learn approximate posterior probabilities of (i) the confusion matrix of each worker, (ii) the propensity to valid labeling of each worker, (iii) the unbiased duration of each task and (iv) the true label of each task. Using two real-world public datasets for entity linking tasks, we show that BCCTime produces up to 11% more accurate classifications and up to 100% more informative estimates of a task's duration compared to state-of-the-art methods