Examining the Attitudes, Pro-Social Value Orientations and Social Norms of Older People to Road Pricing

This study is set to investigate the relationship between older age and the acceptability of road pricing. Specifically, it examines the attitudes of the people aged 60 and over to road pricing in comparison with the attitudes of younger people using relevant literature review findings, secondary data analysis and the results of a questionnaire and three group discussions. Moreover, this research examines whether older people’s support for what is positively valued for society affects these attitudes. Older people are more likely to express positive or negative opinions about road pricing depending on whether they believe it would be good or bad for others, or society. The influence that family, friends or others in general may have on people’s beliefs about road pricing is another subject that is examined. By looking into these issues this work highlights some of the potential opportunities and problems in the present context of the acceptability of road pricing. This will hopefully help policy-makers to decide on actual design criteria and consultation mechanisms that could assist in promoting and communicating better road pricing to older people, making it publicly and therefore politically more acceptable

Nonconservative Nature of the Stresses Developed in a Continuum.

The stresses in an elastic continuum (i.e. a continuum with zero strains after unloading) are classically deemed to be conservative (i.e. their total work all over the continuum is a single-valued function of only the displacement distribution in the continuum). So, internal damping in an elastic continuum appears to be a contradiction in itself. Actually, the total work of the internal stresses all over a continuum does not coincide with the strain energy of the continuum, but also includes the work of the internal body forces formed by the stress derivatives, which only con-tributes to the kinetic energy of the continuum. Owing to this inclusion, the total work of the internal stresses cannot be a single-valued function of only the displacement distribution in the continuum, and hence, the internal stresses must be nonconservative, which indicates internal damping inherent in any continuum whether elastic or not. Only statically deforming continua may possess conservative internal stresses

Road Pricing and Older People: Identifying Age-Specific Differences Between Older and Younger People's Attitudes, Social Norms and Pro-Social Value Orientations to Road Pricing.

The implementation of road pricing schemes is likely to be an inescapable measure in the future of managing road transport demand in highly congested environments. Since public acceptability is the ‘Holy Grail’ of charging policy-making, revealing the special attitudinal issues of older people may help the identification of some of the potential social dilemmas of road pricing. In an ageing society, where older people have a growing influence in politics in general, and potentially in the acceptability of road pricing in particular, their attitudes to road pricing are of particular interest because they face specific types of risk of transport-related social exclusion. Moreover, older people favour, more than any other age groups, what is positively valued for society – a process termed as ‘pro-social value orientation’. Hence in a transport context, older people may be more likely to express positive or negative attitudes to the acceptability of road pricing depending on whether they believe it would be good or bad for others, or society in general. Family and friends may also have a particular influence on older people’s evaluations about their intentions and choices - thus the importance of studying the influence of ‘social norms’ on older people’s attitudes to road pricing. The paper will develop a thorough theoretical and empirical understanding of these issues, based on the findings of a primarily quantitatively-assessed survey of 491 post-back responses combined with secondary data analysis. This will lead to the identification of age-specific differences of public attitudes to road pricing. All in all, some support is provided for the view that attitudes to road pricing do vary with age as pro-social value orientations, social norms and their influence on attitudes also do

Bernoulli's Transformation of the Response of an Elastic Body and Damping

Bernoulli's transformation and the related separation of variables method or modal analysis as classically applied to the partial differential equation of motion of an elastic continuum will always conclude an undamped response. However, this conclusion lacks reliability, since the underlying analysis assumes either integrandwise differentiability (i.e. differentiation and integration signs are interchangeable) or termwise differentiability (i.e. the derivative of an infinite series of terms equals the sum of the derivatives of the terms) for Bernoulli's transformation, which not only is responsible for the undamped response but also is arbitrary. This paper using Bernoulli's transformation examines an elastic uniform column ruled by the generalized Hooke’s law and subjected to axial surface tractions at its free end or a free axial vibration, and shows that the above differentiability assumptions underlying classical analysis are equivalent and actually constitute a limitation to the class of the response functions. Only on this limitation, damping appears to be inconsistent with the elastic column response. Removing the limitation through nontermwise differentiability of Bernoulli’s transformation results in a damped response of the elastic column, which indicates that damping actually complies with the generalized Hooke’s law as applied to elastic continua

Bike-Sharing: Is Safety an Issue Adversely Affecting its Potential for Being Embraced by Urban Societies?

Using bicycles on an ‘as-needed’ basis, usually for a small rental fee and without the externalities and obligations linked to bicycle ownership, is what makes public bicycles a societally affordable medium to enhance the transition to a more sustainable urban transport paradigm. However, despite its distinctive character in terms of its potential to be a mechanism transforming in some degree urban mobility to a shared responsibility regime, bike-sharing still faces some of the same safety concerns associated with ordinary bicycle ridership. The most common problem for cyclists’ wellbeing is that the traffic system is designed predominately from a car-user perspective. Even the cities that have recently implemented public bicycle programmes, and therefore showed some extra care to provide fitting urban conditions for them, have not yet achieved to fully eclipse car-orientation as the prime cornerstone of their development norms. This means that transport systems worldwide do not necessarily take fully into account the main characteristics of cyclists reflecting safety themes: a cyclist is vulnerable (in a crash), flexible (in behaviour), instable (may fall off the bike), inconspicuous (difficult to see), has differing abilities (due to a wide range of the population), is conscious of effort (i.e., highly motivated to minimize energy expenditure), and sometimes seen as intruders in the traffic systems, rather than as an integral part. This work refers to the results of a research scheme that meant to examine road users’ attitudes directly reflecting public acceptability towards two bike-sharing schemes in Drama (Greece, 50.000 residents) and Gothenburg (Sweden, 500.000 residents). Although safety was not the principal initiative for doing this dual study, one key conclusion was that many people could not embrace bike-sharing due to their perceptions that bicycle represents in general an unsafe travel mode and that their cities provide only limited road safety for cyclists

Identifying and Surpassing Contextual Barriers in Cross-Border Research Collaboration: The Case of the Sino-Swedish Project Shanghai Local Interaction Platform

The Swedish advanced knowledge in integrating within a vastly car-oriented transport system a new (or improved) breed of sustainable public transport operations, complemented by the Chinese ability to speedily support urban design innovation that could take even city-wide transportation systems to new heights, guarantees a contribution to mobility research of excellent scientific quality. Having in place a well-tested know-how mechanism to overcome cross-cultural differences between distant research philosophies is the most important hurdle in any scientific collaboration between those Sweden and China and could be vital for the success of the programme, despite the best of scientific intentions and planning. After almost two years from the initiation of Shanghai Local Interaction Platform, a consistent mechanism that will promote cross-border communication and the philosophy of shared responsibility is slowly but steadily taking its final form. This work is describing this process

A Worldwide State-of-the-Art Analysis for Bus Rapid Transit: Looking for the Success Formula

This paper’s intended contribution, in terms of providing an additional angle in the existing Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) state-of-the-art knowledge spectrum, is a dual one. On the one hand, it provides a detailed description of the mode, re-defining BRT as an overall concept by identifying, discussing, and categorizing in a systematic way its strengths and its weaknesses in comparison with rail-based solutions and conventional bus services. On the other hand, it presents in detail a number of selected scheme-oriented applications from around the world, looking into some of the basic ingredients behind BRT’s success (or failure) stories. This is a scientific effort that could inform the reader about the current status of BRT internationally and about the challenges and opportunities that exist when trying to materialize BRT’s potential as an effective urban passenger solution that could challenge the merits of more conventional mass-transit options

Understanding Public Attitudes to Bike-Sharing in Gothenburg

A predominately car-oriented transport has been the cornerstone of urban development in a worldwide scale for decades now; a cornerstone that is associated mostly with the short-term individualistic benefit of the road user in terms of comfort and convenience, but also with severely adverse effects on societal and environmental sustainability. The problem for society – and policy – is therefore how to retain the social and economic benefits linked to mobility while reducing the negative environmental, economic and social impacts from transport. Considering this and the ever-increasing number of people who live in cities, the development and promotion of alternative social, attitudinal, behavioural and technological niches to the current automobile-focused transport regime is needed more than ever before. One of the prime non-regulatory frameworks to promote this transition to a more sustainable transport paradigm refers to the shared-use of mobility innovation mechanisms. Bike-sharing is perhaps the most characteristic and greener example of this sort of alternative transport solutions. It can be described as a short-term bicycle rental service for inner-city transportation providing bikes at unattended stations. Bike-sharing systems have been introduced as a means to extend the reach of public transit services to final destinations in a way that promotes the development of sustainable and aesthetically pleasing urban environments that prioritize people over cars. The most distinctive function of such a scheme however, is clearly the concept of “sharing” since individuals use bicycles on an “as-needed” basis without the costs and responsibilities of bicycle ownership. Despite the vast potential of bike-sharing outlined herein and more importantly despite the numerous (at least 500) schemes of variable sizes and types that run in more than 50 countries worldwide, the impact of its use and the factors that can make it successful or not constitute a topic that is still only modestly negotiated by research. This abstract refers to a study aiming to frame the attitudes of people towards the rapidly expanding bike-sharing scheme of Gothenburg some of them referring to their experience of the scheme as users.Gothenburg has in place Styr & Ställ, which is a self-service bike rental system, spread across 62 stations throughout the city centre with an excess of 600 bicycles. This fairly inexpensive system can be accessed 24 hours a day and seven days a week between 1st of March to 31st of October. Approximately 50,000 annual users signed up in 2012 for using this service (including tourists) a number that has really forced the rapid expansion of the scheme in what it is today and calls for research pointing to two directions; research that could either attempt to captivate what it seems to be a formula for success or understand how a scheme with such a potential could become even more publicly acceptable.A number in excess of 500 fully completed questionnaires were collected and analyzed. The respondents believed in general that cycling could be a sustainable, cost-saving, healthy, pleasant mode capable of reducing road traffic congestion. 90% of them agreed or strongly agreed that more bicycle-related investments are necessary for Gothenburg. More importantly though, only an insignificant proportion of the respondents (approximately 1.5% of them) disagreed or strongly disagreed with the notion that Styr and Ställ is a good scheme for the city. The respondents believed that Styr and Ställ is a pro-environmental, inexpensive and healthy travel option, which complements the other existing public transport services and promotes a more human-friendly identity for the city. The vast majority of them also believed that public bicycles provide a viable service for the city that should expand to more areas. Despite these positive attitudes and although at least one out of four respondents cycle in a daily basis and more than half of them use a bike regularly, very few of them ride a public bicycle: almost 85% of them don’t or use it rarely. More than 40% of the respondents though reported that they do that because they use their own bicycles, while an excess of 30% considered that there is still a lack of good public bicycle related infrastructure in the city. Another finding of the study is that quite a few people find neither the bicycles nor the rental stations particularly attractive and they do not see a need for electrical bicycles. All in all, even the majority of the respondents that self-reported a small likelihood to ever use systematically public bicycles was positive towards the scheme