Values of time for road commercial vehicles

INTRODUCTION The purpose of this note is to review the report of Accent/HCG (1994), referred to here as AHCG, and other sources, and make recommendations regarding future official Values of Time for road commercial vehicles. This note starts by discussing current DTLR practice, as set out in its Transport Economics Note (TEN). Section 3 presents a digest of the AHCG findings. Section 4 looks at the findings of other studies. Although these are very mixed, carried out for a variety of purposes and presented in a variety of forms, they can serve as a partial check on the AHCG work. Section 5 presents interim conclusions

Principles of valuing business travel time savings

OVERVIEW There are two approaches to valuing travel time savings to business people. The first is that which has formed the basis of UK policy for about 30 years, and which is set out in Section 2. This takes the value of travel time savings on employer’s business as equal to the gross wage rate plus an allowance for other costs that the employer saves. These might include such things as desk space, computer, tools, uniform, protective clothing, travel expenses. These were investigated in studies for the UK Department of the Environment around 1970 (Fullerton and Cooper, 1969; Rubashaw, Michali, Taylor and Key, 1969; Harrison, 1969; Harrison and Taylor, 1970; and Makrotest, 1970). The underlying rationale was that if employers were actually seen to be saving a certain amount of cost (through the gross wage and these various add-ons), then this was the value to them and, subject to any taxation related adjustments, should be the value to society. The approach is sometimes called ‘The Cost Saving Approach’, though it is also sometimes referred to as the ‘wage rate plus’ approach. Clearly, it was believed by the UK government that the economy was sufficiently competitive that average wage rates, for the employment groups concerned, reflected the value to employers. The approach can (but need not) be underpinned by appeals to the neoclassical theory of the firm and the labour market. This gives the equivalence of the marginal (revenue) product of labour to the marginal cost of employing labour, implying that a marginal minute saved will result in a marginal output increase valued at the wage rate for that minute. It is sufficient for this to be true on average, rather than for each individual employee involved. The process may also be ‘indirect’, such that employers receiving sufficiently big travel time savings, via their employees, might release resources into the labour market, where their value should be the marginal wage rate paid by employers for labour of this type. There is clearly room in this argument for small edge effects, but in general it does provide credible support for the Cost Saving Approach. However, its value is undermined by the possibilities it gives for objections to its assumptions, and this process ultimately leads most students of this area to at least wish to consider the more detailed ‘Hensher’ method to be considered in Section 3. This note then proceeds in Section 4 to review what AHCG did. Section 5 looks at the matter from the point of view of the employer. Finally, section 6 gives our conclusions

Rockbursts and mud

It has been observed that the presence of water or mud on the floor of a mining tunnel seems to reduce tunnel failure associated with remote seismic events. We examine two mechanisms that could explain this phenomenon. The investigations suggest that lubrication effects due to the presence of water within cracks could well affect the occurrence of spalling, and the results obtained suggest that coating the tunnel walls with moisture containing semi-liquid pastes may be effective for tunnel wall stabilization

Rail privatisation in Britain - lessons for the rail freight industry

Until 1994, the rail industry in Britain – as in most of Europe – was organised in the form of a single integrated state owned company providing passenger and freight services, and the infrastructure on which they ran, throughout the country. It is true that significant reforms did take place in the 1980s, grouping rail services into a number of sectors (Inter City, London and South East and regional passenger, and trainload, distribution and parcels for freight) with their own objectives, management and accounts (Nash, 1988). Also activities such as hotels and rolling stock manufacture were hived off and privatised. However, by the early 1990s the government was determined to go further and privatise the entire rail network. After much debate about options they determined on a pattern that had come to be seen as the norm for network industries – a regulated monopoly infrastructure provider with competitive operators using it. The infrastructure was placed in the hands of a new infrastructure company, Railtrack, which levied charges to cover its costs and was subsequently privatised. Operations were divided into a number of separate companies and also privatised. However, for a mixture of good and bad reasons they were not willing – at least initially – to leave the question of what passenger services would be provided at what charges up to the market. Thus passenger services were franchised out, with franchise requirements as to minimum levels of service and regulation of some fares. In the case of freight services, the approach of the government had long been that services should be run on commercial principles, with specific subsidies for flows of traffic which would otherwise use road and where this would impose sufficient social costs that the subsidy was justified. This was essentially the approach carried through into privatisation. Thus the policy for freight was to implement complete open access for any licensed train operating company, and to seek to create a number of competing freight operating companies by splitting up and privatising the former freight business of British Rail. This paper will proceed as follows. First, the history of rail freight privatisation in Britain will be charted, sector by sector. It will be seen that there has been relatively little entry into the industry, and the reasons for that will then be explored. The particular issues of the price and availability of track access, and of the availability of government grants will then be discussed. Prospects for the rail freight business in Great Britain are then considered. Finally we draw together some lessons which may be learned for other countries embarking on the privatisation and/or deregulation of rail freight. An appendix presents detailed estimates of trends in rail and road freight in Great Britain

A survey of Remote Jobs and Communities Program(me) providers: one year in

This working paper reports on a survey of provider organisations conducted almost one year into the implementation of Remote Jobs and Communities Program. Abstract On 1 July 2013, a new labour market and community participation program-the Remote Jobs and Communities Program (RJCP)-started operating across remote Australia. It replaced several other programs, most importantly Job Services Australia (JSA) and the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) scheme. JSA has in recent years been Australia\u27s principal \u27mainstream\u27 labour market program in which all unemployment payment recipients in Australia who are able to work are expected to participate. CDEP is a much longer-standing program, originally designed to provide some form of paid work to Indigenous people living in remote communities. RJCP was presented by the Gillard Labor government as offering services that would be locally flexible, be delivered in partnership with communities and have a strong focus on getting people into work.  Its dual focus-on community participation and on jobs-was reflected in arrangements for its administration, jointly managed by the Department  of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. However, a change of government in September 2013 brought RJCP into the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. The new Abbott Coalition government was critical of RJCP and immediately included it in a review of Indigenous employment and training programs, led by Andrew Forrest. This working paper reports on a survey of provider organisations conducted almost one year into the implementation of RJCP. It is part of a larger research project on the implementation of RJCP during its first three years, with funding support from the Australian Research Council and Jobs Australia (Linkage Project 130100226). The project aims to understand how RJCP is developed from a general policy idea to specific grounded practice, at the community, regional and jurisdictional levels. This survey report includes findings about basic arrangements and characteristics of provider organisations; ideas about joblessness in remote areas and welfare conditionality; provider perceptions of the government officials with whom they work; operational details (staffing, money and administrative challenges including information technology (IT) systems); and broader influences on the shaping of program delivery, like Community Action Plans and community perceptions. A second survey in 2015–16 will track developments in these areas over time

Freight mode choice and adaptive stated preferences

This paper presents empirical results from a survey of determinants of mode choice for freight in India. The Leeds Adaptive Stated Preference software was used for the main survey which was carried out in summer 1998 on the Delhi to Bombay corridor. The survey results show that frequency of service is an important attribute determining mode choice. Valuation of reliability is generally lower than expected. Value of time is quite similar across different product segments. Given prevailing costs, the results suggest that intermodal services can be viable for high value and finished goods

Stated Preference Experiments Concerning Long Distance Business Travel in Great Britain

Stated preference techniques are now widely used in transport economics as an experimental tool for gathering data on consumer preferences to derive, amongst other things, estimates of demand elasticities and values of travel time, service frequency, service reliability and other deteminants of travel behaviour. However, these techniques have not to our knowledge been used in research on long distance business travel behaviour. This forms the subject of this paper. In particular, results of a stated preference experiment answered by two samples of long distance business travellers are presented. Disaggregate mode choice models are calibrated with this data; and the results are used to derive estimates of the value placed by long distance business travellers on savings in business travel time. The design of the stated preference experiment means that these values can be interpreted as leisure values of time. The results that long distance business travellers place a high value on travel time savings. It is demonstrated that this can largely be explained by their high incomes and long work days, and the unsociable hours at which time savings occur. It is our view that the value of time estimates reported in this paper are not appropriate for use in forecasting exercises, rather they can be used to construct a value of business travel time for evaluation purposes

The Results of a Survey of Business Travel Policies in Greater London and North East England.

This report sets out the initial results of a telephone survey, of 311 organisations, which gathered data on these organisations' travel policies, with particular reference to how these policies affect mode choice decisions for long distance (i.e greater the 50 miles one way) business trips. This survey is one of three carried out by ITS as part of an SERC funded project to investigate Business Travel. The reported results show there are systematic differences between the travel policies of large and small, and private and public sector organisations. Public and large organisations are more likely to have formal travel policies, and mode choice decisions made by the organisation and not the individual. However, regardless of who decided the travel mode it is found that the employer plays an important role in limiting the mode choices available to the business traveller. The nature of these choices is found to vary with the seniority and income of the business traveller

Sample Size Determination to Evaluate the Impact of Highway Improvements

This paper was prepared for the Department of Transport, as a support document to a main report on the feasibility of measuring responses to highway improvements. The paper discusses the statistical issues involved, particularly as regards the determination of suitable sample sizes. Worked examples are provided, using such data on ambient variability and adjustment factors as were available to us. Some of the data is included as an appendix where it was felt to be otherwise not easily available. The note asks two sort of questions. Firstly, what is the minimum sample size to take to be a certain percent confident that a given quantity lies in a range of a given width. Secondly, what sample sizes should be taken in Before and After studies so as to be a certain percent confident that a change in a quantity by a given amount will be detected as a statistically significant difference at some chosen significance level. Three sorts of quantities are discussed: - total flows past a point, which may be counted by loops, tubes or manually; - partial flows, such as a particular 0-D flow, which require roadside interviews; - journey times over particular links