Attitudes and Behavioral Responses to Parking Measures

This paper reports the results of a study of attitudes and behavioral responses of car drivers to planned parking measures at the campus of the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands. In an on-street questionnaire, car drivers were asked their opinion about restricting access to the campus area for cars of non-university car drivers through (i) a barrier, (ii) proper identification when entering the campus area, and (iii) payment. The responses of more than 700 car drivers are used in a multinomial logit analysis. Most car drivers indicate to continue driving to the university by car. Almost half of the car drivers indicate that they will change their travel behavior should they have to pay for entering the campus area by changing transport mode or parking their car outside the campus area. Respondents are invariant with respect to different types of identification. The most favorite way of paying is by bank/credit card, followed by a special university card

Evaluating the mobility and environmental effects of light-rail transit developments using a multi-state supernetwork approach

Mass light-rail transit (LRT) has been promoted as an effective solution toward sustainable transportation in urban areas. This paper presents a micro-simulation framework combining the multi-state supernetwork (MSN) approach and a mobility-related emission module to evaluate the mobility and environmental effects of LRT developments. The evaluation framework considers individuals’ mode choice of LRT and particularly the trip chaining with their private vehicles to conduct daily activity programs. As complementary policies to LRT developments, parking pricing and park & ride (P + R) developments are also integrated. The output of daily travel patterns from the MSN approach can be used congruently to calculate the air pollutant emissions. The framework is applied to the extended Metropolitan area of Eindhoven (the Netherlands), where new LRT developments and additional parking policies are considered to improve accessibility and reduce environmental effects. The micro-simulation concerns a synthetic population of approximately 110,000 individuals and seven LRT scenarios. The simulation results show a decrease in overall vehicle kilometers traveled and travel time, an increase in public transport use, a decrease in total air pollutant emissions, and an increase in activities in areas around public transport stops and P + R locations. It appears that the inclusion of parking measures in the simulations strengthens the effects, confirming the effectiveness of policy combinations

Micro-simulation of Car Drivers’ Movements at Parking Lots

AbstractDrivers’ movements across or within parking facilities contribute to various problems, i.e., congestion, safety, and environmental effects. Micro-simulation can help to increase the understanding of drivers’ movements and their effects on parking management. This study aims to develop a multi agent-based simulation tool to demonstrate its capability of studying driver movements across parking lots. The program was constructed using the multi-agent modeling environment NetLogo. The developed simulation tool allows to adjust features of the parking facilities. Additionally, vehicle travel time and parking occupancy indicators were integrated to investigate the efficiency of the parking

Decoherence-free quantum information in Markovian systems

Decoherence in Markovian systems can result indirectly from the action of a system Hamiltonian which is usually fixed and unavoidable. Here, we show that in general in Markovian systems, because of the system Hamiltonian, quantum information decoheres. We give conditions for the system Hamiltonian that must be satisfied if coherence is to be preserved. Finally, we show how to construct robust subspaces for quantum information processing.Comment: 4 pages, published versio

Exploratory techniques for locating potential users of urban public transportation

O objetivo deste estudo é identificar e encontrar potenciais usuários de transporte público através do emprego de mapas\ud construídos em um sistema de informações geográficas. O método considera a divisão do município estudado em zonas, em\ud função do código postal. Estas zonas são caracterizadas pelos atributos socioeconômicos da população e do sistema de\ud transporte. Diante da hipótese de melhoria na qualidade do transporte público, dois segmentos de usuários de automóvel foram\ud considerados: usuários que trocariam para ônibus e usuários que continuariam preferindo o carro. Duas técnicas (Modelo Logit\ud e Redes Neurais Artificiais) foram utilizadas com o intuito de reproduzir esse comportamento de escolha dos usuários. Assim, é\ud possível caracterizar espacialmente o impacto de alterações no sistema de transportes ou no perfil da população sobre o\ud potencial de utilização do transporte público. Um cenário de aumento na densidade populacional permitiu identificar, por\ud exemplo, regiões da cidade de São Carlos com potenciais usuáriosThe objective of this study is to identify and locate potential users of public transport through maps built using a geographic\ud information system. The method assumes a division of the city into areas according to the postcodes of the streets. These areas\ud are characterized by socioeconomic attributes of the population and of the transport system. Two segments of automobile users\ud were considered, under the assumption that the quality of public transport would be improved: users who would switch to buses\ud and users who still prefer the car. Two techniques (Logit Model and Artificial Neural Networks) were used to reproduce the\ud users’ choice behavior. That makes it possible to spatially distinguish the impact of changes in the transport system or in the\ud profile of the population on the potential use of public transport. A scenario of increase in the population density, for example,\ud allowed the identification of areas in the city of São Carlos with potential user

Geometric representations for minimalist grammars

We reformulate minimalist grammars as partial functions on term algebras for strings and trees. Using filler/role bindings and tensor product representations, we construct homomorphisms for these data structures into geometric vector spaces. We prove that the structure-building functions as well as simple processors for minimalist languages can be realized by piecewise linear operators in representation space. We also propose harmony, i.e. the distance of an intermediate processing step from the final well-formed state in representation space, as a measure of processing complexity. Finally, we illustrate our findings by means of two particular arithmetic and fractal representations.Comment: 43 pages, 4 figure

Genetics affects choice of academic subjects as well as achievement.

We have previously shown that individual differences in educational achievement are highly heritable throughout compulsory education. After completing compulsory education at age 16, students in England can choose to continue to study for two years (A-levels) in preparation for applying to university and they can freely choose which subjects to study. Here, for the first time, we show that choosing to do A-levels and the choice of subjects show substantial genetic influence, as does performance after two years studying the chosen subjects. Using a UK-representative sample of 6584 twin pairs, heritability estimates were 44% for choosing to do A-levels and 52–80% for choice of subject. Achievement after two years was also highly heritable (35–76%). The findings that DNA differences substantially affect differences in appetites as well as aptitudes suggest a genetic way of thinking about education in which individuals actively create their own educational experiences in part based on their genetic propensities