Amanda Stathopoulos

A Stated Ranking Experiment to Study Policy Acceptance: The Case of Freight Operators in Rome’s LTZ

City logistics require an understanding of a number of issues that are seldom accounted for in current research. Policies may produce unsatisfactory results because behavioural and contextual aspects are not considered. Relevant data is crucial for forecasting the reactions of agents to policy changes. Despite recent methodological advances the development of appropriate survey instruments is still lacking to test policy acceptability. This paper expands and innovates the methodological literature by describing a stated ranking experiment to study freight agent interactive behaviour.

Urban Freight Policy Innovation for Rome’s LTZ: A Stakeholder Perspective

City distribution plays a key role in supporting urban lifestyles, helping to serve and retain industrial and trading activities, and contributing to the competitiveness of regional industry. Despite these positive effects, it also generates negative (economic, environmental and social) impacts on cities worldwide. Relatively little attention has been paid to these issues by researchers and policymakers until recently. The analyses found in City Distribution and Urban Freight Transport aim to improve knowledge in this important area by recognizing and evaluating the problems, with a focus on urban freight transport systems.

De Gustibus Disputandum Est: Non-Linearity in Public Transportation Service Quality Evaluation

ABSTRACT User perceptions of service quality are essential to promote public transport ridership and trigger positive externalities. Therefore, research efforts need to analyze service quality from the point of view of users. This article builds on the stream of works studying perceptions of public transport service quality but shifts the focus towards user heterogeneity. Using a discrete choice experiment this article attempts to disentangle different dimensions of decision heterogeneity for bus services. Among the main findings the article discusses the implications of different types of decision heterogeneity, such as non-linear preferences, and relates this to the formulation of bus service contracts.

Special Issue on Measuring Service Quality and Local Public Transport Performance

Reference EPFL-ARTICLE-195377doi:10.1080/15568318.2012.758449View record in Web of Science Record created on 2014-01-09, modified on 2017-11-20

Crowdsourced Urban Package Delivery

Crowdsourced shipping presents an innovative shipping alternative that is expected to improve shipping efficiency, increase service, and decrease cost to the customer, and such shipping promises to enhance the sustainability of the transportation system. This study collected data on behavioral responses to choose from available crowdsourced shipping jobs. The goal of the study was to measure the potential willingness of individuals to change status from pure commuters to traveler–shippers. In particular, the study quantified potential crowdsourced shippers’ value of free time, or willingness to work (WTW) in a hypothetical scenario in which crowdsourced shipping jobs were available in a variety of settings. This WTW calculation is unique compared with the traditional willingness to pay (WTP) in that it measured the trade-off of making a profit and giving up time instead of spending money to save time. This work provides a foundation to analyze the application and effectiveness of crowdsourced shipping by exploring the WTW propensity of ordinary travelers. The analysis was based on a newly developed stated preference survey and analyzed choice across three potential shipping jobs and the option to choose none of the three (i.e., the status quo). Results showed that the experiment was successful in recovering reasonable WTW values that are higher than the normal WTP metrics. The results also identified many significant sociodemographic variables that could help crowdsourced shipping companies better target potential part-time drivers.

Characterization of Trip-Level Pace Variability Based on Taxi GPS Trajectory Data

Travel behavior researchers have observed that the average and standard deviations of trip pace (the inverse of speed) are linearly related. This paper further studies this relationship by using taxi GPS trajectory data collected in the city of Shenzhen, China, in eight periods between early 2013 and late 2015. When tested against the original linear relationship, the data demonstrated heteroscedasticity. To address that issue, a distance- or time-corrected variable was introduced into the original linear model. The resulting two models, along with the original linear model, were tested and compared. The results showed that (a) the new linear model with the time-corrected pace variable (TCPV) demonstrated the best fit to data compared with the other models, (b) the parameters of the TCPV model showed strong consistency for trips originating from similar areas with similar land use patterns, and (c) the parameters of the TCPV model were relatively stable across different time periods.

Energy efficiency in the transport sector: policy evolution and evaluation in some european countries

In the last years Energy Efficiency (EE) has become an important issue in the public policy makers’ agenda due to ambitious objectives of the European Commission to reduce energy consumption by 20% in 2020. Many countries have adopted state-level EE programs targeted to include Energy Saving (ES) policy mixes in different sectors including transportation that is among the most energy intensive ones. The aims of this paper are to: i) report briefly the macroareas of state-level transport EE policies related to the transport sector, ii) verify the level of implementation of these policies among some European countries, iii) highlight, for each country considered, the EE measures adopted up to 2007 and compare the results obtained, iv) evaluate the implementation of EE transport successful measures adopted by each respective National Energy Agency (NEAs), and finally v) compare the main results deriving from EE policy implementation. In particular, in this last objective we adapted the good practice policy mix framework for car passenger transport proposed by the AID-EE Project at the information obtained from countries’ National Energy Programmes (NEPs) updated to 2007.