Mario Catalano

The Analysis Of Urban Travellers’ LatentPreferences To Explain Their Mode ChoiceBehaviour

Our research aims to explore the impact of latent variables, mirroring urban travellers’ attitudes and perceptions, on the individual decision making process regarding the mode of transport. The paper describes the first results of an ongoing research activity, which derive from a pilot study conducted in Palermo, the capital of the Sicilian Region (in the south of Italy), and demonstrate that policy makers, in designing a socially desirable and environmentally sustainable urban mobility system, should take into account how travellers perceive the qualitative dimensions of transport.

Travelling towards and from minor islands through non-conventional air transport: demand and cost analysis

This research addresses the role of innovative forms of passenger air transport in favouring the mobility of tourists visiting minor islands. In particular, we studied the feasibility of scheduled transport services using a helicopter and a seaplane for rapidly connecting Sicily in the south of Italy to the near and very attractive Eolie Islands. In order to estimate the potential service demand, we allowed for the number of tourists arriving in the Eolie Archipelago during the period 1999-2008. In detail, we considered only the market of visitors with a high willingness-to-pay for time savings (individuals choosing superior hotels) coming from origins at least 300 km away from the Eolie Islands. Furthermore, we excluded a quota of travellers not disposed to flying, determined on the basis of a previous study about air transport demand. We also considered as potential users of the proposed transport services a percentage of the Eolie Isles’ population that was set according to a recent study about the use of air transport by Sicilian residents. The resulting observations were employed to estimate forecasts through an ARIMA model. After a technical analysis to identify the types of helicopter and seaplane suited to implementing regular transport services, we performed a cost analysis concerning the proposed non-conventional air transport services (taking into account fixed, variable, trading and financial costs). In particular, based on the ARIMA model demand forecasts, we determined the service supply (daily frequency and number of aircrafts) in the different cases and evaluated the related total cost per passenger. At the final step, we compared the helicopter and seaplane options with the various existing transport alternatives that can be used to get to the Eolie Islands

Urban Public Transport Optimization by Bus Ways: A Neural Network-Based Methodology

This paper describes an approach for planning the introduction of bus lanes into the urban road network in the urban area of Palermo. The proposed modeling tool adopts a multi-agent objective function that expresses the trade-off between the interests of diverse stakeholders: the generalized transport cost for car drivers and the travel time for public transport users. The reaction of car traffic to a certain planning scenario has been simulated by the DUE assignment technique and the positive impact of the modal shift on the objective function has been tackled by attaching a suitable weight to the time saving for bus passengers. The rise in the bus travel speed, owing to the bus lane solution, has been predicted for a set of urban roads by a neural network, so as to take into account many quantitative and qualitative road attributes. The optimal location pattern of bus ways has been searched by a greedy heuristic that through a step-by-step strategy builds the problem solution by keeping, at each stage, the best alternative.

Modelling the accessibility to public local transport to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the service: the case study of the Roccella area in Palermo

This paper suggests a methodology to assess, through quantitative indicators, the public transport based accessibility inside an urban area. Such indicators derive from two functions, one called the “activity function”, allowing for the presence of generators and attractors of mobility and another termed the “impedance function”, measuring the generalized cost of public transport journeys. The proposed method was tested and applied to a zone on the outskirts of Palermo (capital of the Sicilian Region), to evaluate the effects of a new tram line, which is under construction and will be activated by the end of 2012. The study shows that such a line is not sufficient to enhance significantly the accessibility of this zone except near the tramway. Therefore, to reach a high level of accessibility in the whole study area minimising, at the same time, the public transport operating costs, it could be better to plan an integrated system in which the tram service is supported by new bus lines or novel routes of the existing ones. Today, many European cities face the shortage of public funds, which raises the issue of efficiency for local policy actions. Given the above, the authors intend to provide the local town authorities with methodological tools to improve public transport performance and consequently accessibility, under severe budget constraints, by the re-organization of the service and a better exploitation of existing facilities.