Wilfredo F. Yushimito

Park-and-Ride Facilities in New York City: Economic Analyses of Alternative Locations

A procedure is developed to assess the economic feasibility of park-and-ride facilities. Relevant literature is discussed, and a mathematical formulation that can be integrated with a regional planning model is produced and applied to the selection of park-and-ride facilities in New York City. The evaluation procedure is divided into two main stages: candidate selection and candidate evaluation. The candidates are selected according to a set of criteria that includes demand considerations, transit connectivity and design, community integration, and economic viability. Economic assessment of the candidates considers the generalized cost of travel and entails the use of a binary logit model and the computation of four performance measures: expected demand, market share, weighted average savings, and present value of benefits.

A Two-Stage Optimization Model for Staggered Work Hours

Traditional or standard work schedules refer to the requirement that workers must be at work the same days and during the same hours each day. This requirement constrains work-related trip arrivals, and generates morning and afternoon peak hours due to the concentration of work days and/or work hours. Alternative work schedules seek to reschedule work activities away from this traditional requirement. The aim is to flatten the peak hours by spreading the demand (i.e., assigning it to the shoulders of the peak hour), lowering the peak demand. This not only would reduce societal costs but also can help to minimize the physical requirements. In this article, a two-stage optimization model is presented to quantify the effects of staggered work hours under incentive policies. In the first stage, a variation of the generalized quadratic assignment problem is used to represent the firm’s assignment of workers to different work starting times. This is the input of a nonlinear complementarity problem that captures the behavior of the users of the transportation network who are seeking to overcome the constraints imposed by working schedules (arrival times). Two examples are provided to show how the model can be used to (a) quantify the effects and response of the firm to external incentives and (b) evaluate what type of arrangements in starting times are to be made in order to achieve a social optimum.

Assessing the impact of urban off-hour delivery program using city scale simulation models

This paper describes two different types of models to assess the traffic impacts of an off-hour delivery program for the New York City (NYC) borough of Manhattan. Traffic impacts are measured in New York City metropolitan region using both a regional travel demand model and a mesoscopic simulation model. Analysis is conducted to determine the effectiveness and impacts of the scenarios modeled; focusing on the changes predicted by the traffic models. The results from both models are compared and analyzed, and a discussion on the usage of these models is presented. While macroscopic models can be used to measure traffic effects in a large urban region, mesoscopic models similar to the one used in this paper have their advantages in terms of better quantifying traffic impacts of system-wide benefits. However, simulation time makes it impractical to use mesoscopic simulation for large urban regions. In this work, both the macroscopic regional travel demand model and a mesoscopic sub-simulation network show a measurable impact to congestion and network conditions. However, even when the results show an increasing benefit in terms of travel time savings and increasing speeds, cost–benefit analysis show that when compared with the costs (in this case implementation costs by providing incentives), only small receiver participation justifies the costs of the off-hour deliveries (OHD) program. As incentive amounts increase, receiver participation increases greatly, though the monetized traffic benefits do not necessarily increase at the same rate. Additional analysis was also performed with a targeted program where large traffic generators and large businesses were the recipients of the incentive. The benefits of the targeted program are estimated to be roughly equivalent to the cheapest scenario run for the broad-based program (

Firm’s efficiency and the feasibility of incentives for flextime adoption: a preliminary analysis of Chilean employer’s response

5,000 tax incentive assumption) at a fraction of the cost.

User rationality and optimal park-and-ride location under potential demand maximization

Abstract Flextime is a Travel Demand Management policy that allows workers to arrive/leave within a certain threshold of time but staying on duty during a period of the day (core hours). Such flexibility in arrival time can have an impact on relieving traffic congestion as it can shift demand to non-peak periods. However, in several countries, companies are usually reluctant to provide flexibility arguing possible loss in their productivity and efficiency. This paper discusses a preliminary study on perceptions of challenges, and the potential of flextime in congested urban areas. In doing so, we present the information gathered through in-depth-interviews and subsequent questionnaires applied to managers of cars dealers in Santiago, Chile, obtaining both qualitative and quantitative information. The quantitative information obtained was used to develop (1) a data envelopment analysis to investigate whether firms’ productivity is affected by flextime or not, and (2) a binary logit model to evaluate financial and non-financial incentives that can allow firms to adopt flextime or change work arrival times. The results obtained from the sample show that, for this particular industry, flextime might not have a significant impact on firms’ productivity. Additionally, we found that financial incentives and competitors’ work starting times have a significant impact on accepting flextime or relaxing arrival constraints. We also found that if arrangements with the whole industry to change work starting times are made, the effect of this change can be as effective as the provision of financial incentives.