| 1. |
- Almström, Peter, 1980-
(författare)
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Three essays on transport CBA uncertainty
- 2015
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) has for a long time been used in transport planning, but it is often questioned. One main argument against CBA is that the results depend largely on assumptions regarding one or a few input factors, as for example the future fuel price or valuation of CO2 emissions.The three papers included in this thesis investigate some aspects of uncertainty in transport CBA calculations. The two first papers explore how changes in input data assumptions affect the CBA ranking of six rail and road investments in Stockholm. The first paper deals with the effect of different land-use assumptions while the second deals with the influence of economic growth, driving cost and public transport fare. The third paper investigates how alternative formulations of the public transport mode choice and route choice affect travel flows, ticket revenues and consumer surplus. These are important factors previously known to affect CBA results.The findings of the first two papers suggest that CBA results are robust concerning different land-use scenarios and single input factors. No change in rank between a road and a rail object is observed in the performed model calculations, and only one change between two road objects. The fact that CBA results seem robust regarding input assumptions supports the use CBA as a tool for selecting transport investments. The results in the third paper indicate that if there is detailed interest in, for example, number of boardings and ticket income from a certain transit line, or the total benefit of a price change, a more detailed formulation of the public transport mode choice and route choice will provide more reliable results. On the other hand, this formulation requires substantially more data on the transit line and price structure than the conventional formulation used in Swedish transport planning, especially in areas with many different pricing systems.
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| 2. |
- Berghauser Pont, Meta, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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PST
- 2019
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Annan publikation (mjukvara/multimedium) (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- PST is a tool for performing space syntax and regular accessibility analyses. It currently consists of two main parts - a C++ and Python library called Pstalgo and a plugin for the desktop application QGIS.PST is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. The GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its users.For latest download visit either the Chalmers publication page, or find "Releases" on the Github page.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Blom Västberg, Oskar, 1987-, et al.
(författare)
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A dynamic discrete choice activitybased travel demand model
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- During the last decades, many activity-based models have been developed in the literature. However, especially in random utility based models timing decisions are often treated poorly or inconsistently with other choice dimensions. In this paper we show how dynamic discrete choice can be used to overcome this problem. In the proposed model, trip decisions are made sequentially in time, starting at home in the morning and ending at home in the evening. At each decision stage, the utility of an alternative is the sum of the one-stage utility of the action and the expected future utility in the reached state.The model generates full daily activity schedules with any number of trips that each is a combination of one of 6 activities, 1240 locations and 4 modes. The ability to go from all to all locations makes evaluating the model very time consuming and sampling of alternatives were therefore used for estimation. The model is estimated on travel diaries and simulation results indicates that it is able to reproduce timing decisions, trip lengths and distribution of the number trips within sample.To explain when people perform different activities, two sets of parameters are used: firstly, the utility of being at home varies depending on the time of day; and secondly, constants determine the utility of arriving to work at specific times. This was enough to also obtain a good distribution of the starting times for free-time activities.
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| 5. |
- Blom Västberg, Oskar, 1987-, et al.
(författare)
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A joint between-day and within-day activity based travel demand with forward looking individuals
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Including day-to-day planning to account for systematic variability in activity participation has the potential to further improve travel demand models. This paper introduce a dynamic discrete choice model of day-to-day and within-day planning in a joint framework. No model up to date jointly treats within-day and day-to-day planning with individuals that take future days into account. The model is estimated using a combination of a small survey with week long data and a larger single day travel survey. A static, myopic and forward looking version of the model is estimated. There is a big improvement in model fit when moving from a static to a dynamic model, but allowing forward-looking behaviour gives a relatively small additional improvement. As a policy test, grocery stores are closed on Sundays. The myopic model predicts that people as a consequence will shop more on Mondays-Thursdays and therefore unintuitively also less on Saturdays. The forward looking model also predicts increased shopping on weekdays but mainly that people will shop more on Saturdays anticipating that stores are closed on Sundays.
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| 6. |
- Blom Västberg, Oskar, 1987-, et al.
(författare)
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Discount factors greater than or equal to one in infinite horizon dynamic discrete choice models
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this paper, the theory on infinite horizon DDCM's is extended to allow for discount factors greater than or equal to one. The proposed methods are applied to Rust's (1987) bus engine replacement model, where a discount factor of 1.075 is identified using grid search. The infinite horizon problem with and without a terminal state are treated separately. Sufficient conditions are given for the existence of solutions to Bellman's equation in the terminal state problem and to a normalized version of Bellman's equation in the non-terminal state setting. If a terminal state exists, acting according to Bellman's equation still yields the maximum expected total utility under derived conditions on the one-stage utility functions and reachability of the terminal state. In the non-terminal state problem, $\beta=1$ implies that individuals maximize the average cost per stage, but for $\beta>1$ no rationale for acting according to Bellman's equation, even when it has a solution, has been found.
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| 7. |
- Blom Västberg, Oskar, 1987-
(författare)
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Five papers on large scale dynamic discrete choice models of transportation
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Travel demand models have long been used as tools by decision makers and researchers to analyse the effects of policies and infrastructure investments. The purpose of this thesis is to develop a travel demand model which is: sensitive to policies affecting timing of trips and time-space constraints; is consistent with microeconomics; and consistently treats the joint choice of the number of trips to perform during day as well as departure time, destination and mode for all trips. This is achieved using a dynamic discrete choice model (DDCM) of travel demand. The model further allows for a joint treatment of within-day travelling and between-day activity scheduling assuming that individuals are influenced by the past and considers the future when deciding what to do on a certain day.Paper I develops and provides estimation techniques for the daily component of the proposed travel demand model and present simulation results provides within sample validation of the model. Paper II extends the model to allow for correlation in preferences over the course of a day using a mixed-logit specification. Paper III introduces a day-to-day connection by using an infinite horizon DDCM. To allow for estimation of the combined model, Paper III develops conditions under which sequential estimation can be used to estimate very large scale DDCM models in situations where: the discrete state variable is partly latent but transitions are observed; the model repeatedly returns to a small set of states; and between these states there is no discounting, random error terms are i.i.d Gumble and transitions in the discrete state variable is deterministic given a decision.Paper IV develops a dynamic discrete continuous choice model for a household deciding on the number of cars to own, their fuel type and the yearly mileage for each car. It thus contributes to bridging the gap between discrete continuous choice models and DDCMs of car ownership.Infinite horizon DDCMs are commonly found in the literature and are used in, e.g., Paper III and IV in this thesis. It has been well established that the discount factor must be strictly less than one for such models to be well defined.Paper V show that it is possible to extend the framework to discount factors greater than one, allowing DDCM's to describe agents that: maximize the average utility per stage (when there is no discounting); value the future greater than the present and thus prefers improving sequences of outcomes implying that they take high costs early and reach a potential terminal state sooner than optimal.
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| 8. |
- Chengxi, Liu, 1987-, et al.
(författare)
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Estimating changes in transport CO2 emissions due to changes in weather and climate in Sweden
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- There is a considerable body of studies on the relationship between daily transport activities and CO2 emissions. However, how these emissions vary in different weather conditions within and between the seasons of the year is largely unknown. Because individual activity–travel patterns are not static but vary in different weather conditions, it is immensely important to understand how CO2 emissions vary due to the change of weather. Using Swedish National Travel Survey data, with emission factors calculated through the European emission factor model ARTEMIS, this study is a first attempt to derive the amount of CO2 emission changes subject to the change of weather conditions. A series of econometric models was used to model travel behaviour variables that are crucial for influencing individual CO2 emissions. The marginal effects of weather variables on travel behaviour variables were derived. The results show an increase of individual CO2 emissions in a warmer climate and in more extreme temperature conditions, whereas increasing precipitation amounts and snow depths show limited effects on individual CO2 emissions. It is worth noting that the change in CO2 emissions in the scenario of a warmer climate and a more extreme temperature tends to be greater than the sum of changes in CO2 emissions in each individual scenario. Given that a warmer climate and more extreme weather could co-occur more frequently in the future, this result suggests even greater individual CO2 emissions than expected in such a future climate.
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| 9. |
- Chengxi, Liu, 1987-
(författare)
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Understanding the Impacts of Weather and Climate Change on Travel Behaviour
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Human behaviour produces massive greenhouse gas emissions, which trigger climate change and more unpredictable weather conditions. The fluctuation of daily weather corresponds to variations of everyday travel behaviour. This influence, although is less noticeable, can have a strong impact on the transport system. Specifically, the climate in Sweden is becoming warmer in the recent 10 years. However, it is largely unknown to what extent the change of travel behaviour would respond to the changing weather. Understanding these issues would help analysts and policy makers incorporate local weather and climate within our policy design and infrastructure management.The thesis contains eight papers exploring the weather and climate impacts on individual travel behaviour, each addressing a subset of this topic. Paper I explores the weather impact on individual’s mode choice decisions. In paper II and III, individual’s daily activity time, number of trips/trip chains, travel time and mode shares are jointly modelled. The results highlight the importance of modelling activity-travel variables for different trip purposes respectively. Paper IV develops a namely nested multivariate Tobit model to model activity time allocation trade-offs. In paper V, the roles of weather on trip chaining complexity is explored. A thermal index is introduced to better approximate the effects of the thermal environment. In paper VI, the role of subjective weather perception is investigated. Results confirm that individuals with different socio-demographics would have different subjective weather perception even given similar weather conditions. Paper VII derives the marginal effects of weather variables on transport CO2 emissions. The findings show more CO2 emissions due to the warmer climate in the future. Paper VIII summaries the existing findings in relations between weather variability and travel behaviour, and critically assesses the methodological issues in previous studies.
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| 10. |
- Chengxi, Liu, 1987-, et al.
(författare)
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Weather Variability and Travel Behaviour - What Do We Know and What Do We Not Know
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Given that severe weather conditions is becoming more and more frequent, understanding the roles of weathers in influencing individual’s daily activity-travel pattern is important. Whilst some of previously rare events, such as heavy rain, unpredictable snow, higher temperature, less clear differences between seasons etc., would become more common, it is still largely unknown how individual would change and adapt their travel pattern in future climate conditions. Because of this concern, the number of researches on weather and travel behaviour has been increased dramatically in the recent decades. Most of those empirical evidences, however, have not been adopted in cost-benefit analysis (CBA), which serves as the main tool for policy evaluation and project selection by stakeholders. This study summarizes the existing findings in relations between weather variability and travel behaviour, and critically assesses the methodological issues in those studies. Several further research directions are identified and suggested for bridging the gap between empirical evidence and current practice in CBA.
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