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- Contents
- Message from the Co-General Editors
- Public-Private Partnerships
- Railroad Accidents
- Truck Volume Estimation
- Railroad-Shipper Negotiations
- Airline Industry in China
- Vehicle Emissions
- Pedestrian Accidents
- Rail Passenger Policy
A Message from the JTRF Co-General Editors
This is the second year that JTRF will be published in the spring, summer, and fall. The Spring 2006 issue contains the usual wide variety of transportation topics that distinguishes JTRF from other transportation journals. Topical areas include:
- Congestion pricing on metropolitan highways
- Reaction of the stock market to major railroad accidents
- Quantitative methods to estimate truck volume
- Railroad-shipper negotiating strategies
- Potential of GIS to manage pedestrian accidents in developing countries
- Impacts of government restructuring of the airline industry in China
- Comparison of emission models to field data for light duty vehicles
In "Implementing Congestion Pricing on Metropolitan Highway Networks with Self-Financing Public-Private Partnerships," Patrick DeCorla-Souza presents a new public-private partnership model for road pricing either at the facility level or on a region-wide highway network. The approach employs outcome-based contracting systems and incorporates financial incentives to maximize mobility goals, with clearly stated performance standards to ensure service quality. The author developed two scenarios at a sketch level of analysis. One scenario involved pricing all existing lanes on the limited access highway system, and the other involved an addition of capacity at the most critical locations on the limited highway system. The results suggest that both scenarios would generate new toll revenue sufficient to pay for all capital and operating costs.
Thomas J. Walker, Kuntara Pukthuanthong, and Sergey S. Barabanov examine the impact of train accidents on the stock prices of involved railroads in "On the Stock Market's Reaction to Major Railroad Accidents: An Empirical Analysis." The authors employ a sample of 26 accidents involving trains operated by U.S. and Canadian companies during the 1993-2003 period. The authors found that one of the main determinants of railroad stock price decline is the expected liability claims against the railroads. The size of the stock price decline is greater for larger firm size and accidents involving a large number of injuries and fatalities. They found that accidents that result in hazardous material spills cause large stock price drops in the days following the event. Walker et al. discovered that accidents caused by reckless or illegal behavior by railroad company employees result in particularly large stock price declines. On the other hand, accidents caused by mechanical failures or signal malfunctions result in small railroad stock price declines.
In "Truck Volume Estimation Via Linear Regression Under Limited Data," Maria Boilé and Michail Golias use linear regression algorithms to estimate truck traffic. The goal of the paper is to estimate linear relationships between truck volume and surrounding land use activities and economic development. The authors evaluate the relative statistical performance of Ridge Regression, Lasso Regression, Partial Least Squares Regression, and Constrained Linear Least Squares Optimization. These methods were tested with truck traffic volume on New Jersey highways as the dependent variable, and socioeconomic data as the independent variables. The independent variables included population, employment, sales, and number of establishments in the vicinity of the highway. The authors concluded that these algorithms have the computational ability to overcome many of the problems of OLS and stepwise regression. The authors recommend that in dealing with cases where data is limited, all the techniques in the paper should be used and the one with the best statistical results should be selected.
William Huneke uses a game theory framework to analyze railroad-shipper negotiations in "A Game Theory Approach to Railroad-Shipper Negotiations." In the model developed by Huneke, the railroad's objective is to maximize profit, while the shipper's goal is to minimize costs. The railroad offers a rate and the shipper chooses to either accept the rate, build-out to another railroad, or litigate the rate at the regulatory agency. Huneke found that larger shipment sizes increase the value of a potential build-out so the parties have an incentive to negotiate the rate. On the other hand, increasing the cost of build-out increases the incentives for litigation at the regulatory agency. Huneke also found that increased litigation will occur if both parties perceive that the regulatory agency has become arbitrary rather than rational in its decisions.
In "The Operational Impacts of Government Restructuring of the Airline Industry in China," Carl A. Scheraga investigates the operational efficiency of three Chinese airlines that were formed by the consolidation of 10 state-owned air carriers in 2000 and 2001. The relative operational efficiency of Air China, China Eastern, and China Southern is compared to a sample of Asian, European, and U.S. flag carriers using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Scheraga also examines the underlying structural determinants of efficiency. He concludes that the three Chinese carriers are not as efficient as the comparison group of airlines, and suggests managerial strategies to improve efficiency.
Mansoureh Jeihani and four colleagues compare the performance of four vehicle emissions models to field data in "Comparison of TRANSIMS' Light Duty Vehicle Emissions with On-Road Emission Measurements." The authors describe and validate the TRANSIMS emission module and compare its emission estimates to field data measurements and emission estimates of three other state-of-the-art emission models (VT-Micro, CMEM, and MOBILE 6). The authors found that the TRANSIMS model provides consistent trends of estimated carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons with field data, but inconsistent trends of estimated nitrogen oxide. They also discovered that the magnitude of emissions estimated by TRANSIMS is closer to the field data than those obtained from the other three models.
In "GIS Potential in Management of Pedestrian Accidents in Developing Countries," Mohammed T. Obaidat investigates the ability of geographic information systems (GIS) to identify hazardous, pedestrian accident prone locations in Irbid City-Jordan. The author analyzed pedestrian accident data by pedestrian characteristics, driver characteristics, accident times and location, environmental conditions, vehicle speed and characteristics, and accident severity. Pedestrian accidents were correlated to operational factors including traffic volume, speed, pedestrian volume, street length, and number of crossing access points. Obaidat used a GIS query builder to identify locations where most vehicle-pedestrian accidents occurred. He concluded that GIS has high potential for identifying hazardous locations and suggested effective countermeasures.
Kofi Obeng
Co-General Editor - JTRF
Michael W. Babcock
Co-General Editor - JTRF
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