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Sustainable Urban Transport Policy in the Context of New Mobility

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A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2020) | Viewed by 31125

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Prof. Yacan Wang

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Guest Editor

School of Economics and Management, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China
Interests: transportation economics; sustainable transport system; transport behavior response
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Prof. Dr. Andrea Cirà

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Department of Economics, University of Messina, Messina, Italy
Interests: transport economics and sustainability; model choice in transport economics and tourism; tourism research; bioeconomics
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Prof. Dr. Giuseppe Ioppolo

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Department of Economics, University of Messina, Italy
Interests: environmental management; industrial ecology; environmental governance; local development
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Prof. Dr. Hongchang Li

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School of Economics and Management, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
Interests: transportation economics and policy; high speed railway; government governance
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Driven by ICT development and smartphone application popularization (Shaheen et al, 2016), new forms of mobility such as bike-sharing (DeMaio, 2009; Cao et al, 2018), car sharing (Furuhata, 2013; Dowling, 2018), sharing freight and logistics (Krajewska et al, 2008; Gonzalez-Feliu & Morana, 2011) and so on have developed very quickly in the recent decades worldwide. Transport policy plays an essential role in bringing urban transportation into a desirable future (Gössling, 2018). How to design technologically, financially, and environmentally sustainable transport policies accommodating new mobility and business models is a very challenging problem faces by urban transport policy makers (Dowling and Kent, 2015).

In this Special Issue, we call attention to theoretical and empirical studies on sustainable urban transport policy driven by new mobility. This Special Issue will provide a platform for exchanging knowledge on emerging methods, practical implementation, and lessons learned concerning theoretical and empirical problems of sustainable urban transport policies related to new mobility. Specifically, the guest editors encourage submissions of original research articles with key words or directions including but not limited to:

Recent development of new mobility and its impact on transport;
New forms of transport services, business models driven by technology innovation;
Transport policy challenges especially brought forth by sharing transport faced by policy makers;
Fundamental theories as to regulation and governance of new types of mobility;
Theoretical research advancement as to sharing transport and beyond;
Quantitative modeling and big data analysis of the impacts of urban transport policy;
Case studies of pros and cons on sustainable urban transport policy on new mobility in China and other countries;
Co-ordinations and co-operations of anti-monopoly and industrial regulation needed to develop sustainable transport policy on new mobility;
Stakeholder analysis of the design of sustainable urban transport policy on new mobility.

References:

Shaheen, S., Cohen, A., & Zohdy, I. (2016). Shared mobility: current practices and guiding principles (No. FHWA-HOP-16-022).

Shaheen, S., Cohen, A., Zohdy, I., & Kock, B. (2016). Smartphone applications to influence travel choices: practices and policies (No. FHWA-HOP-16-023).

Furuhata, M., Dessouky, M., Ordóñez, F., Brunet, M. E., Wang, X., & Koenig, S. (2013). Ridesharing: The state-of-the-art and future directions. Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 57, 28-46.

Dowling, R., Maalsen, S., & Kent, J. L. (2018). Sharing as sociomaterial practice: Car sharing and the material reconstitution of automobility. Geoforum, 88, 10-16.

Krajewska, M. A., Kopfer, H., Laporte, G., Ropke, S., & Zaccour, G. (2008). Horizontal cooperation among freight carriers: request allocation and profit sharing. Journal of the Operational Research Society, 59(11), 1483-1491.

Gonzalez-Feliu, J., & Morana, J. (2011). Collaborative transportation sharing: from theory to practice via a case study from France. In Technologies for supporting reasoning communities and collaborative decision making: Cooperative approaches (pp. 252-271). IGI Global.

Gössling, S., Cohen, S., Higham, J., Peeters, P., & Eijgelaar, E. (2018). Desirable transport futures.Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, 61, 301-309.

Dowling, R., & Kent, J. (2015). Practice and public–private partnerships in sustainable transport governance: The case of car sharing in Sydney, Australia. Transport Policy, 40, 58-64.

Kc-claffy, & Clark, D. (2014). Platform models for sustainable Internet regulation. Journal of Information Policy, 4, 463-488.

Arbolino, R., Carlucci, F., Cirà, A., De Simone, L., Ioppolo, G., Yigitcanlar, T. (2018) Factors affecting transport privatization: An empirical analysis of the EU. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice (110), 149-160

Yigitcanlar, T., Kamruzzaman, Md., Buys, L., Ioppolo, G., Sabatini-Marques, J., Moreira da Costa, E., Yun J.J. (2018) Understanding ‘smart cities’: Intertwining development drivers with desired outcomes in a multidimensional framework. Cities 81, 145-160

Prof. Yacan Wang
Prof. Dr. Andrea Cirà
Prof. Dr. Giuseppe Ioppolo
Prof. Dr. Hongchang Li
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

sustainable urban transportation
new mobility
transport policy

Published Papers (9 papers)

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Research

23 pages, 1981 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Travel Characteristics Analysis and Passenger Flow Prediction of Intercity Shuttles in the Pearl River Delta on Holidays

by Binglei Xie, Yu Sun, Xiaolong Huang, Le Yu and Gangyan Xu

Sustainability 2020, 12(18), 7249; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12187249 - 04 Sep 2020

Cited by 11 | Viewed by 2379

Abstract

As China’s urbanization process continues to accelerate, the demand for intercity residents’ transportation has increased dramatically. Holiday travel has different demand characteristics, causing serious shortage during peak periods. However, current research barely focuses on the passenger flow prediction along with travel characteristics of intercity shuttles. Accurately predicting passenger flow during the holidays helps to improve operational organization efficiency and residents’ satisfaction, and provides a basis for reasonable resource allocation by the management department. This paper analyzes the spatiotemporal characteristics of intercity shuttles passenger flow in the Pearl River Delta. Separate passenger flow prediction models on non-holiday and holiday are established using an improved genetic algorithm optimized back propagation neural network (IGA-BPNN) based on the characteristics of passenger flow, and the prediction models are validated based on panel data. The results of weekly flow show obvious holiday characteristics, and the hourly traffic flow of holidays is much larger than that of weekends and weekdays. There is a significant difference in the hourly flow between different holidays. The IGA-BPNN model used in this paper achieves lower prediction error relative to the benchmark BPNN approach (leads a two thirds reduction in MAPE, and an over 85% reduction in MSPE). Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Urban Transport Policy in the Context of New Mobility)

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14 pages, 1768 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Availability of Public Electric Vehicle Charging Pile and Development of Electric Vehicle: Evidence from China

by Shuping Wu and Zan Yang

Sustainability 2020, 12(16), 6369; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12166369 - 07 Aug 2020

Cited by 11 | Viewed by 4157

Abstract

As electric vehicles can significantly reduce the direct carbon emissions from petroleum, promoting the development of the electric vehicle market has been a new concentration for the auto industry. However, insufficient public charging infrastructure has become a significant obstacle to the further growth of electric vehicle sales. This paper estimates the impact of the availability of public charging piles on electric vehicle sales using panel regression analysis. It then investigates the barriers to the construction and operation of the public charging piles based on a field survey in 101 communities in Beijing, China. We find that insufficient public charging piles would significantly limit the sales of electric vehicles, in particular when the public charging piles are built up for specific users or in developed regions where private parking spaces are limited. It is found that the top four barriers are limited parking spaces, complicated circuit modification, unclear responsibilities for property management companies, and the objection or high mobility of existing parking space users. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Urban Transport Policy in the Context of New Mobility)

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25 pages, 3018 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Integrated Optimization of the Location–Inventory Problem of Maintenance Component Distribution for High-Speed Railway Operations

by Dezhi Zhang, Shuxin Yang, Shuangyan Li, Jiajun Fan and Bin Ji

Sustainability 2020, 12(13), 5447; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12135447 - 06 Jul 2020

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 2314

Abstract

Sustainable distribution network design for the maintenance components of electric multiple units (EMUs) is critical to reduce the problem of unreasonable resource allocation and capital occupation of high-speed railway (HSR) operations. Motivated by the above analysis, this study investigates the integrated optimization of the location and inventory of EMU maintenance component distributions. Aiming to improve the sustainable operation for high-speed railway, we proposed a corresponding nonlinear mixed-integer programming model to determine the location of the distribution center (DC) for EMU maintenance component delivery, inventory control strategy, and corresponding service level. The above optimization model is solved by an adaptive improved genetic algorithm. The proposed model and algorithm are applied to a real-world case study on China’s EMU maintenance components. The findings show that a higher service level is not better to achieve the lower total cost in the maintenance component distribution network. The ratios of transportation modes are significant to balance the service level and total cost of the EMU distribution network. Furthermore, the unit out-of-stock cost and the service level both show great impacts on the total costs of the EMU distribution system. Finally, there exists an optimal ratio of different transport modes, which ensures the least total cost of the EMU distribution system. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Urban Transport Policy in the Context of New Mobility)

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25 pages, 732 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Mixed Logit Model Based on Improved Nonlinear Utility Functions: A Market Shares Solution Method of Different Railway Traffic Modes

by Bing Han, Shuang Ren and Jingjing Bao

Sustainability 2020, 12(4), 1406; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12041406 - 14 Feb 2020

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2649

Abstract

In recent years, with the development of high-speed railway in China, the railway operating mileages and passenger transport capacity have increased rapidly. Due to the high density of trains and the limited capacity of railways, it is necessary to solve market shares of different railway traffic modes in order to adjust the operation plans appropriately and run railway passenger transport products in line with passenger demand. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to calculate market shares by formulating a mixed logit model based on improved nonlinear utility functions taking different factors into consideration, such as seat grades, fares, running time, passenger income levels and so on. Firstly according to maximum likelihood estimation, the likelihood function of this mixed logit model is proposed to maximize utility of all passenger groups. After that, we propose two improved algorithms based on the simulated annealing algorithm (ISAA-CC and ISAA-SS) to estimate the unknown parameters and solve the optimal solution of this model in order to enhance the computational efficiency. Finally, a real-world instance with related data of Beijing–Tianjin corridor, is implemented to demonstrate the performance and effectiveness of the proposed approaches. In addition, by performing this numerical experiment and comparing these two improved algorithms with the traditional Newton method, the ant colony algorithm and the simulated annealing algorithm, we prove that the improved algorithms we developed are superior to others in the optimal solution. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Urban Transport Policy in the Context of New Mobility)

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19 pages, 68177 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Spatiotemporal Characteristics of Bike-Sharing Usage around Rail Transit Stations: Evidence from Beijing, China

by Zijia Wang, Lei Cheng, Yongxing Li and Zhiqiang Li

Sustainability 2020, 12(4), 1299; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12041299 - 11 Feb 2020

Cited by 27 | Viewed by 3676

Abstract

As an emerging mode of transport, bike-sharing is being quickly accepted by Chinese residents due to its convenience and environmental friendliness. As hotspots for bike-sharing, railway-station service areas attract thousands of bikes during peak hours, which can block roads and pedestrian walkways. Of the many works devoted to the connection between bikes and rail, few have addressed the spatial‒temporal pattern of bike-sharing accumulating around station service areas. In this work, we investigate the distribution patterns of bike-sharing in station service areas, which are influenced not only by railway-station ridership but also by the built environment around the station, illustrating obvious spatial heterogeneity. To this end, we established a geographic weighted regression (GWR) model to capture this feature considering the variables of passenger flow and the built environment. Using the data from bike-sharing in Beijing, China, we applied the GWR model to carry out a spatiotemporal characteristic analysis of the relationship between bike-sharing usage in railway-station service areas and its determinants, including the passenger flow in stations, land use, bus lines, and road-network characteristics. The influence of these factors on bike-sharing usage is quite different in time and space. For instance, bus lines are a competing mode of transport with bike-sharing in suburban areas but not in city centers, whereas industrial and residential areas could also heavily affect the bike-sharing demand as well as railway-station ridership. The results of this work can help facilitate the dynamic allocation of bike-sharing and increase the efficiency of this emerging mode of transport. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Urban Transport Policy in the Context of New Mobility)

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12 pages, 493 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Research on the Relationship between the Individual Characteristics of Electric Bike Riders and Illegal Speeding Behavior: A Questionnaire-Based Study

by Changxi Ma, Jibiao Zhou, Dong Yang and Yuanyuan Fan

Sustainability 2020, 12(3), 799; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12030799 - 21 Jan 2020

Cited by 14 | Viewed by 2569

Abstract

To examine the relationship between electric bike riders’ individual characteristics and their riding speed, this paper obtained 350 valid survey responses from e-bike riders using an on-site sampling survey method. Using the non-aggregate theory, we take the individual attributes of the rider’s age, driving age, personality, and corrective vision as potential influencing factors. The metric model of the influencing factors of the rider’s personal characteristics on riding speed is established, and we analyze the sensitivity of many influencing factors by using the theory of elasticity. The results show that the absolute value of the elasticity value corresponding to the rider’s gender, age, corrected visual acuity, and other factors is less than 1, which indicates that the above factors have no flexibility regarding the rider’s riding speed selection behavior. However, in four selection intervals, the elasticity values of the rider’s education level are 1.577, 2.484, 1.810, and 1.667; those of their driving age are −1.537, −2.061, −1.547, and −1.606, and those of their riding proficiency are 3.302, 12.038, 10.370, and 11.177, which indicate that the three factors of rider’s education level, driving age, and riding proficiency have a significant impact on the riding speed choice behavior. The finding of the study is helpful for the relevant government departments to formulate more accurate classified intervention measures, and effectively prevent the occurrence of illegal speeding behavior. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Urban Transport Policy in the Context of New Mobility)

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9 pages, 984 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Dynamic Crosswalk Signal Timing Optimization Model Considering Vehicle and Pedestrian Delays and Fuel Consumption Cost

by Keyan Bai, Enjian Yao, Long Pan, Linze Li and Wei Chen

Sustainability 2020, 12(2), 689; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12020689 - 17 Jan 2020

Cited by 8 | Viewed by 2269

Abstract

Due to the development of video perception technology, obtaining the volume of pedestrians and vehicles at a crosswalk has become much easier. Based on this development, this paper proposes a dynamic crosswalk signal timing optimization model and then analyzes the effects for three different signal timing strategies. First, we propose the dynamic signal timing optimization model by involving the delays of pedestrians and vehicles, as well as the fuel consumption cost, simultaneously. In the model, we design a dynamic signal timing strategy, using the volume of past cycles to predict the present volume, and then calculate the optimal signal timing by minimizing the total cost of the system. Second, the model is applied to a crosswalk in Beijing, China, as an example, and we compare and analyze the results of three timing strategies: Dynamic signal timing, optimal fixed timing, and current fixed timing. The results show that the dynamic signal timing is more efficient during the morning peak hour in terms of decreasing the total cost. Compared to the current fixed timing result, the vehicle delay and the fuel consumption decrease, while the pedestrian delay increases in both morning peak hour and flat hour for the other two signal timing strategies. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Urban Transport Policy in the Context of New Mobility)

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16 pages, 2025 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Underlying Reasons behind the Development of Public Electric Buses in China: The Beijing Case

by Zeyuan Song, Yingqi Liu, Hongwei Gao and Suxiu Li

Sustainability 2020, 12(2), 688; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12020688 - 17 Jan 2020

Cited by 15 | Viewed by 5071

Abstract

After great efforts towards the development of the electric vehicle (EV) industry and the use of its products in public transportation networks, more electric buses operate in China than in any other country in the world. As more investors will enter the industry, the effect of new participants on the development of the EV industry becomes an important issue. Based on the analysis of several key stakeholders (central and local governments, electric bus producers, users/bus companies, and providers of charging infrastructure in public transportation, this paper constructs a dynamic game-theory model to determine the main participants and their strategic space payoff functions, and ultimately estimates a Nash equilibrium. The dynamic game-model analysis clearly shows that the government’s decision to provide subsidies or not is currently affecting the entire industry and is an important prerequisite for a dynamic game. The user decides the pace of the development of this industry and the user’s management efficiency is a key factor affecting users’ needs. In addition, the availability of EVs and charging station facilities are equally important to the development of the industry. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Urban Transport Policy in the Context of New Mobility)

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21 pages, 1180 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Impact of the Freight Transport Modal Shift Policy on China’s Carbon Emissions Reduction

by Shuling Chen, Jianhong Wu and Yueqi Zong

Sustainability 2020, 12(2), 583; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12020583 - 13 Jan 2020

Cited by 18 | Viewed by 5207

Abstract

How to reduce the negative transport externalities, especially its carbon emissions, without having significant negative influence on economic and social development is the key for sustainable development in China. This paper explores the impacts of China’s recent modal shift policy on carbon emissions, summaries experience from China, and points out future development directions. The paper first compares the different energy consumption and carbon emissions between the road freight transport and the railways in China, and then has a scenarios analysis on China’s energy consumption and carbon emissions of the transport sector in 2025. The latest progress and major problems of modal shift policy in China are presented, and a methodology to address this problem is also proposed. Based on the methodology, we compare the benefits and costs brought by modal shift policy in the case of Ordos, Inner Mongolia. Based on the results, principles and suggestions on how to design and implement more efficient modal shift policy are proposed. We find that road transport is the most polluting mode among various modes of transport, and the railway transport has the least carbon emissions. Furthermore, the modal shift policy plays a positive role in carbon emissions, but the costs caused by the policy are higher than the benefits at some circumstances. Moreover, to achieve the sustainable modal shift policy by relying on the feasible market mechanism, together with scientific and effective regulation, instead of “one size for all” administrative policy, are likely the way forward. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Urban Transport Policy in the Context of New Mobility)

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