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The experience of transport systems users, in terms of comfort, reliability, safety and above all convenience, is critical in determining demand for transport services, at least when there is a choice of alternative ways to travel. Convenience is one of the strongest attractions of the private car for passenger transport. For users of public transport, convenience is also clearly important but not always clearly defined and not often measured in designing transport systems or monitoring their operating performance. In many situations, an increase in public transport convenience reduces the unit costs of travel (euros/dollars per hour or cents per minute) and so provides benefits equivalent to an increase in travel speed. This report focuses on convenience and its importance to the user experience. It reviews operational definitions of convenience, evidence for the willingness of users to pay for convenience and the use of indicators to assess and improve the convenience of public transport, with a view to making it more effective and more competitive.
This report examines the issues that need to be considered before the decision to proceed to costly expansions with long-life spans and a structural influence on the local and national economy. The report benefits from a case study of Chile.
Features the most successful and interesting current projects in this area of development and planning Responds to wide international interest in urban regeneration projects and transportation issues Offers practical guidance to complex issues based on research findings
Estonia’s economy continues to perform well, and growing incomes support well-being. However, the expansion has peaked, and growth is set to soften due to weak international demand. Prudent fiscal policy has resulted in low debt, but spending pressures related to meeting infrastructure needs and ageing are mounting. Old age poverty is high and the proposal to allow early withdrawal of pension funds threatens macroeconomic stability and pension adequacy. The gender wage gap is among the highest in the OECD, and inequalities in income and health are considerable, reflecting gaps in the social safety net. The oil-shale sector is highly energy-intensive and is the main culprit behind Estonia’s high greenhouse gas emissions, but reducing dependence on the sector is challenging, as it is an important employer and meets 70% of Estonia’s energy needs.
For millennia, the Mediterranean has been one of the most active trading areas, supported by a transport network connecting riparian cities and beyond to their hinterland. The Mediterranean has complex trade patterns and routes--but with key differences from the past. It is no longer an isolated world economy: it is both a trading area and a transit area linking Europe and North Africa with the rest of the world through the hub-and-spoke structure of maritime networks. Understanding how trade connectivity works in the Mediterranean, and elsewhere, is important to policy makers, especially those in developing countries in the Mediterranean, concerned with the economic benefits of large invest...
- Substantial progress has been made in improving the sustainability of transport in Europe in a number of areas and is reported in this paper. Nevertheless there remain important problems and challenges: - unsustainable rates of traffic growth ...
Over the last decade or so, private-sector financing through public-private partnerships (PPPs) has become increasingly popular around the world as a way of procuring and maintaining public-sector infrastructure, in sectors such as transportation (roads, bridges, tunnels, railways, ports, airports), social infrastructure (hospitals, schools, prisons, social housing) public utilities (water supply, waste water treatment, waste disposal), government offices and other accommodation, and other specialised services (communications networks or defence equipment). This book, based on the author's practical experience on the public- and private-sector sides of the table, reviews the key policy issue...
In recent decades, the foreign assets and liabilities of advanced economies have grown rapidly relative to GDP, with the increase in gross cross-holdings far exceeding changes in the size of net positions. Moreover, the portfolio equity and FDI categories have grown in importance relative to international debt stocks. This paper describes the broad trends in international financial integration for a sample of industrial countries and seeks to explain the cross-country and time-series variation in the size of international balance sheets. It also examines the behavior of the rates of return on foreign assets and liabilities, relating them to "market" returns.
The role of railways in urban development is the subject of this book. The central aim is to inquire into how especially the development of high-speed rail and light rail links will affect European cities. The analyses are carried out with special attention given to the broader institutional environment of the railway system, including the shift toward privatised railway companies and internationalisation.
Transport Justice develops a new paradigm for transportation planning based on principles of justice. Author Karel Martens starts from the observation that for the last fifty years the focus of transportation planning and policy has been on the performance of the transport system and ways to improve it, without much attention being paid to the persons actually using – or failing to use – that transport system. There are far-reaching consequences of this approach, with some enjoying the fruits of the improvements in the transport system, while others have experienced a substantial deterioration in their situation. The growing body of academic evidence on the resulting disparities in mobil...