European Transport / Trasporti Europei (2000) 16/VI

The evaluation of the external costs caused by the impact of air pollution on human health is fraught with theoretical and empirical difficulties. Many issues are still unsatisfactorily dealt with. Due to the lack of theoretical consensus and good empirical data, the existing estimates on external costs of air pollution in Italy show a very large variability. This sends a noisy signal to the policy makers who ought to develop fiscal policies. In the paper we report on a new estimate we performed, based on recent theoretical and empirical achievements. The focus is on air pollution caused by transport activities. We get much more conservative estimates than there were presented in previous studies.

The objective of this paper is to explore the use of stated and revealed preference techniques for the calibration of residential location choice sub-model, being part of a larger land use and transport model The aim is to observe attitudes of people and therefore obtaining information to guide planning activity. Two examples of calibrating residential location choice model are described. In the first, a stated preference experiment was conducted in Calgary. In each observation each respondent was presented with a set of hypothetical residential location alternatives and asked to indicate the order of preference for these alternatives. In the second, a revealed preference survey was employed in the city of Naples where each interviewee had stated his/her zone of residence, of work.

A general description of container traffic relationships, that involve the European area, constitutes a fundamental element for the evaluation of actual and potential traffic flows through Gioia Tauro hub port. According to many researchers, container traffic volumes via sea concerning the European continent have increased from 11.3 to 15.8 million of TEUs (around 40%) during the period 1991-'96. European traffic travels through two separate port systems: the first one corresponds to the coastal range from Le Havre to Hamburg, known as 'Northern Range'; while the second, denominated 'Southern Range', includes ail Mediterranean ports from Algerians to Piraeus. This paper firstly illustrates the traffic dynamics of container freights in the European context and secondly presents the container traffic flow through the port of Gioia Tauro. The spatial, temporal and modal split of arriving and departing containers to/from Gioia Tauro are considered. Finally, the development perspectives of traffic volumes are outlined, in relation to the forecasted growth of the European port system. Analyses have been conducted during a two-year research project, whose title is: ".Evaluation of the potentialities of the Gioia Tauro intermodal terminal for the development of the Calabrian economy and role of minor Calabrian ports". The research was supported by Calabrian Region Administration (RO.R European Program).

The paper deals with the consequences of stoppage of fuel supply from one wing tank for stability and control of aircraft. It is shown that the counterbalancing of the weight of the blocked fuel causes the development of the additional moment about the transverse axis of the aircraft, which changes the loaded index at landing. It is pointed out that the intersection of the changed loaded index at landing and actual landing weight could be displaced out of the operating limits of the aircraft in the balance graph. The question is raised whether the manufacturers have considered the described stoppage in fuel supply when laying down the operating limits, i.e. has the adequate safety reserve been provided.

Preference surveys report individual choices regarding air alternative choice set. This type of data is paramount to forecast the product/service demand as it makes possible to determine the importance the consumers/users pay to the different product/service characteristics. The data modelling is usually performed through Legit. As a probabilistic model, Legit is based on assumptions about the consumer's behaviour, which might not be real (for instance, the model assumes there is no taste variation among individual). Besides, researchers have been using a linear utility function in order to avoid model complications, even though it is known that the individual' s behaviour in a choice process is not linear. This paper reports literature main research findings on the subject, as well as, the influence of designs in the calibration results. Experiments are conducted using simulation tools. Results showed that, for data holding Legit assumptions, the bigger the distance between the attribute vectors, the better the calibration results from Legit modelling as it reduces the possibility of the optimisation algorithm to get stuck in a fiat region. On the other hand, it is likely that the data could break the homoscedasticity Logit assumption on the error term.

A new intermodal container specifically designed to carry cars by both land and sea has been recently presented. This unit is a collapsible, 40-foot, ISO container with two decks and space for six cars. Because of its standard sizes, the unit will allow cars to be carried door-to-door (from factory to showrooms) by the same transportation means which carry containers all over the world. Cars were traditionally delivered using specialised land vehicles and vessels; such modes were not integrated and this fact led to multiple lashing and handling operations as vehicles were transferred from one mode to another. This paper analyses the benefits of car containerisation, mainly in terms of lower transportation costs and lesser space requirements for land Storage.

The design of bus routes and setting frequencies on these routes are two basic decision elements that critically determine public transport system performance. Various attempts are made to solve this type of combinatorial optimisation problem involving non- linearity, non- convexity with multiple objective functions but in most of the approaches design of routes and schedules are dealt separately though they are complementary to each other. In this study a model is developed for simultaneous routing and scheduling using a robust optimization technique namely Genetic Algorithm (GA). For this model objective function is minimisation of the sum of user and operator costs. User cost is taken as combination of in-vehicle travel time, waiting time and transfer time where as operator cost is vehicle operating cost of buses. Constraints are related to load factor, fleet size and overloading of links. The model is tested for Mandl's Swiss Transit Network and Demand Matrix. It is found that the developed model gives the better-optimised values over other existing results for the same network and demand matrix.

The effect of various levels of on-street parking on the operating conditions of traffic stream has been quantified in terms of congestion and level of service. The data obtained from a controlled experiment of on-street parking has been used to model congestion and to estimate level of service characteristics for the traffic flow with zero, low, medium and heavy on-street parking. The quantified congestion at different operating traffic volumes and the corresponding levels of service have been analysed and used as a basis for developing a potential policy for rationalisation of on-street parking on an example urban road.