Institute for Transport Studies (ITS)

A firm can obtain market power through its dominant position on the product market, or via control of a key resource. In particular, it has been argued that airport dominance was a more important source of market power in the US airline industry than route dominance. We examine this contention by analysing a 17-year panel of airport-level prices in the United States. We demonstrate that even though on average airport-level concentration appears to be the strongest source of market power; concentration on routes originating at an airport is the strongest predictor of price levels for large and medium hub airports. There is little evidence that either airport or route dominance significantly affect prices at medium and small hub airports. There is also little evidence that an airport's dominant carrier exerts market power beyond the level predicted by the airport or route dominance. Our results imply that consumer welfare losses due to airline consolidation can be concentrated in smaller communities, and related to changes in airport-level concentration. We provide a simple evaluation of the possible effects of two recent mergers (Delta - Northwest and United - Continental) in light of this finding, and suggest that the former consolidation event can potentially lead to non-trivial consumer welfare losses to travellers in over 30 small communities.

This seminar presents Dr Lathia's recent work investigating how data from public transport fare collection systems can be used to analyse travellers' behaviour and augment the information systems that urban residents will use to navigate their city. In particular, fare collection data can be blended with machine learning algorithms to (a) provide personalised travel time estimates, (b) learn which stations are relevant to each passengers' habits, and (c) help travellers to purchase the best ticket for their needs. The seminar will discuss how these techniques have been designed and evaluated using millions of Oyster card transactions from London. Dr Lathia is Research Associate in the Networks and Operating Systems Group of Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory, where his work includes an EPSRC project about using technology to help "nudge" people to change their behaviour. Prior to joining the Computer Lab, he was a Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science at University College London, where he analysed huge volumes of Oyster card data as part of the EC i-Tour (intelligent Transport Systems for Optimised Urban Trips) project.

This paper compares recent experiences in contract negotiation and subsequent commitment in public air services with the bus industry. The heart of the paper is a survey of European and Australian regional airlines, which we mirror with revealed experiences of bus operators. Ultimately airline and bus services are similar in that public authorities procure transport services that are desirable for the society but would be unprofitable without government involvement. One of the surveyed contract details that had a perceived high clarity in both industries was "payment procedures" and amongst those with rather poor clarity was also in both industries "incentives to improve performance and grow patronage". Because of the strong safety culture around air services we find that regulation and trusting partnerships are even more important to aviation than to the bus sector. Because of the high level of trust but also because of simpler and more complete contracts in aviation, there is, despite the shorter duration of air contracts, much less (re-)negotiation going on compared to the bus operations.

Over recent years, there has been considerable interest in Alternative Fuel Vehicles (AFV) driven by the significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from conventional vehicles which contribute to climate change. A number of technologies are now commercially available or close to market, and there are policies being implemented in order to overcome the barriers which will potentially prevent a successful market penetration. There have been many modelling studies carried out to explore the impacts of these barriers and the policies. However, the focus (e.g policy, preferences or forecasting) and assumptions (on technological innovation, model boundaries and inclusion of AFV types, for instance) behind the models vary immensely. Further to this, there appears to have been no study which explicitly considers the ethical impacts of the model parameters or the policies themselves. This omission is of prevalent importance, as the policies recommended by such work could be adopted in the real world, where there may be severe implications if the policy induces some inequality within our society, or impacts unfairly on those already worst off.

Following a brief appraisal of the range of existing models and potential policies, this paper will concentrate on a study by Whalter et al (2010), which utilised system dynamic modelling to explore the impact on market share and success of the different strategies employed within the Californian automobile industry to meet mandatory targets on GHG emissions and share of Zero Emission Vehicles (ZEVs). Following comment upon the policies and assumptions within the model and the ethical consequences of these, suggestions for improvement and model extension will be offered, in order to identify policies that may be both robust to ethical criticism and successful in achieving an AFV market share that will ensure the required GHG emission reductions.

Gillian joined the Doctoral Training Centre in Low Carbon Technologies in 2009 and has just completed the first year of PhD research. Prior to this Gillian worked in environmental management and business reporting at Yorkshire Water for six years, following an Undergraduate Masters in chemistry from Bradford University. Gillian's interdisciplinary research combines applied ethics, modelling techniques, policy appraisal and technological themes.

Over the next decade the 'baby boomer' cohort will contribute to the proportion of those aged over 60 years old in the UK, which has also been termed an ageing population. The issue of how people will continue to be mobile in this context has not been considered as highly in comparison to other challenges such as state pension and healthcare provision. As such, this presentation aims to develop insight into the changing travel behaviour of the elderly population and the future travel implications for the 'baby boomers'. The presentation will explore what the historic travel patterns in Great Britain are amongst the elderly using data from the National Travel Survey and seeks to disentangle the extent to which Age, Cohort and Time effects can explain change in travel behaviour over time.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have transformed many aspects of business, society and government, from healthcare to education and the economy. ICT are now in the early stages of transforming transportation systems by integrating sensors (remote sensing and positioning), control units (traffic signals, message signs) and automatic technologies with microchips to enable them to communicate with each other through wireless technologies. In many developed countries, particularly Japan and South Korea, the deployment of ICT in Active Traffic Management(ATM) programmes has led to significant improvement of traffic network performance such as reduced congestion, increased traffic safety, enhanced environmental quality (e.g. reduced CO2) and a more reliable service to the road user. It is expected that in the coming 5 to 10 years ICT will considerably progress worldwide so that intelligent equipped vehicles, in which the driving tasks are shifted from the driver to the vehicle through autonomous vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication, will make up a significant share of the traffic flow. In V2V communication, the leading equipped vehicle will issue information of its current speed, driving manoeuvre (e.g. acceleration or deceleration), etc. to further upstream vehicles while in V2I communication, the equipped vehicle will exchange information with roadside intelligent devices and receive commands from such devices for consequent driving activities. A considerable proportion of intelligent vehicles in traffic flow will create intelligent traffic networks containing a mixed composition of non-equipped (or manual) and equipped vehicles. Such traffic flow system is defined as a heterogeneous intelligent traffic system. This fellowship will seek solutions for an improved ATM programme to monitor and control more efficiently intelligent traffic networks. In principle, the traffic control problem for heterogeneous intelligent traffic networks is highly complex, which is characterized by the interactions between non-equipped vehicles and various types of equipped vehicles and by the interaction between equipped vehicles and the roadside intelligent devices, as well as by the interplay between different control strategies for different types of vehicles. The fellowship will tackle such complex issues and bring in a new real-time model-based intelligent traffic control framework using real-life data collected from multiple sources (loop detectors, remote sensing, mobile phones, floating cars, etc. ). The new model will predict in the short term the traffic congestion patterns (i.e. the transitions between free-flow, congestion or stop-and-go jams) and investigate the true causes of such congestion which occurs in a heterogeneous intelligent traffic network. Based on the traffic states predicted from the real-time model, a sequence of immediate optimal control actions will be established for different types of vehicles (equipped and non-equipped) in order to reduce congestion, travel time and air pollution.

Dr Dong Ngoduy is a University Research Fellow at ITS. Dong has background in traffic flow theory and simulation. He currently secures a Career acceleration fellowship award from EPSRC to work in a 5-year research programme concerning the development of model and control methods for the dynamics of intelligent traffic flow networks.

Traffic data have some characteristics that can be quite challenging to deal with from a statistical modelling perspective. In addition, there is the need of having on-line traffic forecasts in order to support real time decisions that must be taken during rush hours or other crucial traffic periods. Graphical dynamic models, which combine graphical representations of the multivariate flow time series under study with a dynamic modelling approach, have been shown to be a useful class of models in this field. However, there are still some modelling issues that must be addressed, such as measurement errors due to possible malfunctions of the data collection devices and different levels of traffic variability depending on the period of the day. In this talk, it will be shown how these models can be extended in order to deal with these issues thus improving their suitability for multivariate short-term flow forecasting. Data from the intersection of three motorways - the M60, M62 and M602 in the west of Manchester - will be used for an application of the proposed methodologies.

Osvaldo is a 3rd-year PhD student working on the development of statistical methodologies for multivariate traffic flow forecasting.

This seminar will look at the differences between 'social marketing' and the 'marketing of social things'. It will describe the basic components of marketing and how these would apply to promoting alternatives to the car. Geoff Gardner was formerly at the Transport Research Laboratory and has private and public sector experience. He is currently working on projects related to healthy and active transport.

Especially for junior researchers, choosing where to publish their work can be a crucial career-influencing decision. This presentation discusses why we need comparative evaluation of the quality of different journals; what metrics can be used to compare them; and how to decide where to submit your research article. Elsevier publishes many of the most highly-ranked journals in transportation research. Chris has managed the Elsevier transport list for nearly 20 years.

This presentation examines the disparate governance landscapes of transport and carbon across English city-regions. In looking towards a low carbon as opposed to 'sustainable' transport research agenda, this paper investigates emerging transport and carbon governance relationships within the city regions of Yorkshire and the Humber. It draws upon multilevel governance analysis to compare the historically disparate disciplines of carbon governance and transport governance in the city-regions. The recent and continuing devolution of transport policy to UK constituent countries has marked a divergence in the delivery and development of low-carbon transportation (Docherty & Shaw 2011). This is also true to varying degrees within English regions (MacKinnon and Vigar 2008). In parallel the governance of carbon emissions in the UK has developed into a myriad of shifting responsibilities which do not necessarily match up to deliver low carbon transport interventions on the ground (Docherty & Shaw 2008). By developing a comparative multilevel governance analysis for transport and carbon, drawing on insights from critical discourse analysis and utilising urban theory, it is argued that low carbon investments in transport infrastructure are now (and will increasingly be) contested and legitimised on the basis of a 'carbon/capital fix'.

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The Disruption project is a £1.2M RCUK funded project under the Energy programme. The project will explore travel practices in a range of places and social contexts seeking to understand how understandings of 'normality' of travel are constructed and how travelers and organizations respond to 'disruptions' to normality. Evidence will be drawn from detailed ethnographic accounts of individual and familial responses to events such as job loss, broken limbs, illness through to large scale responsive surveys that can capture the impacts of major system-wide disruptions such as the ash cloud event and snow and ice events of 2010. The project is seeking to understand whether observing the responses to disruptions provides new insights into the constraints and opportunities to encourage low carbon behavior and whether this, in turn, can 'disrupt' the incrementalism of current policy on travel behavior change.

The Disruption project is funded by EPSRC as part of the RCUK Energy programme. The Disruption project partners are the University of Leeds, University of Lancaster, University of Aberdeen, Open University, Brighton University, Glasgow University and University of the West of England. The project began on 01 September 2011 and this talk will focus on the conceptual framework for the project. Insights are welcome from all disciplines!

Dr Greg Marsden, Senior Lecturer in Transport Policy and Strategy. His research interests relate to understanding decision-making processes within local and national government, issues of governance and acceptability.

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European Union bodies are considering whether to make complete vertical separation of rail infrastructure from operations mandatory. Yet academic research on the impact of vertical separation on costs seems inconclusive as much depends on the circumstances of the country concerned and the way in which the system is managed (Nash and Matthews, 2009). Other reforms can also have a significant impact. Vertical separation is often advocated in network industries because it is assumed to be necessary to eliminate discrimination in gaining access to infrastructure and therefore helpful to the development of competition. Competition is not, however, an objective in its own right but simply a means of achieving a more efficient railway. Any efficiency advantages arising from competition must be compared with possible reductions in efficiency because of transaction costs between the infrastructure manager and the incumbent operator, the reduced pressure on costs and the negative impact on decision making, particularly for investment. This paper compares aggregate data by country in order to see what evidence there is on the impact of vertical separation on (a) the level of competition in rail markets as reflected in the number of licences and the market shares of different operators and (b) on growth in traffic. Growth was chosen as a surrogate for desirable ultimate objectives such as lower unit costs and prices, and improved service quality and customer satisfaction, on which it is difficult to obtain data but which, in any case, are likely to be reflected to some extent in traffic growth. The analysis indicates that typically countries with vertically separated railways have issued fewer operating licences than those with vertical integration. Also vertical separation is associated with slower growth in rail freight traffic than vertical integration but faster growth in rail passenger traffic. Again the findings are therefore inconclusive and contradictory. The choice between vertical separation and integration may not be the most important factor in determining the extent of intra-rail competition and traffic growth. Other factors include the effectiveness of regulation, the financial situation of the incumbent operator and the under-compensation for mandated public service provision. Support by government for investment in infrastructure can also be important, given how poor infrastructure affects service quality, reliability and, ultimately, the competitiveness of the whole rail sector. These factors appear to be particularly significant in some countries in Central and Eastern Europe where incumbents are in decline and rail as a whole is losing market share. Before considering whether to make vertical separation mandatory within the EU, a much better understanding is therefore required of the factors which determine competition, efficiency and growth in the railway industry. On existing evidence therefore there is no reason to conclude that vertical separation improves rail performance.