Welcome to the August 2015 issue of Transport.
This issue provides eight papers covering a diverse yet related range of topics – safety, reliability and service, and public transport. As further transport challenges and opportunities emerge as the global economy recovers, it is important that engineers focus attention on providing value, amenity and safety for all who use the global transportation network. In short, a sustainable form of transport development where engineers are at the forefront.
The first paper, by Lawson et al. (2015), identifies the key determinants within cyclists' perceptions of safety, recommending possible policy interventions for improvements. A cyclist safety index is also proposed that allows the perceptions of cyclists relative to driving to be quantified for consideration in transport network design and adaptation for cyclists.
Micaelo et al. (2015) investigate the guidelines assessing road aquaplaning risk and the recommended countermeasures considering other methodologies and published research results. On a similar theme, Xu and Kouhpaenejad (2015) identify the influencing factors of road traffic crash rates.
The issue moves on to discuss service matters within the transport network and Dell'Asin et al. (2015) look at the quality of public transport interchanges from the perspective of travellers. The analysis identifies five key quality factors. Ticketing, physical and environmental issues, services, temporal issues and interconnectivity all feature in the findings.
Li and Preston (2015) develop a spreadsheet cost model that simulates the various public transport modes encountered including straddle bus. Elasticities for passenger waiting time and in-vehicle time are used to assess actual passenger reactions to the attractiveness for different public transport technologies at different levels of demand.
Wang et al. (2015) consider and investigate the nature of congestion and how reliability plays an important role is its alleviation. Chen et al. (2015) follow these papers by introducing a new method to the original social force model when looking at the design and evacuation of highly crowded places such as underground stations.
New evaluation and decision methods feature in Chen and Yao's paper (Chen and Yao, 2015) that addresses the issues of bus service times. The paper discusses and recommends appropriate programming methods to resolve the problems surrounding this matter.
You may be interested to know that the most recent papers are available ahead of print at the ICE Virtual Library homepage giving you access to the latest content. I hope you enjoy the issue and find the papers informative.
