Abstract

The reliability of transit modes is a crucial issue to guarantee their competitiveness and attractiveness. Experience shows that buses covering busy lines with short headways tend to arrive irregularly at their stops, often in bunches and therefore remarkably affecting the service. Hence, this work presents a stochastic model capable of representing the operational activity of a bus transit network and the service disruptions which eventually end up causing deviations from desired schedule. At the same time, the model is tested on an ideal route as a decision making tool.

Abstract

This research project aims to model shared vehicle systems at strategic and tactical levels. The objective is to obtain a simple model that establishes the existing trade-offs between the agency costs (i.e. vehicle fleet, stations, repositioning costs) and the user costs (i.e. access and wait). This would allow optimizing the main strategic and tactic variables of the system (i.e. strategic: total number of vehicles, density of stations; tactic: size of each station, occupancy at each station after a complete rebalancing period).

Abstract

For long time, most of the big cities have serious problems of congestion in the streets because of the high use of private vehicles, which means also more pollution and traffic accidents, among others. Therefore, for over many years ago and up to nowadays has been investigating in order to improve the quality and service of the public transportation and thus make it more attractive for the people. Since the people spend very much time going to work, university, etc., a very important aspect for the traveller is his travel time. This includes the time going to and from the bus stop, waiting and travel time. These times may be optimized and reduced with and effective route and with a good commercial speed of the bus as well. This project is focused on investigating some aspects of transport engineering of the urban bus route number 43 of the city of Kaunas, Lithuania. In order to do it, the study is performed for several time periods in a weekday and on Saturday. The research intends to analyze four factors: the speed of the vehicle along the route, the passenger’s flow, the passenger travel distance and the passenger travel time. In the experimental research it is obtained data of passengers flow throughout the route; and, in order to get data of bus speed we have a GPS which is able to store files at high frequency. The results indicate that the vehicle speed is not affected by the load; however it might be significant when comparing average bus speeds of the streets. The calculations give an average travel distance on the vehicle equal to 4,79 km and an average travel time - including walking and waiting time - nearly 24 minutes. About passengers’ flows, they are localized in a small time interval during the morning peak time. However, in the afternoon the passengers come back home during more prolonged time and often without peaks of flow. Outgoing

Abstract

This thesis examines the transition from internal combustion engine (ICE) fleets to electric vehicle (EV) fleets. In particular, there is a focus on the economic effects from the point of view of the fleet owner, as well as overall environmental effects. This is accomplished through case studies involving different fleet-based business models and analysing the resulting effects of a transition to EV fleets. Furthermore, comparisons will be made between similar scenarios in two different European cities, namely Barcelona and Stockholm. Additionally, aid and incentives to motivate a change from ICE and EV fleets are explored in detail. The results show annual savings of 4,279.94 EUR/year and 6,352.33 EUR/year for taxi drivers in Barcelona and Stockholm respectively, and 6,405,121 EUR/year and 8,594,734 EUR/year for public bus operators in Barcelona and Stockholm respectively. Furthermore, the results show a reduction in local emissions of 12,727 kg CO2/year for taxi drivers in Barcelona and Stockholm, and 22,835,163 kg CO2/year and 19,134,464 kg CO2/year for public bus operators in Barcelona and Stockholm respectively. Finally, savings for delivery service fleets are shown to range from 18.25 EUR for 4,000 km up to 3,744.25 EUR for 50,000 km. The thesis concludes by acknowledging the large positive environmental effects, while also pointing out that despite the yearly economic savings, there is still a large financial burden associated with a transition to EV fleets. Ways in which this financial burden can be reduced include increasing the annual kilometres driven by vehicles in the fleet, and increasing the difference in cost between electricity and fuel prices.

Abstract

In this article a quantitative analysis of the cost structure a shipping company has to take into account when starting and running a regular Ro-Ro cargo line (a Short Sea Shipping line, for instance) is carried out. The object of this paper is to study Ro-Ro industry. However, Ro-Pax vessels cannot be excluded. Their behaviour when analysing the exploitation costs is very similar to Ro-Ro vessel’s, and it cannot be forgotten that nowadays most of the Ro-Ro vessels carry passengers as well. The empirical data used to formulate this paper are based on the Spanish market and the current Mediterranean lines. The aim of this paper is to find an expression for the total costs depending on the parameters of the analyzed route, bearing in mind that the vessel’s capacity will be an important factor. This model will be applied to rolled cargo vessels, especially trucks or platforms. Once the costs function is obtained the long run marginal costs will also be obtained, depending on the line capacity, aiming to obtain the optimum pricing, according to microeconomic theory. Frequency and regularity reflected upon the amount of scales will also be considered to be important because the long run marginal costs will depend on the amount of scales and the amount of transported platforms/trucks.