Contemporary Transportation Systems Research Articles

From Ancient Paths to Modern Highways: Mapping the Evolution of World Trade Routes and their Crucial Role in Today's Global Supply Chains Gaurav Dangre

From Ancient Paths to Modern Highways: Mapping the Evolution of World Trade Routes and their Crucial Role in Today's Global Supply Chains Gaurav Dangre

Account based ticketing (ABT) integration for seamless multi-modal transport systems in smart cities

The digital transformation of urban transportation systems remains a critical challenge in Smart Cities' development. This paper addresses the pervasive issue of inadequate digitalization within public transportation systems. The paper highlights the promise of Account Based Ticketing (ABT) as a pivotal solution for integrating diverse public and private transportation modes allowing users to access different transportation services with a single account, without the need for new physical tickets or cards. ABT approach represents a breakthrough in seamlessly amalgamating various transportation operators' systems, transcending city limits into broader metropolitan spheres, and fostering integration and interoperability across transportation modes operated by disparate entities. Emphasizing beyond-city-scale integration, it explores the potential value of ABT to connect transportation networks extending into metropolitan influences. The proposed approach involves analyzing the implementation and functionality of ABT systems, underlining their capacity to overcome existing barriers in multi-modal transportation. The results anticipate enhanced accessibility, increased ridership, and streamlined user experiences, contributing to the realization of efficient and interconnected urban transport networks. This study not only underscores the value of ABT in revolutionizing contemporary transportation systems but also examines its broader implications for future urban planning and smart city development, highlighting the transformative potential and essential role that ABT plays in shaping the future of integrated transportation and Mobility as a Service in Smart Cities.

Collaborative Perception-The Missing Piece in Realizing Fully Autonomous Driving.

Environment perception plays a crucial role in enabling collaborative driving automation, which is considered to be the ground-breaking solution to tackling the safety, mobility, and sustainability challenges of contemporary transportation systems. Despite the fact that computer vision for object perception is undergoing an extraordinary evolution, single-vehicle systems' constrained receptive fields and inherent physical occlusion make it difficult for state-of-the-art perception techniques to cope with complex real-world traffic settings. Collaborative perception (CP) based on various geographically separated perception nodes was developed to break the perception bottleneck for driving automation. CP leverages vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication to enable vehicles and infrastructure to combine and share information to comprehend the surrounding environment beyond the line of sight and field of view to enhance perception accuracy, lower latency, and remove perception blind spots. In this article, we highlight the need for an evolved version of the collaborative perception that should address the challenges hindering the realization of level 5 AD use cases by comprehensively studying the transition from classical perception to collaborative perception. In particular, we discuss and review perception creation at two different levels: vehicle and infrastructure. Furthermore, we also study the communication technologies and three different collaborative perception message-sharing models, their comparison analyzing the trade-off between the accuracy of the transmitted data and the communication bandwidth used for data transmission, and the challenges therein. Finally, we discuss a range of crucial challenges and future directions of collaborative perception that need to be addressed before a higher level of autonomy hits the roads.

Intelligent transport systems vs. drivers’ safety

Contemporary transport systems do not meet either the expectations or the needs of their users. Hence the search for new, innovative traffic management methods, which would improve traffic safety. This article discusses the definition and impact on the safety of drivers, including professional ones, of a promising idea, namely, intelligent transport systems (ITS).

Immotility as resilience? A key consideration for transport policy and research

Contemporary transport systems lack resilience. They are prone to congestion, vulnerable to multiple threats, constitute a great financial burden and are environmentally unsustainable. Research and policies have been developed aimed at solving these problems by means of improving transport technologies and governance; however, success has been limited. This paper asks whether resilience can be increased also by means of promoting localism, slowness and stillness, or what we synthetically term “immotility”. This is a valuable enterprise because in the recent past the focus has been on the highly mobile and the global. The highlighted knowledge gap is problematic because it reduces the perceived value of development models which are not based on high-speed, long distance and high-frequency mobility.

Urban transport justice

Many cities in the world seek to establish more sustainable urban transport systems with a view to reduce accidents, congestion, air and noise pollution, and to improve social interactions, liveability and amenity values. Against this background, this paper frames urban transportation as an issue of justice: contemporary transport systems are characterized by injustice, as they tend to favour and prioritize motorized transport, accepting that considerable environmental and social burdens are put on more sustainable forms of transportation, other traffic participants and society as a whole. To conceptualize ‘urban transport justice’, the paper discusses three dimensions where injustices are apparent: Exposure to traffic risks and pollutants; distribution of space; and valuation of transport time. It is argued that public and political recognition of urban transport injustices provides significant argument for changes in urban planning, transport infrastructure development and traffic management.

Synergistic sensor location for link flow inference without path enumeration: A node-based approach

Sensors are becoming increasingly critical elements in contemporary transportation systems, gathering essential (real-time) traffic information for the planning, management and control of these complex systems. In a recent paper, Hu, Peeta and Chu introduced the interesting problem of determining the smallest subset of links in a traffic network for counting sensor installation, in such a way that it becomes possible to infer the flows on all remaining links. The problem is particularly elegant because of its limited number of assumptions. Unfortunately, path enumeration was required, which – as recognized by the authors – is infeasible for large-scale networks without further simplifying assumptions (that would destroy the assumption-free nature of the problem). In this paper, we present a reformulation of this link observability problem, requiring only node enumeration. Using this node-based approach, we prove a conjecture made by Hu, Peeta and Chu by deriving an explicit relationship between the number of nodes and links in a transportation network, and the minimum number of sensors to install in order to be able to infer all link flows. In addition, we demonstrate how the proposed method can be employed for road networks that already have sensors installed on them. Numerical examples are presented throughout.

Decision-making, intermodal transportation, and sustainable mobility: towards a new paradigm

Contemporary transportation systems and policies are discussed in terms of their relationship to sustainable development. The current situation is generally characterised by policies that favour motorisation and violate fundamental elements of sustainability. Accordingly, a new vision of sustainable transportation is required, one that incorporates intermodalism for both passengers and freight. Creating a sustainable intermodal system necessitates overcoming many obstacles and can be achieved only with appropriate policy and decision‐making systems that incorporate genuine public participation. However, existing decision‐making processes and public involvement mechanisms are inadequate. New approaches need to be developed and implemented if the new transportation paradigm is to be realised.

Transport Systems, Policy and Planning; A Geographical Approach

This book reviews the major spatial aspects of transport systems throughout the world, analyses in detail the transport problems arising in urban and rural areas, and evaluates the principal social, environmental and policy issues generated by contemporary transport systems. Part 1 outlines the basic geography of transport, and examines transport and spatial structures, especially transport's contributions to urban, industrial, and agricultural development. Part 2 considers transport systems at the national and international levels, and, for example, discusses the effects on transport of the recent political changes in the former USSR and Eastern Europe. Part 3 addresses various transport problems in urban and rural areas, using specific examples to illustrate contrasting difficulties and evaluate current urban transport planning methods. Part 4 explores some significant contemporary transport issues, and evaluates the environmental and social impacts of increasing personal mobility and infrastructure demands for motorised movement. The book provides a comprehensive survey of how transport planning and policy are formulated in different parts of the world, and emphasises the need for policies on transport sustainability.