Percentage Of Travelers Research Articles

The Relationships between Adverse Weather, Traffic Mobility, and Driver Behavior

Adverse weather conditions impact mobility, safety, and the behavior of drivers on roads. In an average year, approximately 21% of U.S. highway crashes are weather-related. Collectively, these crashes result in over 5300 fatalities each year. As a proof-of-concept, analyzing weather information in the context of traffic mobility data can provide unique insights into driver behavior and actions transportation agencies can pursue to promote safety and efficiency. Using 2019 weather and traffic data along Colorado Highway 119 between Boulder and Longmont, this research analyzed the relationship between adverse weather and traffic conditions. The data were classified into distinct weather types, day of the week, and the direction of travel to capture commuter traffic flows. Novel traffic information crowdsourced from smartphones provided metrics such as volume, speed, trip length, trip duration, and the purpose of travel. The data showed that snow days had a smaller traffic volume than clear and rainy days, with an All Times volume of approximately 18,000 vehicles for each direction of travel, as opposed to 21,000 vehicles for both clear and wet conditions. From a trip purpose perspective, the data showed that the percentage of travel between home and work locations was 21.4% during a snow day compared to 20.6% for rain and 19.6% for clear days. The overall traffic volume reduction during snow days is likely due to drivers deciding to avoid commuting; however, the relative increase in the home–work travel percentage is likely attributable to less discretionary travel in lieu of essential work travel. In comparison, the increase in traffic volume during rainy days may be due to commuters being less likely to walk, bike, or take public transit during inclement weather. This study demonstrates the insight into human behavior by analyzing impact on traffic parameters during adverse weather travel.

Design and Comparative Analysis on Real-Time Trade of Road Priority in Connected Traffic

New technologies present opportunities to re-think the real-time traffic operation. Trade of road priority using schemes such as auctions, credits, and direct-transactions, provides a novel way to better serve heterogeneous traffic demands in the future connected environment. Implementations of these schemes come with a common phenomenon called the network effect, meaning that the value of the scheme depends heavily on the percentage of travelers that subscribe to this scheme. To encourage travelers to be subscribers, the traffic operator needs to reasonably consider the treatments for both subscribers and outsiders, and have the knowledge of each scheme’s impact on individuals and society. Only in this way can the government choose an appropriate scheme that will be accepted by the public. However, most existing studies simply assumed a 100% of subscribers and ignored the travelers’ autonomy and smartness in choice behavior. Such neglect may easily render the economic schemes failed in practice due to public resistance or loss in subscribers. To fill up this research gap, this paper designs treatments to both subscribers and outsiders for different schemes in intersection operations. We investigate travelers’ choice behaviors under different scenarios, and make comparative analysis about individual benefits, social benefit, and social equity between different schemes. The findings of this paper can support the government’s decision on the system design of road priority trading.

Fuel prices at petrol stations in touristic cities

While it may seem obvious from common sense that retail fuel prices should be higher in touristic rather than in nontouristic cities, the related empirical literature has failed either to clearly support this assumption or to qualify and quantify the effect of tourism on retail fuel prices. Using a self-created data set that includes prices across a large sample of petrol stations located in mainland Spain and the Balearic Islands, we seek to evaluate the effects of tourism on local destination retail petrol prices. The estimations prove three main effects: Petrol prices are higher in cities with high levels of tourism, nearby beaches, and/or with the socioeconomic influence of a national park. In fact, petrol stations add a margin of around 6.6% and 6.4% for unleaded gasoline 95 and diesel, respectively, in touristic cities. Second, the more touristic the city, the higher these prices. Third, in the case of touristic municipalities, the percentage of travelers from abroad and being within the area of influence of a national park are two of the main drivers that explain this overpricing.

Attitudes and awareness of medical assistance while traveling abroad

BackgroundWith globalization, more and more people travel to countries where they are at risk of injuries and travel-related diseases. To protect travelers’ health, it is crucial to understand whether travelers accurately perceive medical assistance resources before and during their trips. This study investigated the need, awareness, and previous usage of overseas emergency medical assistance services (EMAS) among people traveling abroad.MethodsAnonymous questionnaires were distributed to patients (n = 500) at a travel clinic in Taipei, Taiwan.ResultsThe results showed that EMAS were important, especially in the following categories: 24-h telephone medical consultation (91.8%), emergent medical repatriation (87.6%), and assistance with arranging hospital admission (87.4%). Patients were less aware of the following services: arrangement of appointments with doctors (70.7%) and monitoring of medical conditions during hospitalization (73.0%). Less than 5% of respondents had a previous experience with EMAS.ConclusionsEMAS are considered important to people who are traveling abroad. However, approximately 20–30% of travelers lack an awareness of EMAS, and the percentage of travelers who have previously received medical assistance through these services is extremely low. The discrepancy between the need and usage of EMAS emphasizes the necessity to adapt EMAS materials in pre-travel consultations to meet the needs of international travelers.

Measles CEA

Abstract Background Most measles importations are due to returning US travelers infected during international travel. We projected clinical outcomes and assessed cost-effectiveness of pretravel evaluation for measles immunity and MMR vaccination among eligible adult US international travelers. Methods We designed a decision tree to investigate pretravel evaluation compared with no evaluation from the societal perspective. Data from the Global TravEpiNet Consortium and published literature informed input parameters (Figure 1). Outcomes included measles cases averted per 10 million travelers, costs, and the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER, Δcosts/Δmeasles cases averted); we considered ICERs < $100,000/measles case averted to be cost-effective. We performed sensitivity analyses to assess the impact of varying the probability of exposure based on travel destination, and the percentage of travelers with pre-existing measles immunity. Results In the base case, departure after pretravel evaluation resulted in 16 measles importations and 46 transmissions per 10 million travelers and cost $132 million, vs without pretravel evaluation (26 importations and 87 transmissions per 10 million travelers, costing $22 million). Pretravel evaluation averted 51 measles cases per 10 million travelers with an ICER of $2.2 million per case averted. Results were most sensitive to the probability of measles exposure and the traveler’s pre-existing immunity (Figure 2). Pretravel evaluation was cost-effective for travelers to Asia if pre-existing measles immunity was <80%. Evaluation was always cost-effective for travelers to Africa when pre-existing immunity was less than 100% and became cost saving when the percentage of immune travelers was lower (<70%). Travelers who were more likely to be non-immune and were visiting destinations with higher probabilities of exposure were most likely to benefit from pretravel evaluation for measles immunity at excellent economic value. Conclusion As risk of measles exposure increases and likelihood of travelers’ pre-existing immunity decreases, it can be cost-effective or cost saving to assess US international travelers’ measles immunity status and vaccinate with MMR prior to departure. Disclosures All authors: No reported disclosures.

An Impact of Social Media and Online Travel Information Search in Vietnam

An Impact of Social Media and Online Travel Information Search in Vietnam Abstract Social media is increasingly prevalent among and beneficial for travelers. A large percentage of travelers use search engines when it comes to making travel-related decisions. In addition, social media websites which appear on the search results are becoming preferable information sources to travelers. In Vietnam, numerous customers (83%) use search engines before making ground travel purchase decisions and over one fifth of the population, which is equivalent to 19.6 million, is currently Facebook users. Therefore, the goal of this research is to investigate the role of social media presented by a search engine within Vietnam trip planning context. The research employs a set of selected searching keywords together with ten Vietnam urban destination names in order to unveil the information searching for travel planning. The findings show to some extent that social media websites can help display searching results, and how certain types of social media websites are distributed across the result pages in online tourism domains. Implications for online marketers targeting Vietnamese audience are also mentioned.

Do Travelers Pay for Managed-Lane Travel as They Claimed They Would?

This study examined whether travelers are using the new Katy Freeway managed lanes (MLs) in Houston, Texas, as people stated that they would in their responses to a survey conducted in 2008, before the MLs opened. To check the veracity of intended behaviors, a new stated preference survey was given to Houston's Katy Freeway travelers in 2010. The 2010 survey yielded 3,325 respondents, of whom approximately 869 respondents had likely been participants in the 2008 survey. Mixed logit models were developed from the 869 responses, and their value of travel time savings were compared with the 2008 survey estimates. The implied mean value of travel time savings based on the 2010 survey was found to be about 48% of the sample mean hourly wage rate, similar to values estimated for the 2008 surveys. The value of travel time reliability was estimated as 56% of the sample mean hourly wage rate. Combining both the value of time and the value of reliability for these travelers results in a combined value of $61/h. This value is close to the value travelers are giving their travel time for their actual recent trips on the Katy Freeway (an average of $51/h). Thus it appears that travelers are factoring in (consciously or subconsciously) some additional value for the reliability of MLs when they choose to use these lanes. The percentage of travelers from the 2010 survey who actually used the MLs was similar to the percentage of 2008 survey respondents who indicated that they might or would definitely use MLs. These findings suggest that travelers are actually using and paying for MLs as they said they would. The results also suggest that the maximum willingness to pay for travel did not change much from before to after the opening of the MLs.

Population‐Based Survey of Travel Patterns Among Canadians Visiting Hepatitis A–Endemic Countries: Table 1

Each year, approximately 42 million trips are made outside Canada, and this number is constantly rising.1,2 The increasing number of trips is largely attributable to visits of tropical and subtropical areas, where hygiene and health care standards may be different than those existing in North America. While hepatitis A (HA) is the most common vaccine‐preventable disease among travelers,3,4 it can also be considered an interesting marker of the hygienic infrastructure of the destination countries and for the general risk of enteric diseases. An analysis of the patterns of travel in HA‐endemic countries may therefore be useful to assess the general health risks of travelers. Most published studies in the medical literature have focused on the travel patterns of individuals visiting travel clinics. Because only a very small percentage of travelers seek appropriate pretravel health services,5 these studies are subject to selection bias in that they mostly reflect the travel patterns of risk‐conscious individuals. Planning prevention programs requires reliable data on travel patterns of all individuals, in particular those unlikely to visit travel clinics. The objective of this population‐based study was to describe the travel patterns of Canadians who went to HA‐endemic countries between 1990 and 1999. A phone survey was conducted between October 27 and December 6, 1999, among adults selected through random‐digit dialing and residing in either Quebec (7 million people) or Ontario (12 million people), the two largest provinces of Canada, documenting travels to HA‐endemic countries between 1990 and 1999. Details on study design have been previously published.5,6 For the current analyses, comparisons of proportions were made using results from the chi‐square test or Fisher’s exact test. The Mantel–Haenszel chi‐square test for trend was used for polytomic ordinal variables, whereas the two‐sided Cochrane–Armitage exact test for trend was used with dichotomic variables. Among the …

Air travel thrombosis 2001.

68IntroductionOn June 8th, 2001 an expert workshop on air travel throm-bosis was held in Berlin.The aim of the workshop was to accumulate presentknowledge on this phenomenon and to assess the availableevidence. This is particularly important from a scientificpoint of view, especially with respect to further studies. Ifsound scientific evidence should be available, the membersof the workshop advise the development of consensus re-commendations for daily clinical practice.DefinitionThe term “traveller’s thrombosis” comprises deep veinthrombosis (DVT), with or without pulmonary embolism(PE), that occurs during or within four weeks after travel-ling, predominantly in sitting posture. The sub-group of“air travel thrombosis” is defined as travel thrombosis thatoccurs when the main part of the travel was done by plane.Current knowledgeUntil recently, apart from some experimental studies [6],only case reports or retrospective analyses were availablefor the epidemiology of air travel DVT (previously alsotermed economy class syndrome) [8–10, 12, 14]. In 1999and 2000, three case control studies were published thatfocus on the association of travel with the incidence of deepvein thrombosis, however, only one study explicitly ex-amined the risk of air travel. In addition, the results are notuniform: In a study by Ferrari [3], who examined patientsthat were admitted to a hospital in the vicinity of the Parisairport, an odd’s ratio of 4.0 was found for long distancetravel (both air travel and ground transportation) with aconfidence interval of 1.9–8.4. This study included 160cases and 160 controls with an average travel duration of5.7 hours. The percentage of patients who developed deepvein thrombosis after long distance travel was 24.4% andthe percentage of air travellers 5.6%, while the percentageof long distance travellers in the control group was 7.5%,without further details provided on air travel. All patientswho were admitted for venous thromboembolism, as wellas the age-matched controls were examined twice with theuse of a questionnaire. The control group consisted of con-secutive patients who were admitted to the same depart-ment during the same time period for other reasons thanDVT. In the SIRIUS-Study [11], a multicenter case-controlstudy with 624 general practitioners, consecutive patientswere admitted with DVT of the lower extremities, the con-trols were age- and sex-matched. For each DVT patient,the first patient who presented with viral flu infection or anaso-pharyngeal syndrome was matched as a control. Thepercentage of long distance travel was 12.6% in patientswith DVT compared to 6.3% in the control group, result-ing in an odd’s ratio of 2.35 with a confidence interval of1.45 to 3.8.The third case control study by Kraaijenhagen et al. [5]appears to avoid recruting bias from its design: In this studypatients were included who were examined for suspectedDVT, controls comprised patients with excluded DVT. Ac-cordingly, in this study 186 patients were included with acontrol group of 602 patients. The percentage of a long dis-tance travel was 4.8% in the cases and 7.1% in the con-trols, respectively. The percentage of air travel in bothgroups was 2.2%, the absolute number was very low with4 and 13 long distance air travels, respectively. The odd’sratio for all travels in this study was 0.7 (confidence inter-val 0.3–1.4) and 1.0 for air travel (confidence interval0.3–3.0). The upper limit of the 95% confidence intervalfor the relative risk of thromboembolic events after air trav-el of 3.0 is not in sharp contrast to the study of Kraaijen-hagen and the other mentioned case-control studies [3, 11].As emphasised by Hirsh [4] an association between longdistance travels and thrombosis is possible but probablynot strong.In another study with surrogate parameters (ultrasoundexamination of the lower extremities with investigation foran apparent and inapparent deep vein thrombosis) Scurr etal. [13] examined air travellers with and without com-pression stockings and found an incidence of 12% DVT intravellers without the use compression stockings. All DVTwere clinically asymptomatic. In this study no details areprovided on diagnostic criteria, the localisation and exten-sion of DVT. Notable is the fact that none of the travellerswith compression stockings had DVT, implicating a 100%protection by compression stockings, which does not seemplausible. Another point of critic is, as mentioned by Hirsh(4), the high percentage of travellers without compressionstockings that developed DVT, which is a magnitude higherthan observed in the previously mentioned case-controlstudies. In addition, the employed design carries a poten-tial for bias during the ultrasonographic examination.A recently published study retrospectively analysed theincidence of severe PE requiring immediate medical careon arrival at Charles de Gaulle Airport, France [7]. The fre-quency of PE was clearly related to the distance travelled,with the highest incidence of 4.77 per million for those pas-sengers who had travelled more than 10000 km. The over-all incidence of severe PE was 0.4 per million passengers.

Urban transport in Germany: providing feasible alternatives to the car

With the second highest level of car ownership in the world, and the third highest population density in Europe, Germany has adopted a range of policies to balance the many private benefits of car use with its serious social and environmental problems. In order to ‘tame’ the car, most German cities have implemented a twofold strategy of expanding and improving pedestrian, bicycling and public transport alternatives simultaneously with restricting car use and making it more expensive. That has increased political acceptability since the car‐restrictive measures are not perceived as mere punishment of car drivers. The results of this coordinated urban transport strategy have been impressive. Germany, as a whole, has managed to increase public transport use and to stabilize the car share of modal split. Some cities, of course, have been more successful than others, and this paper examines three of the most successful cities: Münster, Freiburg and Munich. In each of the cities, the percentage of travel by bicycling, walking and public transport has been raised over the past 20 years, while the car's share of modal split has fallen. This article documents the range of policies used to restrict car use, both in Germany as a whole, and in the three case‐study cities in particular. The key to success is found to be mutually reinforcing transport and land‐use policies. It is the combination of a whole set of coordinated policies that explains the dramatic success in changing travel behavior.

Downtown Residential-Transportation Development

A single general equation useful in estimating the residential development potential has been developed. The method relates the road capacity to the residential development. The variables in the road capacity include the percentage of travel during the peak period by both auto and transit, the efficiency of this travel, and the relative effectiveness of each mode. The methodology developed includes a representation of the interaction of the variables used in the estimating equation and the degree of control various agencies exercise over them. The methodology was applied to downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. The results indicate that some of the proposals for residential development in the downtown area may in fact be high.