Private Modes Research Articles

Resource Efficiency and Innovation in Public Transport: Implementing Inclusive Green Growth in the Himalayas

This paper highlights successful implementation of an innovative project aimed at enhancing resource efficiency and mitigating emissions from transport by introducing pollution free, fuel efficient and safe public transport in a fragile ecosystem of the Himalayas in India (Himachal Pradesh). After analysing the environmental concerns of the state emanating from the transport sector, results of the study are discussed, project components are explored and an implementation framework is presented. Towards the end, project outcomes are highlighted and conclusions are drawn. It is argued that public transport, as an activity offering services of a merit good nature, suffers from serious market and policy failures. It is therefore essential that any attempt to improve public transport should not be confined to purchase of new buses alone, but it should include a wide- ranging reform agenda to correct market and policy distortions to bring about a modal shift from private modes to public transport.

Private and public modes of bicycle commuting: a perspective on attitude and perception.

Public bicycle-sharing initiatives can act as health enhancement strategies among urban populations. The aim of the study was to determine which attitudes and perceptions of behavioural control toward cycling and a bicycle-sharing system distinguish commuters with a different adherence to bicycle commuting. The recruitment process was conducted in 40 random points in Barcelona from 2011 to 2012. Subjects completed a telephone-based questionnaire including 27 attitude and perception statements. Based on their most common one-way commute trip and willingness to commute by bicycle, subjects were classified into Private Bicycle (PB), public bicycle or Bicing Bicycle (BB), Willing Non-bicycle (WN) and Non-willing Non-bicycle (NN) commuters. After reducing the survey statements through principal component analysis, a multinomial logistic regression model was obtained to evaluate associations between attitudinal and commuter sub-groups. We included 814 adults in the analysis [51.6% female, mean (SD): age 36.6 (10.3) years]. BB commuters were 2.0 times [95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.1-3.7] less likely to perceive bicycle as a quick, flexible and enjoyable mode compared to PB. BB, WN and NN were 2.5 (95% CI = 1.46-4.24), 2.6 (95% CI = 1.53-4.41) and 2.3 times (95% CI = 1.30-4.10) more likely to perceive benefits of using public bicycles (bicycle maintenance and parking avoidance, low cost and no worries about theft and vandalism) than did PB. Willing non-bicycle and public-bicycle commuters had more favourable perception toward public-shared bicycles compared to private cyclists. Hence, public bicycles may be the impetus for those willing to start bicycle commuting, thereby increasing physical activity levels.

Web browser artefacts in private and portable modes: a forensic investigation

Web browsers are essential tools for accessing the internet. Extra complexities are added to forensic investigations when recovering browsing artefacts as portable and private browsing are now common and available in popular web browsers. Browsers claim that whilst operating in private mode, no data is stored on the system. This paper investigates whether the claims of web browsers discretion are true by analysing the remnants of browsing left by the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera when used in a private browsing session, as a portable browser, and when the former is running in private mode. Some of our key findings show how forensic analysis of the file system recovers evidence from IE while running in private mode whereas other browsers seem to maintain better user privacy. We analyse volatile memory and demonstrate how physical memory by means of dump files, hibernate and page files are the key areas where evidence from all browsers will still be recoverable despite their mode or location they run from.

Privatizing sick pay: Does it work?

Public schemes for sickness benefits and disability insurance are often criticized for the lack of incentive they provide for preventive and reintegration activities by employers. To stimulate the interest of employers in engaging with these schemes, several modes of privatization could be considered, including the provision of sickness benefits by employers, “experience rating” of disability insurance costs, employer self-insurance, or insurance by private insurance providers. These types of employer incentives seem to lower sickness rates, but they also come at the risk of increased under-reporting and less employment opportunities for workers with disabilities or bad health conditions. Policymakers should be aware of this trade-off.

Private and public modes of bicycle commuting: a perspective on attitude and perception

Private and public modes of bicycle commuting: a perspective on attitude and perception

The Legal Status of State-Owned Share Companies in Ethiopia

Privatization of public enterprises or state-owned business entities has been greatly acclaimed as one of free market ideas and a sort of democratic rule on equitable distribution of wealth. However, ill-designed modes of privatization, particularly, Article 5 of the Proclamation No.146/1998 transfers the public enterprises to share companies in Ethiopia, goes out of the purpose and creates legal and practical problems on the operation of share companies. The crux of this paper focuses on the formation and operation of state-owned share companies which are evolved by the process of privatization in Ethiopia. It advocates that the new advent of formation of company is out of the Commercial Code of the State and legal jurisprudence ever experienced. Hence, the status of such companies is carefully discussed from the legal point of view. These companies situate in different place than company law perspective, the purpose of privatization sought in these companies and the economic policy which the country follows. To this effect, the legal doctrines of the area, the practice of privatization from Privatization and Public Enterprises Supervising Agency (PPESA) are explored.

Intermodal Urban Mobility: Users, Uses, and Use Cases

Cities are growing nowadays and so is their citizens’ demand for mobility. On a global scale, motorized individual traffic is hardly capable of meeting this need due to its ownership costs and due to the lack of an accordingly large infrastructure. Besides, motorized individual traffic is responsible for the majority of today's traffic burdens, such as air pollution, traffic jams, noise, and accidents. It is thereby assumed that only a combination of soft transport modes and public and private modes of motorized transport with different capacities, time schedules, and operation times can achieve what is called “sustainable cities”. Besides the need for coordinated transport services, their cooperation must be assured to obtain seamless interchanges and consequently undisturbed, fast, and reliable travelling. Such a use of different transport modes within a single journey is called “intermodality” and is a work topic fostered in a national, European, and world-wide context. This report shows the initial results of the project “UrMo” (“Urban Mobility”) that is being performed at three institutes of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The report gives an introduction to the topic by evaluating how socio-demographics and space structure influence intermodal behavior. In addition to this, the subsequent project steps are outlined.

Private Environmental Governance in the Ethiopian Pesticide Supply Chain: Importation, Distribution and Use

Agricultural pesticides are important chemicals that are used to mitigate crop damage or loss and improve productivity. However, pesticides may cause negative environmental and human health effects depending on their specific distribution and use. Securing environmental safety and sustainability of pesticide distribution and use is widely seen as an important challenge for pesticide governance. This paper analyses how, why and under what circumstances Ethiopian pesticide supply chain actors deal with (un)safe distribution and use of pesticides and assesses their potential contribution to securing the quality, environmental safety and sustainability of pesticides importation, distribution and use. The framework developed for this is based on sustainable supply chain governance in order to assess the roles of and the interactions between the different chain actors, supporters and influencers. On the basis of field research in Ethiopia among key chain actors (importers, retailers, farmers) we analyse their involvement in three different environmental governance mechanisms: governing material flows of pesticides, managing information on health and environmental safety and providing training and capacity-building services. The study found the organisation of the pesticides supply chain in Ethiopia as atomistic. Environment and health hardly played a role in pesticides handling by the different supply chain actors, which was dominated by immediate profit motives. As a consequence smallholder farmers are put at risk because they are refrained from training, support or information provision on pesticides. Indeed, it was a failure of state governance that led importers and retailers to aggressive marketing and distributing pesticides unsafely and hinder the proliferate of private mode of governance. At the same time, a small signs of hope have also been identified at the supporters’ and influencers’ side of the chain. Successful environmental supply chain governance for safe pesticide distribution and use requires coordination and as well as training and information sharing (interaction) among pesticide supply chain actors, supporters and influencers at all levels-local, national and global as elements of one system of governance. Finally, the evidence presented in this paper suggests that due to limits in governmental capacity and concerns on commercial viability and on social and environmental impacts among private actors, there will be a role for private actors alongside public actors to ensure safe pesticide distribution and use. Public-private partnerships might constitute an attractive strategy for this aim.

A NEW MULTIMODAL MULTI-CRITERIA ROUTE PLANNING MODEL BY INTEGRATING A FUZZY-AHP WEIGHTING METHOD AND A SIMULATED ANNEALING ALGORITHM

Abstract. A multimodal multi-criteria route planning (MMRP) system provides an optimal multimodal route from an origin point to a destination point considering two or more criteria in a way this route can be a combination of public and private transportation modes. In this paper, the simulate annealing (SA) and the fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (fuzzy AHP) were combined in order to find this route. In this regard, firstly, the effective criteria that are significant for users in their trip were determined. Then the weight of each criterion was calculated using the fuzzy AHP weighting method. The most important characteristic of this weighting method is the use of fuzzy numbers that aids the users to consider their uncertainty in pairwise comparison of criteria. After determining the criteria weights, the proposed SA algorithm were used for determining an optimal route from an origin to a destination. One of the most important problems in a meta-heuristic algorithm is trapping in local minima. In this study, five transportation modes, including subway, bus rapid transit (BRT), taxi, walking, and bus were considered for moving between nodes. Also, the fare, the time, the user’s bother, and the length of the path were considered as effective criteria for solving the problem. The proposed model was implemented in an area in centre of Tehran in a GUI MATLAB programming language. The results showed a high efficiency and speed of the proposed algorithm that support our analyses.

API - AGRO: An Open Data and Open API platform to promote interoperability standards for Farm Services and Ag Web Applications

In accordance to National Program of Agricultural and Rural Development objectives, the project API-AGRO has been selected to improve interoperability and data exchange between agricultural stakeholders. This project is a non-contradictive new oncoming about the previous projects working on agricultural data exchanges trying to standardizing data format to insure exchange. Based on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), this emerging digital distribution channel enables data sharing with clear rules of use. 
 APIs can provide a hook for partners or third party developers to access data and services to build applications or to offer new services for different Farm Management Information Systems. In the French Ecophyto program, we observed that centralizing data from many different FMIS has shown its limits; all FMIS have their own standards, constraints and goals. This has led to the creation of a new FMIS to receive all the data collected from the farms national networks. In this context, APIs seem to be an innovative solution to expand data exchanges and promote open-innovation. Thus, we made the assumption that pooling data sets produced by different partners, or web services provided by API, will facilitate the design of the new FMIS.
 We also believe that APIs could boost innovation in the agricultural ecosystem by integrating new players (start-up, for example) promoting co-development of disruptive web applications for e-agriculture.
 So we designed the API-AGRO platform from an agronomic references inventory existing in each program’s partner. The platform offers unified access to a data set in open or private mode and a set of Open or Private-APIs (reserved for specific partners or clients) This paper will present the main functionalities of the full platform. We will focus on user interfaces with the visualization and the data extraction tools and on the API console designed for developers.

Public discourse and community formation in a trilingual Matsigenka-Quechua-Spanish frontier community of Southern Peru

AbstractUntil recently, the members of a community on the Andean-Amazonian agricultural frontier of Southern Peru have tended to limit their social ties to members of their own families. But the residents have begun to forge a ‘community’ through a semiotic distinction between private and public spaces, social practices, and domains of morality. Particular discursive phenomena in the asamblea ‘community meeting’ are deployed to create and maintain the community as a domain of action distinct from kin commitments, and participation in the asamblea offers a context in which to assume a novel political and moral subjectivity. Thus, the social organizational construct of the community is emergent in public interactions. The article concludes with a comparative analysis of public discourse in another comunidad nativa ‘indigenous community’ that has not embraced the notion of ‘community’, and demonstrates how code-switching allows leaders there to invoke both the private and public modes of social authority. (Amazonia, Andes, Matsigenka, Spanish, Quechua)*

Young drivers’ night-time mobility preferences and attitude toward alcohol consumption: A Hybrid Choice Model

This paper proposes an analysis of mobility preferences of young people at nighttime. In OECD countries in the last decades, data show that road crashes are the single biggest cause of death of 15–24 years-old drivers. On average, over 8500 young drivers were killed each year and it is demonstrated that the accidents tend to occur on weekend nights and when young people drive under the influence of alcohol.Focusing on the demand for mobility, we approach the problem from several points of view, concentrating on the relationship between attitudes towards alcohol and some of the most common countermeasures implemented to address young-driver risk. In particular, we examine the potential demand of young drivers for new modes of public transport, understand their preferences for plans designed to reduce and/or prevent the number of risky situations. Our analysis covers different aspects of private modes of transport, including amounts of fines and police checkpoints. We also investigate the characteristics of existing and available public transport systems (e.g. fares and levels of services).Through a Stated Preferences experiment (SP), we collected young people’s preferences about nighttime mobility within our application area (Lugano, Switzerland).Using the Hybrid Choice Models technique, we developed an approach and we estimated a model designed to incorporate simultaneously three dimensions of the problem: attributes of the alternatives, characteristics of young drivers, and alcohol-related psychological variables.Our estimates suggest that, first, there are young drivers who are willing to choose public alternatives; secondly, the countermeasures considered can increase their number; and, thirdly, people with a higher attitude to alcohol are more willing to switch to new public transport alternatives and more sensitive to “Drinking and Driving Do not Mix” policies. Action plans developed on the basis of these findings and on the relevance of the psychological component will have a better chance to succeed.

Commute travel and its effect on housing tenure choice of males and females living in the urban and rural areas of Bangalore city in India

This study attempts to identify various factors influencing individual’s choice of housing tenure with emphasis on the effect of commute trips on that choice. It also focuses on the sensitivity to various factors affecting the housing tenure choice between males and females of urban and rural areas. The study is based on both exploratory analysis and estimation of statistical models using a Household Travel Survey data collected for Bangalore Metropolitan Region in year 2010. The results indicate the role of both the land use attributes and commute travel characteristics on tenure choice and the behavioural difference between males and females. The sensitivity to various attributes is also observed to be varying between the individuals living in the urban and rural areas of the city. The finding that private mode use for commuting governs the housing tenure choice of individuals suggests that promotion of urban-transport policies such as Transit Oriented Development may be an effective strategy to curb the issues related to energy consumption and emission.

Collective identities, empty signifiers and solvable secrets

In modern societies collective identity is both an empty signifier and a sacred center: even as its existence is taken for granted, what is or should be is subject to a host of different and often conflicting interpretations. However, the narratives and representations of collective identity are in no way undermined by these public debates; these signifiers are seen rather as a problem that is in principle amenable to solution, as something that ought to be (re)solved. In fact, the empty signifiers of collective identity are constructed as solvable secrets precisely and primarily in public speech, open debate and perpetual critique. This article identifies the public and private modes of dealing with empty signifiers – through collective traumatic repressions, private resentments, public discourses adhering to argumentation ethics, and individual fabulations.

Restructuring the Mixed Economy of Welfare: Three Modes of Privatization

Since the early‐1990s arrangements for social protection in most of the advanced industrialized nations have undergone a series of policy reforms that are restructuring the mixed economy of modern welfare states. This paper reviews several fundamental reasons for these changes and their substantive character, focusing on the increasing role of the private sector in the finance and delivery of welfare state activity. Three basic modes to increase private responsibility for heretofore publicly financed and publicly delivered social provisions are identified, illustrating alternative paths which advance the movement toward privatization. The assumptions and implications associated with these modes of privatization are analyzed.

English

Nowadays, arbitration is required in the world of international trade as the normal mode of dispute settlement. Indeed, the development of the business world and the intensification of global trade have contributed to the emergence of several conflicts between international traders, these conflicts are amplified with different cultures, mentalities and especially international legislation. The arbitration was then the best remedy since it is the justice that best suits the needs of traders. The private mode of dispute settlement offers them a certain serenity, to the extent that it has significant advantages. Arbitration is in fact a flexible way, confidential, fast and reasonably expensive. In addition, the technical qualifications of arbitrators and their specific vision of litigation are two factors that ensure the warring parties a satisfactory solution to the disagreement, leaving the door open to continuing business relationships. Key words: Arbitration , Agreement clause, Tunisian legislation

Augmenting the Transit Capacity of Delhi by Renewal of the Sub-Urban Railway

This paper discusses the specific case of the untapped potential of the Sub-Urban Railway in Delhi. The Sub-Urban Railway, used as a passenger service during ASIAD Games of 1982, lost its relevance in due course of time. Delhi commutes primarily through various public and private modes of road-based transportation, with the Delhi Metro emerging as an lternative. Urban transportation in Delhi is facing a crisis due to long traffic jams, rising numbers of vehicles on roads, environmental pollution, waste of energy, among others. Ironically, the existing infrastructure of the Sub-Urban Railway is left unutilized, though this may well provide increased passenger capacity to the Mega-City while simultaneously addressing the concerns of environment and energy as well. The paper is based on 3-year long study by the author of the salient aspects of the Sub-Urban Railway in Delhi and also the resultant detailed proposals for the augmentation of the city’s Transport scenario.

A game of two cities: A toll setting game with experimental results

In this paper we model the competition between two cities as a game to maximise the welfare considering the impact of demand management strategies in the form of cordon tolls. This research builds on earlier work which studied the competition in a small tolled network meant for private modes of transport which have a choice of route. The earlier work showed that while both cities have an incentive to charge alone, once they begin, they are likely to fall into the ‘Nash Trap’ of a prisoner's dilemma where the incentive to defect is higher than that to cooperate thus eventually leading to a ‘lose–lose’ situation. The current paper extends the idea of competition between cities by setting up a system dynamic model of two cities which includes modes such as car, bus, train and walking and cycling. This paper innovates by integrating the simulation of land use transport interactions with a class room style experimental game and analyses the gaming strategies from a continuous repeated prisoner's dilemma involving setting of tolls to maximise the welfare of residents. The aim is to test (a) whether the strategies adopted are as theory predicts and (b) whether the players recognise the benefits of lower tolls when given information about the regulated solution and collaborate or continue to play to win. The results show that players respond to the information and maintain a collaborative solution which may have significant implications for regulation and the development of cities within regional partnerships.

Understanding the Effects of Various Factors on the Public Response to Congestion Charge: A Latent Class Modeling Approach

The standard ordered response model (SORM) is a common disaggregate approach with ordered outcomes in which the effects of various exogenous attributes are assumed constant across ordinal choices. In this study, an innovative latent class based generalized ordered response model (LC-GORM) is formulated and used to assess the effects of various factors on respondents’ choice behavior with respect to congestion charge proposal for Jakarta, Indonesia. The proposed model probabilistically assigns respondents into selfish and altruistic class memberships (latently) based on their knowledge of the proposed scheme and their specific attributes. Aiming to capture observable preference heterogeneity across ordinal choices and allow the thresholds to be varied across observations, we parameterize the thresholds as a linear function of the exogenous variables for each ordinal preference. Using stated preference data collected in Jakarta in December 2013, we incorporate the influence of a comprehensive set of explanatory variables into four categories: charges, latent variables related to respondent’s psychological motivations, mobility attributes and socio-demographic characteristics. Empirical results obviously verify the existence of preference heterogeneity across outcomes. The findings confirm that the altruistic class are more sensitive with respect to acceptance of the scheme, while the selfish class are more sensitive with respect to rejection. The key factors influencing public acceptability include the charge level and respondent variables such as car dependency, awareness of the problem of cars in society, frequency of visits to the city center and frequency of private mode usage.

Long term energy and emission implications of a global shift to electricity-based public rail transportation system

With high reliance on light-duty vehicles in the present, the future of global transportation system is also geared towards private modes, which has significant energy and emission implications. Public transportation has been argued as an alternative strategy for meeting the rising transportation demands of the growing world, especially the poor, in a sustainable and energy efficient way. The present study analyzes an important yet under-researched question – what are the long-term energy and emission implications of an electric rail based passenger transportation system for meeting both long and short distance passenter transportation needs? We analyze a suite of electric rail share scenarios with and without climate policy. In the reference scenario, the transportation system will evolve towards dominance of fossil based light-duty vehicles. We find that an electric rail policy is more successful than an economy wide climate policy in reducing transport sector energy demand and emissions. Economy wide emissions however can only be reduced through a broader climate policy, the cost of which can be reduced by hundreds of billions of dollars across the century when implemented in combination with the transport sector focused electric rail policy. Moreover, higher share of electric rail enhances energy security for oil importing nations and reduces vehicular congestion and road infrastructure requirement as well.