Road Transport Activities Research Articles

Estimating annual average daily traffic and transport emissions for a national road network: A bottom-up methodology for both nationally-aggregated and spatially-disaggregated results

The regular and robust collection of traffic data for the entire road network in a given country will usually require high-cost investment in traffic surveys and automated traffic counters. This paper provides an alternative and low-cost approach for estimating annual average daily traffic values (AADTs) and the associated transport emissions for all road segments in a country. This is achieved by parsing and processing commonly available information from existing geographical data, census data, traffic data and vehicle fleet data. Ceteris paribus, we find that our annual average daily traffic estimation based on a neural network performs better than traditional regression models, and that the outcomes of our aggregated bottom-up road segment emission estimations are close to the outcomes from top-down models based on total energy consumption in transport. The developed approach can serve as a means of reliably estimating and verifying national road transport emissions, as well as offering a robust means of spatially analysing road transport activity and emissions, so as to support spatial emission inventory compilations, compliance with international environmental agreements, transport simulation modelling and transport planning.

Excessive light is another form of pollution on the environment

The every activity of man leads to pollution. All these activities pollute the environment in different ways. The contamination of air, water, soil and noise are treated as major pollution in this biosphere. In addition to different types of pollution a new kind of pollution has been added i.e light pollution. Thistype of pollution occurs because of using artificial lighting in the night time, no darkness in the night causes impact on the bio diversity and ecosystem results the lot of disturbance in bio diversity life cycle. This effects the human health directly in terms sleep disorders and causing various other hazards on many species, effects the natural body cycles called circadian rhythms. The present paper describes manycauses and effects of excessive usage of light in the public areas because of urbanization, high level of road transport activities in the night time.

Developing Singapore Driving Cycle for passenger cars to estimate fuel consumption and vehicular emissions

Singapore has pledged to attain 7–11% Business-As-Usual carbon emissions reduction by 2020. Road transport sector is a significant source of carbon emissions, estimated to be the third largest sector in Singapore. A current gap in environmental evaluation for road transport activities in Singapore is the lack of a representative driving cycle for passenger cars (64% of the total population of 974,170 vehicles). This Singapore Driving Cycle (SDC) is hence developed for Singapore roads and traffic conditions. A chase-car (instrumented vehicle) was used to collect on-road data along 12 designed routes, and circulation driving on highly utilized arterial roads (including those in Central Business District (CBD) and both inner and outer ring roads fringing the CBD area). The SDC was thus hence constructed, with consideration of road type proportions, time periods and desired distance, duration and peak-lull proportion. In essence, the SDC is a 2400-s speed–time profile to represent the driving pattern for passenger car in Singapore. Microscopic estimation model (CMEM) shows that, as compared to SDC, the New European Driving Cycle (NEDC) underestimates most of the vehicular emissions (fuel, CO2, HC and NOx by 5%, 5%, 22% and 47%, respectively) and overestimates CO by 8%. The SDC is thus more suitable than the NEDC that is currently in use in Singapore; the SDC can be used to generate more accurate fuel consumption and emissions ratings for various uses (for example, inventory of vehicular emissions and fuel economy labelling).

지역단위 도로교통 탄소배출 인벤토리구축 방법론

기후변화에 대응하여 수송부문의 탄소배출 저감노력이 세계적인 이슈가 되고 있다. 특히, 지역단위의 수송부문 탄소배출 저감전략의 수립 및 효율 집행을 위해서는 정밀한 탄소배출 인벤토리 구축은 필수적이나, 현재 도로교통의 특성과 수단의 다양성, 통행패턴의 복잡성 등 자료수집 한계로 신뢰성 있는 지역단위 인벤토리는 개략적 산정에 그치고 있는 실정이다. 본 연구는 이와 같은 문제점을 극복하기 위해 국가교통DB의 자료를 활용하여 지역단위 도로교통 탄소배출 인벤토리 구축 방법론을 제시하였다. 이를 위해 국가교통DB포함 자료 중 <TEX>$CO_2$</TEX> 관련 속성을 파악하고, 이에 적합한 <TEX>$CO_2$</TEX> 산정식을 도출하여 인벤토리 모형을 구축하였다. 구축된 모형의 적용성을 검토하기 위해 부산시를 사례로 2008년도 기준 도로부문의 탄소배출량을 산정하여 기존 연구결과와 비교분석하였다. 또한, 연구의 결과를 기초로 더욱 정밀한 인벤토리 구축을 위한 향후 연구방향을 제시하였다. Due to its excessive <TEX>$CO_2$</TEX> emissions, road transport sector becomes a target for emission reduction strategies. Although precise and reliable emissions inventories are necessary for evaluating plans and strategies, developing the region-wide inventory is a difficult task mainly because of a lack of data including travel patterns and modal volumes in the reginonal context. Most existing inventory methodologies employ fuel sale data within the target region, which ignores actual regional traffic patterns and thus not suited to its geographical context. To overcome these problems, this study develops region-wide <TEX>$CO_2$</TEX> emissions inventory methodology by utilizing the Korea Transport DB (KTDB). KTDB provides a number of useful information and data, such as road network with which one can identify in and out trips over the entire region, traffic volumes of various modes, distance of travel, travel speed and so on. A model of equations that allow the computation of volume of <TEX>$CO_2$</TEX> emitting from the road transport activities within the target region is developed. Using the model, numerical analyses are performed for the case of Busan Metropolitan City to demonstrate the applicability of the developed model. This study is indeed exploratory in the sense that using the existing data, it develops the <TEX>$CO_2$</TEX> emissions inventory methodology which can produce better results than those from conventional fuel sales methodology. This study also suggests further reresarch directions to develop more refined methodologies in region-wide basis.

Investigating relationships between road freight transport, facility location, logistics management and urban form

This paper examines road freight transport activity and its relationship with facility location, logistics management and urban form through an analysis of 14 selected urban areas in the UK. Improved understanding of this relationship will assist planners when making transport and land use decisions. The findings suggest that several geographical, spatial and land use factors have important influences on freight activity in urban areas. Commercial and industrial land use patterns affect the types and quantities of goods produced, consumed, and hence the total quantity of freight transport handled. This also influences the distances over which goods are moved and by what specific mode. There has been relatively low growth in warehousing in many of the selected areas over the last decade compared to the national average as well suburbanisation of warehousing in some locations. This affects the origin and destination of journeys visiting these facilities and typically increases the distance of such journeys. A greater proportion of road freight has been shown to be lifted on internal journeys in large urban areas than in smaller ones. Journeys within urban areas have been shown to be less efficient than journeys to and from the urban area in the 14 locations studied due to the much smaller average vehicle carrying capacities and lower lading factors for journeys within urban areas. The length of haul on journeys to and from urban areas studied was found to be greatest for those areas with a major seaport and/or which were geographically remote. This affects the road freight transport intensity of goods transport journeys.

Profiling road transport activity: Emissions from 2000 to 2005 in Ireland using national car test data

This work describes a methodology for determining the average vehicle kilometres travelled by the private national car fleet in Ireland and estimating the disaggregated CO 2 and NO x emissions from private vehicles in the Irish road transport sector for the period 2000–2005 using national car test records. The developed methodology facilitates the calculation of greatly improved estimates for vehicle kilometres under a range of constraint variables and thereby enables the disaggregated analysis of specific vehicle fleet groups and their associated activity patterns to support evidence-based policy development. The results indicate that while older vehicles are contributing significantly to car NO x emissions; newer cars produce a higher share of CO 2 emissions than older cars in the vehicle fleet.

A genetic approach for freight transportation planning

PurposeThis purpose of this paper is to present a methodology for optimally planning long‐haul road transport activities through proper aggregation of customer orders in separate full‐truckload or less‐than‐truckload shipments in order to minimize total transportation costs.Design/methodology/approachThe model is applied to a specific Italian multi‐plant firm operating in the plastic film for packaging sector. The method, given the order quantities to be shipped and the location of customers, aggregates shipments in subgroups of compatible orders resorting to a heuristic procedure and successively consolidates them in optimized full truck load and less than truck load shipments resorting to a Genetic Algorithm in order to minimize total shipping costs respecting delivery due dates and proper geographical and truck capacity constraints.FindingsThe paper demonstrates that evolutionary computation techniques may be effective in tactical planning of transportation activities. The model shows that substantial savings on overall transportation cost may be achieved adopting the proposed methodology in a real life scenario.Research limitations/implicationsThe main limitation of this optimisation methodology is that an heuristic procedure is utilized instead of an enumerative approach in order to at first aggregate shipments in compatible sets before the optimisation algorithm carries out the assignments of customer orders to separate truckloads. Even if this implies that the solution could be sub‐optimal, it has demonstrated a very satisfactory performance and enables the problem to become manageable in real life settings.Practical implicationsThe proposed methodology enables to rapidly choose if a customer order should be shipped via a FTL or a LTL transport and performs the aggregation of different orders in separate shipments in order to minimize total transportation costs. As a consequence, the task of logistics managers is greatly simplified and consistently better performances respect manual planning can be obtained.Originality/valueThe described methodology is original in both the kind of approach adopted to solve the problem of optimising orders shipping in long‐haul direct shipping distribution logistics, and in the solution technique adopted which integrates heuristic algorithm and an original formulation of a GA optimisation problem. Moreover, the methodology solves both the truckload assignment problem and the choice of LTL vs FTL shipment thus representing an useful tool for logistics managers.

External effects and social costs of road transport

The article contains a welfare economic analysis of road transport's external effects. First, we discuss the definition of external effects. Applying this definition, it is concluded that road transport activities give rise to a wide range of external costs. However, there are no external benefits associated with individual road transport activities which might compensate for such effects. Therefore, road transport volumes will in general be beyond the optimal levels. Second, we describe a conceptual framework for the analysis of environmental external costs. It is explicitly recognized that not only the externality as such, but also the induced outlays on defensive and abatement activities should play an important role in welfare economic analyses of external effects. Then, this framework is used for the evaluation of the existing empirical work on road transport's environmental external costs (i.e., noise and air pollution). It is concluded that most of the studies carried out in that field will provide an underestimation of road transport's external costs by definition. Finally, some attention is paid to empirical estimates of road transport's accident costs.

J. WYATT JNR. (HAULAGE) LTD. v. ROAD TRANSPORT INDUSTRY TRAINING BOARD

October 5, 1973 Industrial Training — Industrial training levy — Road transport industry — Company providing haulage mainly outside Great Britain — Liability for levy — Company disputing liability — Whether company engaging “mainly in activities not being road transport activities' — Industrial Training Act, 1964 (c.16), s.12(2) — Industrial Training (Road Transport Board) Order, 1969 (S.I. 1969, No. 879), Sch. para. 1(b), 2(a)(i) — Industrial Training Levy (Road Transport) Order, 1971 (S.I.1971, No. 1049), art. 2(1)(o), 3(1).