In the light of pressing challenges like climate change, urban congestion, air and noise pollution and traffic safety there are numerous efforts aiming at reducing car traffic and shifting road users to more sustainable forms of mobility. In this respect, digitalization and technology developments offer new opportunities to support this development. The envisioned solutions range from increasing the

This topical collection includes contributions from Transport Research Arena (TRA) 2020, an international event that covers all transport modes and all aspects of mobility. The theme of the Transport Research Arena 2020 was “Rethinking transport – towards clean and inclusive mobility”. The theme itself highlights the complexity of transitioning towards sustainable mobility systems. At the centre of

The explosive growth of social media has rendered them powerful communication channels. User generated content is an important source of inspiration and influence among web friends, it generates new activities and consequently affects mobility decisions. Whether to visit a place, or how to get to a place of interest are decisions that can be triggered through people’s interactions on social media.

A doubly stochastic, conditionally binomial model is proposed to describe volumes of vehicular origin-destination flows in regular vehicular traffic, such as morning rush hours. The statistical properties of this model are motivated by the data obtained from inductive loop traffic counts. The model parameters can be expressed as rational functions of the first and second order moments of the observed

As a subset of increasing EV growth and micro-mobility technology trends, micro-electric vehicles (micro-EVs) have the potential to address many transport system issues. Little research quantifies micro-EV potential, increasing investment risks. This paper builds an index to explore city propensity for micro-EV market success by incorporating differentiation, implementation, commercialisation, consumer

In a context of decreasing resources and of climate change, lowering road vehicles consumption is a key point to meet CO2 reduction requirements. In addition to car technological advances, eco-driving is part of the solution but the road infrastructure should ensure its development. This work aims to demonstrate that road energy demand and associated pollutant emissions can be reduced by working out

Cities all around the world are observing increasing levels of urban freight activities owing to the growth of internet shopping combined to the traditional distribution to shops, creating additional problems in terms of congestions and environmental impacts. This study, developed within the European Project SUITS framework, aims at showing how Local Authorities can effectively observe freight flows

This paper explores the real practices of users of a smart carpooling application that learns their mobility habits and predicts their future trips to propose relevant matches. A combination of usage data and interviews analysis allows us to explore the commuter experience from registration to the first and the next shared rides. The results highlight the shortcomings associated with human factors

For assessing the desirability and feasibility of major transport projects decision makers often recur to ex-ante evaluation methods such as cost-benefit analysis or multi-criteria analysis. In these methods projects are evaluated for their impacts on the welfare of society as one indivisible entity. The use of these methods is limited for assessing socio-spatial equity, as costs and benefits of transport

Modern urban-transport planning requires evidence-based insights into current transport flows to better understand the needs and impacts of policymaking. Urban transport includes passenger and freight vehicles, which have different behavior, and the need for such a separation is often ignored in research and practice [1]. New digital data sources provide an opportunity to better understand urban transport

New forms of shared mobility such as free-floating car-sharing services and shared automated vehicles have the potential to change urban travel behaviour. In this paper, we identify potential user classes for these new modes. For this, a stated choice experiment on mode choice among a sample of the Dutch urban population has been conducted, which features free-floating car-sharing and shared automated

Alcohol is the most frequent detected substance in the automobile fatal crashes but its precise mode of action on mental state is not always clear, notably when combined with lack of driving experience. The aim of this work is thus to evaluate performance and self-reported alertness and effort as a function of low doses of Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) and of drivers’ experience. A single blind

Humans are required to respond to a vehicle’s request to take-over anytime even when they are not responsible for monitoring driving environments in automated driving, e.g., a SAE level-3 vehicle. Thus, a safe and effective delivery of a take-over request from an automated vehicle to a human is critical for the successful commercialization of automated vehicles. In the current study, a set of human-in-the-loop

Given the inconsistent application of various road markings on Czech rural roads, there is a question “How does road marking in horizontal curves influence driving behaviour?” The study objective was to assess how centreline and edgelines influence driving behaviour. To focus on the critical conditions, six curves on secondary rural roads, with radii below 200 m, were selected and monitored before

The objective of this paper is to study 1) do people living in certain residential environments express more dissatisfaction with general functionality and safety of travel, 2) is dissatisfaction with general functionality and safety of travel related to dissatisfaction with certain transport modes, 3) is the residential environment related to mode-specific travel satisfaction mediated by satisfaction

Demand-responsive transport is an alternative to fixed-route, fixed-scheduled transport services in low-demand areas. This paper discusses the welfare and distributional consequences of the implementation of request stops (RSs) on a scheduled fixed-stop transport service. The discussion is based on a general welfare model. The focus is on discussing how the magnitudes of the welfare effects on different

Key to understanding the needs and building road infrastructure management tools to prevent and mitigate run-off-road accidents is to identify hazards and their sources which are a result of wrong design, construction, and installation of road restraint systems. Building such tools requires advanced studies with field tests, simulations and models to demonstrate the effects of selected parameters on

The aim of the study was to examine the prevalence of pedestrian fatalities and serious injuries (MAIS3+) in traffic, and to identify differences in the factors associated with the injury severities. The study included all motor vehicle-pedestrian accidents in Finland in 2014–2017 and exposure data from the national travel survey of 2016. The results showed a heightened fatality and serious injury

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article.

Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) is a service that supports customers’ transportation needs by providing information and ticketing for a multitude of transport modes in one interface; thus, buy potentially fostering multimodality and public transport, it represents an important lever to reduce negative transportation impacts such as emissions and congestion. By means of an online survey conducted in Switzerland

Current statistics show that distraction is a central cause of traffic accidents. Safety systems with distance control currently available on the market have great potential for preventing accidents and significantly reducing their severity. However, depending on the driver’s level of attention, the systems warn too early or too late, which impairs use acceptance. Adaptive systems allow for personalization

Understanding the usage of a product is essential for any manufacturer in particular for further development. Driving style of the driver is a significant factor in the usage of a city bus. This work proposes a new method to observe various driving manoeuvres in regular operations and identify the patterns in these manoeuvres. The significant advance in this method over other engineering approaches

In the original publication of this article [1], the whole Abstract section is revised as below. This is an error caused during the production stage.

To improve safety and address current employment challenges in the waterborne transport sector, the VT concept is developed. The VT is a vessel platooning concept that is semi-autonomous. The VT is composed by one Leader Vessel (LV) and Follower Vessels (FVs) that will be connected with each other with sensors. The research examines from a business-economic and societal perspective, whether it is interesting

The shipping industry has grown spectacularly during the last 50 years transporting nowadays, approximately, the 80–90% of goods worldwide. However, maritime transport remains a highly inefficient industry. Only in the last 10–15 years has the industry started studying how to optimize navigation speeds and digitization is just entering ports. Consequently, institutions like the International Maritime

This paper presents the first results of an agent-based model aimed at solving a Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) for inbound logistics using a novel Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm, developed and implemented in the NetLogo multi-agent modelling environment. The proposed methodology has been applied to the case study of a freight transport and logistics company in South Italy in order

Travel demand and travel satisfaction of a transport service are affected by user perceptions of the service quality attributes, and such perceptions should be included in studying user willingness-to-pay (WTP) for automated vehicle (AV) services. This study applied structural equation modelling with service quality attribute perceptions as latent variables affecting WTP. We investigated how WTP AV

This study aims to examine to what extent sustainability has been incorporated into assessments of road infrastructure projects. It identifies promising approaches that include indicators reflecting core sustainability criteria, determines criteria that were insufficiently covered as indicators, and develops an integrated indicator set covering all criteria. A systematic review was performed to obtain

This paper looks at how ongoing attempts to improve air market competitiveness in Europe are challenged by the differing internal and external realities that exist. Europe’s internal multilateral single air market has encouraged the proliferation of pan-European airlines unhindered by national borders, which have stimulated increased competition and driven down airfare prices. Meanwhile, externally

Surging acceptance of adaptive cruise control (ACC) across the globe is further escalating concerns over its energy impact. Two questions have directed much of this project: how to distinguish ACC driving behaviour from that of the human driver and how to identify the ACC energy impact. As opposed to simulations or test-track experiments as described in previous studies, this work is unique because

The study investigated how a speed warning system influence drivers’ speedometer monitoring, and how drivers respond when they receive a speed warning. With a speed warning system, drivers may pay more attention to the exact speed, which would be expected to increase glances to the speedometer. Nineteen participants drove in a driving simulator, either with or without a speed warning system implemented

This work presents a microsimulation study on the topic on an uphill network, regarding the potential impact of AVs and Cooperative-AVs (Coop-AVs or CAVs), vehicles able to cooperate with the infrastructure. The novelty of the proposed approach is that the simulation of all vehicles is performed with a common hybrid car-following model that takes explicitly into account the variability in the vehicle

Finnish government allowed in October 2013 operating high capacity vehicles (HCV) with a maximum weight limit of 76 t on Finnish roads. An analysis on how HCVs have affected the Finnish road freight transport sector is presented here based on a continuous time series data from 2013 to 2017. The analysis shows a significant increase in the average payload weight and a transition from 7-axle to 8- and

What are the profiles of both users and non-users of car sharing in European cities regarding their travel patterns and psychological aspects? Two subsamples (1519 users and 3695 non-users of car sharing) participated in a survey, translated into seven languages, with 36 questions regarding attitudes towards car sharing, the environment, political orientation, personal norms, frequency of use of different

Road users, such as cyclists and car drivers, are constantly adapting to each other and to the road infrastructure. This study aimed to investigate what trade-offs can be observed when drivers and cyclists adapt to other road users and to the infrastructure. A semi-controlled study was carried out in an urban traffic environment, where all participants travelled the same route twice, once as a cyclist

On majority of roads, horizontal road markings are essential safety feature that must be periodically renewed to maintain appropriate performance. The use of a premium road marking system resulted in prolonged the service life as compared to a standard system, which would be financially-neutral in the long term despite much higher unit and initial costs; advantageously, 54% less glass beads and 63%

We study the problem of making algorithmic statistical inferences about the dynamics of city traffic. Our data is based on loop detector counts of observed vehicles in various roads in the city of Tampere, Finland. We show that meaningful correlations can be found between traffic asymmetries at different measurement locations. The traffic asymmetry is the difference of the traffic counts of the opposite

About 1.35 million people died in traffic accidents around the world in 2018, make this type of accidents the 8th cause of death in the world. Particularly, in Spain, there were 204,596 traffic accidents during 2016 and 2017, out of which 349,810 drivers were injured. The objective of this study was to understand to what extent seat belt non-use and human factors contribute to drivers injury severity

Transport infrastructure owners are moving from reactive toward proactive infrastructure management. This involves computation of costs associated with failure or maintenance, including expected transport delays. These delays are often computed by multiplying additional travel time by the number of travellers. However, this does not reflect the process of decision-making by travellers using the infrastructure

With the emergence of the Mobility as a Service (MaaS) concept, it is important to understand whether it has the potential to support behaviour change and the shift away from private vehicle ownership and use. This paper aims to identify potential ways that MaaS (specifically MaaS plans) could help encourage behavioural change; and understand the barriers to using alternative transport modes. In-depth

We recently proposed a concept, called Combined Alternate-Direction Lane Assignment and Reservation-based Intersection Control (CADLARIC), for organizing directionally unrestricted traffic flows in automated vehicle environment. The conflicts between through movements are handled by a reservation-based algorithm while the turning conflicts at the intersections are avoided altogether. This paper extends

New mobility solutions, such as Mobility as a Service, have been suggested to have the potential to reduce car ownership and be part of a transition towards a more sustainable transportation system. However, research suggests that governance measures such as taxation and policies will be needed to ensure sustainability aspects. This paper explores everyday mobility by use of interventions in people’s

This paper presents an analysis of short-term (2025) scenarios for noise emission from civil air traffic in airport areas. Flight movements and noise levels at a given airport are predicted using a web-data-informed methodology based on the ECAC Doc.29 model. This methodology, developed by the authors in a previous work, relies on the collection and processing of air traffic web data to reconstruct

This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for the development of optimal multi-year maintenance plans for a large number of bridges. A maintenance plan is said to be optimal when, within the given budget, a maximum number of bridges can be maintained in the best possible year, achieving maximum performance with minimum socio-economic impact. The framework incorporates heuristic rules, multi-attribute

This paper addresses, in simulation, energy minimization of an autonomous electric minibus operating in an urban environment. Two different case studies have been considered, each involving a total of 10 different 2?km bus routes and two different average speeds. In the proposed method, the minibus follows an optimized speed profile, generated using a genetic algorithm. In the first case study the

Ridepooling services have been predicted a bright future since they promise a flexible and user-centered mobility service. However, there is a research gap in examining the travelers’ perception of ridepooling service characteristics since findings concerning fixed-scheduled public transport are hardly transferable. In order to shed some light on the human factors of ridepooling services a Discrete

Intelligent vehicle detection and counting are becoming increasingly important in the field of highway management. However, due to the different sizes of vehicles, their detection remains a challenge that directly affects the accuracy of vehicle counts. To address this issue, this paper proposes a vision-based vehicle detection and counting system. A new high definition highway vehicle dataset with

This study evaluates the attractiveness of self-hubbing in terms of the (a) symmetry of itineraries and the consequences for passengers in the case of missed flights. We compute the most attractive European origin-destination (O-D) pairs through self-connection and evaluate their robustness by estimating the expected delays relative to connecting times and the travel options available when a connection

This paper studies distributional effects of public transport (PT) subsidies focusing on the Greater Oslo region. We identify how different PT markets enjoy different levels of subsidies. We describe how subsidies are distributed along PT modes and their respective patronage. This is done by document studies and travel surveys, supplemented by expert inquiries. We find that high-income groups, served

A new research idea regarding port selection concerns customer-oriented, rather than product-oriented, thinking. Through investigation and interviews with over 280 active customers in the global shipping industry, port selection criteria were proposed, and an evaluation scheme based on the responses to a questionnaire survey is compared with a scheme based on the weight calculation of the analytic

The emphasis of the study presented in this paper was to identify the attributes of drivers who are prone to cause a motorway crash. It was induced byambitions to enhance the effectiveness of traffic safety campaigns by identifying subgroups of drivers more precisely. For this purpose we conducted an accident data analysis of all injury crashes 2012–2014 on Austrian motorways. Since 2012 it is possible

The prediction of the uncertainty of route travel time predictions for all possible routes in an urban road network is of importance for example for logistics. Such predictions need to take the essential features of the data set as well as the underlying traffic dynamics into account.In this paper a large floating taxi data set is used in order to derive predictions of route travel time uncertainty

Drivers are met with numerous elements requiring their attention while driving. The present research focuses on selected visual and cognitive distractions that the driver is faced with, and on their influence on detecting and perceiving changes in the traffic environment. Driver self evaluation data was used to define which elements attract most visual and cognitive distraction. A constructed conceptual

Driving fatigue can have serious consequences. Too often fatal accidents are caused by fatigue. However, it is not uncommon for fatigue to occur while driving when the driver is under-challenged. Due to the increasing automation of vehicles, it is foreseeable that the number of accidents caused by monotony will increase. Interactions between driver and vehicle through gamification can remedy the situation