Vetenskapliga artiklar

Due to relatively low patronage levels, rural bus stops are sometimes questioned in order to improve travel time and reliability on regional bus services. Previous research into stop spacing has focused on urban areas, which means that there is a lack of knowledge regarding the effects of bus stops in regional networks, with longer distances, higher speeds, and lower passenger volumes, in general. The present study addresses this knowledge gap by analysing the effects of bus stops on a regional bus service regarding average travel times, travel time variability, and on-time performance. This is done by statistical analysis of automatic vehicle location (AVL) data, using a combination of methods previously used for analysis of rail traffic and urban bus operations. The results reveal that bus stops that are only used sporadically have a limited impact on average travel times, in general. In contrast, they are all the more influential on travel time variability, and, in turn, on on-time performance. On the studied bus service, the number of stops made have a far greater impact on travel time variability than any of the other included variables, such as the weather or traffic conditions during peak hours. However, the results suggest that rural bus stops have a much lower impact than what we define as secondary bus stops in urban areas. Consequently, by primarily focusing on bus stop consolidation in urban areas, it is possible to significantly improve service reliability without impairing rural coverage.

Having access to realistic and empirically grounded passenger valuations of public transport trip components facilitate the undertaking of necessary trade-offs during planning of transport networks. Discrete choice estimation of path choice preferences is a practical way to obtain such preferences. This paper proposes a new take on the empirical foundation of path choice estimation based on revealed choices by introducing trip data for full activity-based ‘door-to-door’ public transport trips collected from a dedicated survey application for smartphones. Choice probabilities were modelled based on an explicitly generated choice set, where the public transport trip parts were generated using a branch-and-bound approach. Results in terms of estimated preferences are comparable to those based on conventional surveying methods and suggest significant premiums for paths involving public transport stops with an elevated level of passenger service as well as differences in preferences across population groups.

This paper analyses two differing approaches to the improvement of local bus services, using the analytical lens of formal and informal institutions. Both formal and informal institutions govern the behaviour of authorities and operators, but they do it in different ways and they have advantages and disadvantages. In so doing we seek to understand both how the informal institutional approach (e.g. voluntary partnership working) can be used effectively, but also to assess its limits; and to understand why a formal institutional approach (e.g. franchising), in spite of its strong underlying basis in law, may nonetheless not always function. Through doing so, this paper contributes to the current understanding of how to handle the unintended consequences of a deregulated market through the different (formal and informal) ways available.

Uncertainty during the course of a trip is regarded as a particularly disturbing phenomenon by public transport (PT) passengers and has been shown to have a substantial impact on travel behaviour. However, so far there has been little empirical evidence within contemporary research concerning the degree of mid- to long-term adaptation among PT passengers to changes in the principal cause of such uncertainty within PT transport systems: Lack of service departure reliability. While most studies to date have focussed on instantaneous or short-term behavioural responses, this paper presents results from a one-year panel dataset consisting of individuals’ trip itineraries derived from smart card transactions enriched by automatic vehicle location (AVL) data. We measured long-term line route usage and departure reliability, the latter in terms of headway regularity and schedule adherence, in two panel waves. Thus, we aimed for practical indicators that may be associated with specific line routes and origin–destination PT stop pairs used for recurring trips over time. Results from logistic regression indicate a consistent significant impact of changed headway regularity and punctuality change for line routes with relatively high departure frequency. However, there is a relative indifference to long-term reliability change by a significant share of individuals that have actual trade-offs between at least two line route options, possibly indicating satisficing behaviour among PT passengers. Implications on PT path choice forecasting and route planning are discussed.

1. Global society is rapidly ageing. Research on ageing and mobility suggests that better synergies could exist between older people and the built environment. The age-in-place policy will put increased demands on the transport system as a key facilitator for access. The main goal of this study is to examine the spatial distribution of older adults, assessing if it could be affected by selective characteristics of the surrounding built environment and, if so, to what extent. The study district is the region of Scania in the southern part of Sweden. Register-based longitudinal socio-demographic data such as income, employment and education associated with the outcomes of previous travel surveys conducted in the region are the main data sources to be considered. Correlated with population density patterns and expansion of the railway network, this longitudinal approach is expected to reveal causal inferences. Better knowledge may be gained about the environmental and demographic factors that may potentially lead older people to adapt their mobility choices according to the area in which they reside. Research findings could provide useful policy recommendations both to land use and transport planners, contributing to the development of age-friendly neighborhoods, cities and regions.

Globally, transport systems help bridge distances in time and space and play a central role in securing accessibility for people and businesses. However, this is not without negative consequences such as investment costs, congestion, noise and barriers in the urban fabric. Consequently, active planning that limits negative consequences and enables a shift towards sustainable modes of transport is necessary to steer developments in an appropriate direction (Banister, 2011; Koglin and Rye, 2014). In order to gain an idea of whether planning is, in fact, steering development in an appropriate direction and to identify cost-effective objects, tools and models help analyse the proposed transport policies. Most commonly, the tools aim to estimate user-benefits in terms of accessibility (Laird and Venables, 2017), although there is an increasing interest among planners in tools that capture softer aspects of a social nature (Johansson et al., 2017). In recent years, infrastructure and traffic have come to be seen as more than just transport solutions (Isaksson et al., 2017), which opens up for a range of appraisal tools. In Table 1, we separate between two categories of ex-ante appraisal tools. Firstly, decision-making tools include cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and multi-criteria analysis (MCA). The purpose of decision-making tools is to provide the decision-maker with a comprehensive picture of a policy. Secondly, impact assessments (IA) are tools such as transport system analysis (TSA) and social impact assessment (SIA). IA analyse consequences of policies and can be an integral part of decision-making tools (common for the TSA), or a separate report (common for the environmental impact assessment (EIA)). Previous research on the CBA concerns its development (Eliasson, 2009; Börjesson et al., 2014; Laird and Venables, 2017), its role in public policy-making (Hahn and Tetlock, 2008; Mouter et al., 2013; Mackie et al., 2014; Andersson, 2018) and its limitations (Sen, 2000; Næss, 2006; Damart and Roy, 2009; van Wee, 2012). This article positions itself in the CBAs role in policy-making and its limitations. We are not going to discuss the MCA at length, but there is research on tool development (de Brucker et al., 1995; Macharis et al., 2008; Thomopoulos et al., 2009) and tool application (Macharis and Bernardini, 2015). The qualitative feature of the MCA makes it able to include input from an SIA. SIA, as it is understood in this paper, has its roots in sociology and other social sciences with the purpose of predicting consequences in terms of, for instance, equity across groups of people as an effect of a policy (Esteves et al., 2012). This paper is about the planning and ex-ante appraisal of a public transport investment in Sweden. The aim with this paper is to elaborate on the use of appraisal tools, i.e. the kinds of tools employed and at what stage they enter the planning process. In addition, the aim is to discuss where there might be scope for improvement of CBA and the TSA. This is done by looking at a light rail project in Stockholm, where we study planning documentation and do interviews with persons involved in the planning process. The research questions are: What is the role of appraisal methods in this project and how concordant are they with the planning procedure? Can the appraisal methods be improved, and if so, in what aspects?

A growing research literature is focusing on how effects from increased accessibility may differ according to socio-economic aspects of neighbourhoods and households. This has raised concerns of whether areas with high accessibility may became unaffordable for low-income households, who, at the same time, may depend on public transport accessibility more than average households. We use difference-in-difference estimates of hedonic price models to study the distribution of effects around the new stations provided by a railway tunnel in Malmö, Sweden. The study finds that the lower-price segments are the most affected by the improved accessibility, which becomes clearer when different control groups are used for different market segments. Accessibility is therefore interpreted as highly important for households in the lower-price segments. From a housing accessibility perspective, this is described as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the owners of the apartments in these neighbourhoods, who benefit from the price increase, are typically low-income households. On the other hand, low-income households who are not owners may find the area prohibitively expensive due to price increases. Tenure of the catchment area is thus an important factor in understanding the distributional effects of accessibility. Integrating transport and housing-related planning, and specifically addressing the issue of affordability in early assessments, are therefore recommended.

Investment in railways, and transport infrastructure in general, are often motivated because they are believed to improve peoples’ accessibility to jobs. By linking together and increasing the size of labour markets, the matching between individuals and jobs is improved, and the productivity increases. Communities and municipalities lobby for investments that lead to higher accessibility and those that are successful often see inflows of people as a consequence. This paper looks at the entire Swedish railway network, at the level of service of each station and at the connectivity among stations during the morning peak hour, considering different time bands. Associations between job accessibility levels and socio-demographic features are explored and disclosed, looking at the longitudinal impacts of railway investments over 4 years (from 2011 to 2014) on annual wages. Estimating a fixed effects model, very small effects on wages have been found with the increase in the number of jobs around accessible rail stations. These preliminary results indicate that additional jobs along the rail network seem to have a marginal effect. The findings of this analysis, if communicated to planners, may assist them in assessing the effects of future railway measures to implement over the Swedish territory.

The growing awareness of environmental issues can be linked to the demand for green transport innovations. Consumer behavior studies have pointed to the importance of consumer innovativeness (CI) and green perceptions in the adoption of green innovations. The purpose of this paper is to identify how users and nonusers of shared micromobility perceive the greenness of shared e-bikes and e-scooters and how CI affects shared microvehicle adoption. The paper also analyses the relationships between green perceptions and environmental referent cognitions—biospheric values, environmental knowledge, ascription of responsibility, and environmental attitudes. Shared e-bike and e-scooter users and nonusers in Copenhagen and Stockholm were surveyed using an online questionnaire. Results revealed that users consider themselves innovative and perceive the shared microvehicles as relatively green, while nonusers do not. When comparing users, CI and green perceptions relate to shared e-bike use, but notably, only CI is linked to shared e-scooter use. The results also show that environmental knowledge and environmental attitudes are related to green perceptions. The practical and theoretical implications of the results are discussed.

Accessibility is increasingly recognised as a key purpose of transport policies. Most of the common practices found both in academic studies and policy planning draw on relatively simple accessibility measures taken as ‘objective’ indicators that only focus on the interaction between land use and transport. Relatively little attention has been paid to heterogeneity in individual characteristics and in self-reported perceptions of accessibility (‘subjective’ indicators), and the corresponding differences with respect to available modal options. This study includes a comparison of (1) ‘objective’ indicators of accessibility to key activities by various modes of transport; and (2) individuals' own perceptions of their capability to access valuable out-of-home activities and the modal options available to them. This study examines the key differences between the two representations of accessibility. The calculated measure was developed using door-to-door travel times to supermarkets and healthcare centres using OpenTripPlanner. The self-reported measure was based on a dedicated capability-oriented travel survey of people aged 65–79 in Sweden's large metropolitan regions: Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics and binary and multinomial logistic regressions. The results of this study allow us to gain a greater insight into the ways in which the two accounts differ and can complement one another. We find that conventional methods, by overlooking the heterogeneity in people's perceptions of their accessibility, tend to overestimate accessibility levels and underestimate accessibility inequalities. This study shows how perceived accounts of accessibility can be incorporated into conventional accessibility models and improve accessibility analyses.