1,721,016 research outputs found

    Congestion costing critique

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    The Urban Mobility Report (UMR) is a widely-cited study that quantifies and monetises (measures in monetary units) traffic congestion costs in U.S. metropolitan regions. This report critically examines the UMR’s assumptions and methods. The UMR reflects an older planning paradigm which assumes that “transportation” means automobile travel, and so evaluates transport system performance based primarily on automobile travel speeds; it ignores other modes, other planning objectives and other impacts. The UMR methodology overestimates congestion costs and roadway expansion benefits by using higher baseline speeds and travel time unit cost values than most experts recommend, by ignoring induced travel impacts, and using an inaccurate speed-emission curve. Its estimates represent upper-bound values and are two- to four times higher than result from more realistic assumptions. The UMR claims that congestion costs are “massive,” although they increase total travel time and fuel consumption by 2% at most. It exaggerates future congestion problems by ignoring evidence of peaking vehicle travel and changing travel demands. The UMR ignores basic research principles: it fails to identify best current practices, explain assumptions, document sources, incorporate peer review, or respond to criticisms

    Which Transportation Technologies Do We Want?

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    A review of Todd Litman\u27s book, New Mobilities- Smart Planning for Emerging Transportation Technologie

    author is given attribution. Please send your corrections, comments and suggestions for improving it.

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    People value convenience and comfort features such as safe walking conditions, pleasant waiting areas, real-time vehicle arrival information and uncrowded transit vehicles. Travelers tend to place a high value on qualitative factors such as convenience, comfort, security and prestige. However, conventional transport planning practices tend to focus on quantitative impacts and undervalue qualitative impacts. This paper describes ways to evaluate qualitative impacts. Improved travel convenience and comfort tend to reduce unit travel time costs and so are equivalent in value to increased travel speed. Improved analysis of qualitative factors can expand the range of impacts and options considered in transport evaluation, leading to better planning decisions. It is particularly important for efforts to encourage use of alternative modes such as walking, cycling and public transit

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Evaluating public transit accessibility: Inclusive design performance indicators for public transportation in developing countries

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    This paper by Todd Litman and Tom Rickert provides guidance for selecting “inclusive design” performance indicators to evaluate the ability of public transport services in developing countries to accommodate people with disabilities and other special needs

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

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    We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods

    Author Index

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