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Research on the effect of rapid urbanization on households in developing countries tends to focus on the linkages between affordability, expenditures, and welfare. Unfortunately, due to data availability limitations, empirical evidence on the monetary effects of urban land use change on individual households is absent from the literature. In order to address this void in the literature, the study uses a unique travel survey to specify models of transportation expenses for a subsample of households in Lahore, Pakistan. The models of households nested within administrative units known as zones uses the respective transportation expenses for each household unit as a dependent variable as well as demographic and economic independent variables which are known to affect such expenditures. The zone level controls for the relative density of road infrastructure in each of the zones as well as stock and flow versions of an urban land use predictor obtained from remotely-sensed land cover data from 2000 and from 2009. The major contributions of the study are that household expenditures for transportation are: lower in zones that have more road infrastructure; higher in zones that became more urbanized; and lower in zones that are more proximate to the geographic center. Further, efforts by local government to rezone land toward a mixture of uses will help to offset the higher household expenditures for transportation found where urbanization is more rapid. More research is necessary, but the results offer cautious optimism on the effects of urban land use change on the welfare of households in developing countries. • Empirical evidence on the effect of urban land use change on household welfare in developing countries is scarce. • Household transportation expenditures decrease with road infrastructure. • Household transportation expenditures increase in zones that became more urbanized. • Household transportation expenditures decrease with proximity to the geographic center of Lahore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Bus rapid transit (BRT) is a popular mode for government investment in public infrastructure, particularly in developing countries where capital resources are scarce. Enthusiastic evaluations of BRT systems worldwide are perhaps premature given that most such systems have been operational for only a short time. Further, little research on BRT systems from the user perspective is evident in the literature. The latter is problematic because one justification for government investment in BRT is the social benefit such systems bestow on groups who are traditionally without access to private modes of transportation. In order to explore the purported social benefits of a BRT system two series of multiple logistic regression models are fit. The first uses disaggregate data from inside a BRT service area and the second uses disaggregate data from inside and from outside a BRT service area. The rider and the commuter data sources, respectively, help to understand who benefits from the new Metro Bus System (MBS) in Lahore and how. To that end, descriptive results show that women are less representative of riders and of commuters, but inferential results show that females are more likely to commute via the MBS. In addition, usage patterns show that females are more habitual users and that they benefit greatly from the fare subsidy. Finally, efforts to further integrate the MBS with the greater public transportation network in Lahore will help to mitigate the monetary and the temporal costs of MBS usage which more so affect females. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the regulation control of a one-dimensional reaction–diffusion equation in the presence of a state-delay in the reaction term. The objective is to achieve the PI regulation of the right Dirichlet trace with a command selected as the left Dirichlet trace. The control design strategy consists of the design of a PI controller on a finite dimensional truncated model obtained by spectral reduction. By an adequate selection of the number of modes of the original infinite-dimensional system, we show that the proposed control design procedure achieves both the exponential stabilization of the original infinite-dimensional system as well as the setpoint regulation of the right Dirichlet trace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agent-based models (ABMs) have become an important tool for advancing scientific understanding in a variety of disciplines and more specifically have contributed gains to natural resource management in recent decades. However, a key challenge to their utility is the lack of convergence upon a common set of assumptions for representing key processes (such as agent decision structure), with the outcome that published ABM tools are rarely (if ever) used beyond their original development team. While a number of ABM frameworks are publicly available for use, the continued development of models from scratch is a signal of the continuing difficulty in capturing sufficient modeling flexibility in a single package. In this study we examine ABM sharing by comparing co-citation networks from several well-known ABM frameworks to those used in the land-use change modeling community. We then outline a different publication paradigm for the ABM community that could improve the sharing of model structure and help move toward convergence on a common set of tools and assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]