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The perception of highway nuisance i.e. noises, air pollution and barrier-effects, is associated with negative effects on health and quality of life. This study aims to gain a deeper understanding of the development of highway nuisance perception among residents. Interviews were conducted with residents in 32 households living along the Southern Ring Road, a highway which crosses various neighbourhoods in the city of Groningen, the Netherlands. Various themes emerged from the interviews which were important in the development of residents’ perceptions of highway nuisance. For example, our interviews showed that residents who had not explicitly chosen to live next to a highway were more acutely affected by the negative externalities of that highway later. Perceived environmental changes, often due to governmental actions such as new/extended noise barriers, removal of trees and newly constructed buildings causing noise reflection, also played a role in the interviewees’ development of nuisance perception. In addition, the interviewees indicated that expectations about future highway developments influenced their current perception of highway nuisance, which could be described as anticipation effects. Interviewees also indicated that recent information about the potentially harmful effects of air pollution increased their concerns about living near the highway. A final theme discussed were differences in the extent to which residents were able to develop coping strategies to reduce the amount of highway nuisance perception. The participants’ experiences indicate the importance of further integration between the planning of highway infrastructure and the broader environment in order to reduce nuisance perceptions and improve residential quality near highways. more...

The competitive dialogue (CD) procurement procedure aims to structure and facilitate public-private interaction in procurement. In this article we examine the CD procedures of four complex Dutch road infrastructure projects and explore how the mix in public-private interaction between the three governance strategies of cooperation, competition, and coordination is conditioned by various external influences. We found that public authorities' strict legal coordination can structure the CD process, but may divert attention from the required interaction on project-specific complexities. Combined with private contractors' focus on competition, this does not stimulate public-private cooperation. We conclude that CD is a promising tool for facilitating public-private interaction, but, in practice, the optimal mix of governance strategies is not achieved. We recommend strengthening cooperation by encouraging public and private tender organizations to collaboratively search for opportunities to deal with complexity in planning. more...

The introduction of a road pricing measure leads to changes in the transport costs on (certain) roads in a network at a certain time, possibly influencing the geographical accessibility of (groups of) people or firms at certain locations. Geographical accessibility indicators or measures give the opportunity to gain a quick and interpretable insight into the (accessibility) effects as a result of changes in the land-use or transport system (e.g. caused by certain policy interventions). These characteristics also make accessibility indicators a useful policy tool to assess (transport geographical) effects due to transport pricing, possibly in addition to economic welfare analyses. Despite the possible advantages of using geographical accessibility as a policy evaluation tool, geographical accessibility indicators have not been used to evaluate road pricing effects. This may in part be caused by the fact that geographical accessibility measures in their basic form are not directly applicable to road pricing. This thesis aimed to provide (greater) insight into how to model realistic geographical accessibility effects due to pricing measures. This was studied on the basis of a desk study and a simulation study. The study has shown that it is possible to determine accessibility effects due to road pricing in a relatively easy way with tailored geographical accessibility measures. However, the effects are sensitive to how accessibility is computed. In addition to geographical accessibility, this study also aimed to gain greater insight into the behavioural intentions of households and firms as a result of road pricing. The thesis focused specifically on the longer-term behavioural (relocation) effects of households and firms. However, short-term (trip) changes were also analyzed since short-term and longer-term behavioural changes are expected to be interdependent. It was found that people intend to adjust their behaviour when a road pricing measure is introduced. As can be expected more people intend to make changes in their car trip behaviour than in their residential and job locations. However, relocation effects do seem to occur, and are not negligible at all. As is the case with households, more firms intend to change their trip behaviour than their settlement location due to road pricing. Again, settlement relocations are certainly not negligible. Although relocation effects are not insignificant, especially households and firms that already have an intention to relocate within two years are intending to relocate due to road pricing. Moreover, road pricing also seems to have an influence on the actual decision where to locate when a decision to relocate has already been taken (e.g. due to another reason). By using state-of-the-art statistical estimation techniques, this thesis also analyzed characteristics of people and firms who have a lower or higher intention to change their current behaviour. more...

Although the spectacular spread of wired and wireless communication technologies such as the Internet and mobile phone have been discussed extensively in the academic literature, knowledge of the interactions among face-to-face (F2F) and electronic communication modes and their implications for travel behavior is rather limited. The same is true for knowledge about factors influencing the choice for these types of communication. Using survey data collected among 662 respondents, this paper aims to gain more insight into (i) the interaction between F2F and electronic contacts, (ii) the influence of information content and relational distance on the choice of the communication mode/service, and (iii) the influence of relational and geographical distance, in addition to various other factors, on the frequency of F2F and electronically mediated contacts with relatives and friends. Bivariate correlation analysis indicates that the frequency of F2F contacts is positively correlated with that for electronic communication, which points at a generation effect. With respect to the impact of information content and relational distance, we find that such synchronous modes/services as F2F and telephone conversations are used more for urgent matters and that asynchronous modes (especially e-mail) become more influential as the relational distance in the social network increases. Finally, ordered probit analyses confirm that both F2F and electronic communication frequencies decline with increasing physical and relational distance to the social network members. more...

In many developed countries high quality digital transport networks are available for GIS based analysis. Partly this is due to the requirements of route planning software for internet and car navigation systems. Properties of these networks consist among others of road quality attributes, directionality and turntables. In contrast in many so-called developing countries hardly any digital networks of sufficient quality exist for even the most basic GIS operations. It is not realistic to assume that on a short term high quality digital networks will become available. In such a case an airline network can be created. However this type of network assumes homogeneous space and does not take any physical obstacles into account. The Willowvale case is used to introduce the concept of (modified) Delauney networks that only creates airline links between physically neighboring locations. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First it is assessed to what extent ‘Airline’ and ‘Delauney’ based networks can be used as simplified cheap alternatives for the expensive digital road maps based on reality. The suitability of these alternative networks is examined in a Dutch case, where a detailed digital road map already exists. Results indicate that origin-destination distances computed with Delauney networks, when compared to airline distances, are much more in line with distances derived from the actual network. This leads to the conclusion that especially in heterogeneous areas the Delauney method offers an acceptable way of creating alternative road maps for the sole purpose of estimating the travel distance between locations. The ‘Dar es Salam’ case is used to illustrate that the method can also be applied when the road network needs to serve an urban area instead of linking small villages. The second purpose of the paper goes one step further and aims at getting insight into the sensitivity of accessibility outcomes when a Delauney network is used as a network extension to add more detail at the local level to an already existing digital road map. Results for the ‘Eindhoven’ case indicate that the addition of a more detailed lower scale network does indeed have a substantial influence on accessibility results more...

Transport pricing is high on the political agenda throughout the world, but as the authors illustrate, governments seeking to implement this often face challenging questions and significant barriers. The associated policy and research questions cannot always be addressed adequately from a mono-disciplinary perspective. This book shows how a multi-disciplinary approach may lead to new types of analysis and insights, contributing to a better understanding of the intricacies of transport pricing and eventually to a potentially more effective and acceptable design of such policies. The study addresses important policy and research themes such as the possible motives for introducing road transport pricing and potential conflicts between these motives, behavioural responses to transport pricing for households and firms, the modelling of transport pricing, and the acceptability of pricing. more...