Search results

In this volume, we have studied the cyclical behavior of numerous business cycle indicators from the U.S. transportation sector and studied how they are related to those of the overall economy. Our study began with the conceptualization of what constitutes the transportation services sector, identifying relevant monthly indicators from the private sector and the government, and finally putting them together to construct a monthly measure of output of the transportation services sector. The challenge was to develop an indicator that will be available promptly soon after a month with other widely reported monthly indicators such as the index of industrial production, Institute for Supply Management (ISM) surveys, CPI, index of leading indicators, etc. and is not subject to much data revisions. Since monthly activity measures of major transportation services sectors such as trucking and railroads are produced by private membership organizations, use of these data in the production of official statistics in the public sector needed skillful persuasion of government officials. Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) releases the preliminary number for the latest month and replaces the number for the oldest preliminary month with a revised number. All other revisions are held until an annual comprehensive revision of the transportation services output (TSI). It is gratifying to see that the arrangement of cooperation between the transportation department and these private service organizations are working out seamlessly, and TSI continues to get the media attention.

Purpose – This study aims to analyze and assess the relation of freight transportation for regional development in the north zone of Aceh. The impact of freight transportation to accelerate the delivery of goods as observed through several indicators including regulation, retribution, freight entrepreneur, trucker, size of truck bin, punctuality, loading and unloading systems on regional planning supporting has been focus of this study.

Design/Methodology/Approach – The freight transportation in north zone of Aceh, covering Lhokseumawe, Aceh Utara, Bireuen, BenerMeriah and Aceh Tengah regencies will be examined. In several indicators including regulation, retribution, freight entrepreneur, trucker, size of truck bin, punctuality, loading and unloading systems the freight transportation will be surveyed for the analysis. The factors which contribute in the development of the area through freight transportation are the economic growth, human resources improvement, management of land use and environmental harmonization. This regional development approach aims to determine a connection between the two variables.

Findings – The results of the study show that variables of freight transportation in several indicators including regulation, retribution, freight entrepreneur, trucker, size of truck bin, punctuality, loading and unloading systems have a significant impact on regional development. It is indicated by the value of 0.214 in the regression weight result.

Research Limitations/Implications – This research has implications on the relation of freight transportation with regard to several indicators including regulation, retribution, freight entrepreneur, trucker, size of truck bin, punctuality, loading and unloading systems on the regional development based on the aspect of economic growth, human resources improvement, management of land use and environmental harmonization.

Practical Implications – The result of this study will be an important input to the Aceh government, county and city governments in the north zone in Aceh to encourage the establishment of a road network to accelerate freight transportation in that region for the development of new economic zones.

Originality/Value – This study suggests that freight transportation has the strongest links to significantly influence the activities of regional development, so it can be recommended for the Aceh government, county and city governments in the north zone of Aceh to orient road network policy towards the development of the new economic area and support the implementation of the special economic zones of Arun, Lhokseumawe.

This paper discusses a multifaceted approach to developing specific and general climate resilience in a state transportation system that focuses on organizations and physical infrastructure. The paper focuses on resilience building to the dynamically evolving climate-related threats and extreme events in a transportation agency. This paper aims to enable agencies to understand better how their systems are exposed to different hazards and provide the information necessary for prioritizing their assets and systems for resilience improvement.

This paper leverages long-term climate hazard databases, spatial and statistical analyses and nonprobabilistic approaches for specific and general climate resilience improvement. Spatial and temporal variability assessments were conducted on granular historical records of exposure obtained from Spatial Hazards Events and Losses Database for the United States data set to identify emerging hot spots of exposure. These were then assessed in combination with various asset specific vulnerability parameters, presented with examples of pavements and bridges. Specific metrics were obtained for the various aspects of vulnerability in the context of a given asset to estimate the overall vulnerability. A criticality-vulnerability matrix was then developed to provide a prioritization model for transportation systems.

This paper provides insights into the evolving nature of exposure, vulnerability and risk assessments and an approach to systematically account for climate change and the uncertainties associated with it in resilience planning. The Multi-Hazards Exposure, Vulnerability and Risk Assessment tool presented in this paper conducts climate hazard exposure, vulnerability and risk analysis on pavements, bridges and culverts and can be applied by any transportation agency.

This study does not address operational aspects of the transportation system nor include future climate scenario data, but uses the historical records available at hand for resilience planning. With better climate projection data available in the future, the approach should be enhanced by leveraging scenario-based planning.

This paper is of potential value to practitioners and researchers interested in developing resilience building capabilities to manage the effects of climate-related hazards and extreme events as well as unknown threats on infrastructure and organizational performance.

This paper bridges an important gap in infrastructure resilience approaches by systematically accounting for the dynamic nature of climate change and the system level context of vulnerability beyond the physical condition of assets.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of maritime and air transportation on the environment and economy of Iran. The authors specify two dynamic models of the environmental pollution and the economic growth. Then, the authors estimate the environmental and economic elasticities of maritime and air transportation in short run and long run in Iran during 1978–2012.

The authors estimate the environmental and economic elasticities of maritime elasticities in short and long run, using simultaneous equations system.

The findings indicate that the short- and long-run environmental pollution elasticities of maritime transportation are higher than those of the air ones. In addition, the economic growth elasticities are greater in the air transportation compared to maritime one. As a result, the maritime transportation is more pollutant and less productive in Iran in comparison with the air transportation.

The policymakers are advised to improve the infrastructure of maritime transportation from both the environmental and economic point of views. Consequently, the air transportation is considered as a cleaner and more beneficial transportation mode in Iran, where geographical position limits the maritime transport as a widespread transportation mode.

Attention to infrastructure issues has increased in recent years. The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA)and its reauthorization in the Transportation Efficiency Act of 1998 (TEA 21 ) have focused stronger attention on the need to encourage innovation, identify and facilitate partnerships, identify core research and provide assessment criteria. This has resulted in increased awareness that information is key to accomplishing these goals. The importance of international materials is now seen as critical to efficient utilization of knowledge. Reports a survey of 12 European transportation centers in nine countries during 1998. Information was gathered on local characteristics of researchers, areas of research specialization, formats and languages of resources used/borrowed by the researchers, local publications and their dissemination patterns, the utilization of US materials, and the role of the World Wide Web by the librarians, researchers and other staff at the transportation facility.

Transportation librarians name the Transportation Information Research Services (TRIS) database as a critical resource to meet research needs of the US transportation community. This paper seeks to question the claim with evidence from a small‐scale pilot study seeking to answer the question, “How is TRIS Online meeting the needs of transportation professionals?” The paper also aims to offer an outline of the information‐seeking behaviours of transportationists who participated in the pilot study.

Using a mixed‐methods pilot study, researchers present observed information‐seeking behaviours of transportation professionals, compared with formal studies about the user group and the consensus of library and information professionals who serve the community.

Questions remain about the efficacy of TRIS serving its target audience. The results demonstrate that search results received mixed reviews from users and they favoured keyword searching to the near total exclusion of the sophisticated information retrieval features that librarians/information professionals maintain.

The study focuses on a specific, one‐time interaction between a small pool of professionals and an online database. The results are highly valuable but should not be generalized to describe the information‐seeking behaviour of all transportation professionals.

The researchers recommend that all elements of this pilot study remain, should the project be reproduced on a larger scale; it provides a feasible framework and yields data necessary for extensive analysis.

Baldwin notes, “Although there is a general assumption that a large portion of transportation‐related materials are available on the internet, few, if any, studies have been done on the topic. For most of the transportation community TRIS Online is seen as the most important single means of identifying transportation‐related information resources”.

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to expand the traditional economic effect analysis of export subsidy, which has previously ignored the incentive of export subsidies in terms of competition from re‐importation.

The paper performs a comparative static analysis based on the traditional welfare analysis of export subsidies by introducing different transportation costs and using small country model and large country model, respectively.

Compared with the traditional analysis, exporting countries that implement export subsidies suffer less welfare loss and induce intra‐industry trade of homogeneous products. Due to export subsidy policy incentives, transportation costs heavily influence trade patterns, trade volumes and welfare. Trade patterns evolve from unidirectional export to intra‐industry trade as transportation costs are reduced, with the main source of welfare loss coming from transportation costs. The distribution of export subsidies is biased when domestic transportation costs are high. Under low domestic transportation costs, inefficient intra‐industry trade would emerge as a result of export subsidy incentive.

The findings could be helpful to understand the impact of export subsidy policy on trade pattern, trade volumes and welfare when considering international and domestic transportation cost.

The paper emphasizes the incentive of export subsidy on re‐importation, and links it with transportation costs, which expand the traditional export subsidy analysis.

Despite the fact that transportation accounts for about 20% of the gross national product of the United States, transportation course offerings‐at both the undergraduate and graduate level‐are rather insignificant at most US colleges and universities. There is apparently no great demand by the transportation industry for students whose major field is transportation. Nor are transportation teachers in demand, and “the doctoral student in transportation and logistics must usually prepare himself to teach in a second field such as marketing or finance because most schools do not need a full‐time transportation and logistics person. This note does not solve the problem; it does little more than reaffirm that it exists. Hopefully, others concerned with college and university level transportation curricula will take a cue from this note and contribute ideas as to what needs to be done to restore transportation education to a more proportionate role.

There has been little conceptual work that comprehensively examines the changing role of the corporate transportation function in the modern business environment. Successful managers today require a broad view of transportation management’s role and responsibilities in an integrated supply chain. This paper clarifies the major transportation decision areas and introduces a framework that positions corporate transportation management within the overall integrated supply chain environment. The framework portrays initial transportation decisions as strategic, long‐term decisions that focus on the overall supply chain transportation system. Once decisions are understood at this level, the decision‐making scope becomes increasingly tactical in nature, focusing on operations that implement the overall system decisions.