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To explore people’s attitudes towards bus service quality and bus use.

The study is a natural experiment that uses primary data collected from questionnaires, which were conducted to Maltese residents. The information was collected two months before the bus service reform and one year afterwards.

Results cast doubt on whether current policy measures regarding bus service quality are adequate to contribute to a modal shift from car to bus use.

Provides insight on whether current policy measures are sufficient in order to obtain an increase in bus patronage.

The case study of the Malta bus service reform provides an opportunity to study people’s attitudes in a quasi-experimental situation. Additionally, the research sheds light on the possible impact that bus service reforms have on people’s attitudes.

Purpose — Automated fare collection systems implemented in public transportation systems in the last decade have provided a massive, continuous and low-cost source of reliable travel information. A direct and useful application of these data is the estimation of highly representative, although not bias-free, origin-destination (OD) matrices.

Methodology/approach — We discuss several issues with current OD matrix estimation methodologies, such as fare evasion and group travel, and their derived biases, specifically focusing on the Santiago (Chile) case. We also propose and apply two methods of validation: endogenous and exogenous validation. We elaborate on some methodological improvements that could be implemented to upgrade the activity estimation mechanics.

Findings — Several sources of bias in the estimation of OD matrix estimation from passive data are pointed and some solutions proposed. We apply improvements to existing methodologies and increase the success rate of trip estimations.

Practical implications — The reliable estimation of public transport OD matrices from passive data results in a valuable planning tool for both transit authorities and operators, much more representative and with less errors and biases that conventional data collecting techniques.

Originality/value of paper — This paper is one of the first works to deal with the subject.

Purpose — This paper describes what the authors believe to be the first GPS-only full-scale household travel survey.

Design/methodology — The survey commenced in early 2009 with the conduct of a pilot survey to help establish various parameters and procedures for the main survey. The main survey commenced in August 2009 and was completed in August 2010. It was designed as a household travel survey to be collected steadily over a 12 month period. The target sample size was originally set at over 3500 households, although this target was reduced downwards during the course of the survey. Each household member over the age of 12 was asked to carry a GPS device with them everywhere they went for a period of 3 days. After the 3-day collection period was completed, GPS devices were retrieved from households, the data were downloaded and processing of the data commenced. The study also involved a PR survey performed on the Internet.

Findings — The paper concludes with lessons learnt from this GPS-only survey and suggestions for how future GPS-only surveys might be conducted.

Originality/value of the paper — The paper describes the first GPS-only household travel survey and concludes that it is now feasible to conduct household travel surveys by GPS.

Tourism reconfigures the metropolitan dynamics and the patterns of use of the urban systems. The seasonal nature of tourism produces an impact on the urban hierarchies, since it affects the labor, residential, and recreational markets. As a result, people move to and in the destination and it challenges the supply of sustainable modes of transport such as public transport. This research is set within the context of three demanding challenges that tourist destinations need to face-up: to increase environmental sustainability, to enhance destination competitiveness, and finally to assure quality and comfort of public transport services for the local resident population. Camp de Tarragona region, where Costa Daurada (one of the most important Spanish tourist brands) is located, is analyzed to illustrate how different data sources can aid to confront the aforementioned challenges. Given that seasonality is a dynamic phenomenon, suitable data should be flexible in terms of its time framework. To this end data from smart travel cards provided by the consortium that manages the public transport system in the region has been analyzed. Data unveiled the impact of seasonality on the evolution of demand throughout the year, the type of transport tickets used, or changes occurred in the geographical distribution of the mobility Alternative data sources such as surveys and passive mobile positioning data have also been examined, and their pros and cons have been addressed.

Purpose — New methods of measuring user satisfaction in transport services have been proposed and applied in the literature. In this paper, we compare three alternative measures for estimating user satisfaction: the numerical rating, the ordinal rating and the choice.

Approach — We analysed these measures considering their differences and limitations and the models that use these measures as dependent variables. We developed and applied a methodology to build these models. It comprises a preliminary qualitative analysis and a quantitative survey to identify the most relevant attributes of the satisfaction function, and a stated preference survey to obtain information of the alternative satisfaction measures for modelling purpose.

Findings — The ordinal rating may be a better user response to estimate satisfaction than score and choice based on its characteristics. The results obtained in the application reinforced this approach.

Research limitations — It is assumed that choice, score and ordinal valuation depend upon a latent stochastic satisfaction function of the same attributes. Further research is needed to analyse this assumption and how these responses vary according to the context for decision and exogenous factors, including the response scale of ratings.

Practical implications — Gathering alternative satisfaction responses simultaneously from users allowed for the consistency analysis and filtering of data, which greatly benefited the model estimation process.

Originality/value — The paper provides a methodology to estimate user satisfaction models in transit services, which can be applied in other transport services. The conceptual analysis and the application suggest that ordinal ratings are key user responses to uncover the underlying satisfaction function.

This paper addresses the problem of bunching of buses and how it may be counter-acted. An algorithm is presented for providing selective priority to buses at traffic signals according to their headways, the highest levels of priority being given to those buses with the highest headways, i.e. those buses which are running late or falling behind the bus in front.

Alternative selective priority strategies are evaluated in terms of their effects on bus journey time regularity, bus delay and general traffic delay. A simulation model SPLIT (Selective Priority for Late buses Implemented at Traffic signals) has been developed to investigate the performance of different priority strategies. The paper describes the details of the model, including bus stop dwell times and overlapping bus services, and compares results obtained from the model for a number of different priority strategies.

This work was driven by the keen interest in bus priority applications in London within the EC DGVII project INCOME.

Sustainable transport is often defined according to energy efficiency and environmental impacts. With global approval during Habitat III, however, a set of Sustainable Development Goals have become the focus for human development until 2030, underlining the relevance of health, equity and other social issues.

These goals raise the challenge of achieving significant progress towards ‘transport justice’ in diverse societies and contexts. While exclusion occurs for different reasons, discrimination, based on cultural roles, combines with sexual harassment and other mobility barriers to limit women’s mobility. This makes gender an area of particular interest and potential insight for considering equity within sustainability and its social components.

Using data from Metropolitan Santiago to ground a conceptual exploration, this chapter examines the equity implications of women’s travel patterns and sustainable transport. Key findings underline the importance of considering non-work trip purposes and achieving better land-use combinations to accommodate care-oriented trips. Moreover, barriers linked to unsafe public transport environments limit women’s mobility and, therefore, their participation. Women account for a disproportionately high number of walking trips, a situation that can be interpreted as ‘greater sustainability’ in terms of energy use and emissions, but suggests significant inequalities in access. Environmental and economic sustainability gains may be achieved at a high social cost, unless specific measures are taken.