Passenger transport is a key player in urban mobility. However, it imposes some disadvantages, such as: time wasting, cost of fares and other costs, insecurity, discomfort and damage to the environment. These disadvantages herein called disutilities affect passenger choices and therefore it is necessary to consider them encompassing all modes of transportation. In this study, an analysis of these disutilities was conducted with the purpose of measuring its drawbacks. To this end, a case study in the Greater Tokyo Area (Japan) was carried out and assessed using the Analytic Hierarchy Process. The results showed that from 0,000 to 1,000 automobiles produce the highest level of disutility (0.182) compared with seven other modes of transportation.
Public transport is essential to provide urban mobility, and cities need to offer a fast, comfortable, secure, and low-pollutant public transport mode to attract passengers and reduce private car use. Despite metros, trains, and light rail systems being desirable, the cost of implementation and low flexibility make bus services the best option for many cities. One solution for improving bus service systems is the implementation of bus rapid transit systems that are composed of buses running in segregated lines with pre-payment fares and level boarding platforms in stations. However, the main challenge of bus systems is the use of engines fueled by diesel, which is extremely polluted. One possible solution is the use of battery buses; but are they really feasible regarding daily operation cost? In this paper, we investigate the adoption of battery buses in comparison to diesel engines in a BRT system using municipal data from São Paulo, Brazil, as a reference. We collected operational data from the Sao Paulo city government transport agency and data from the literature to produce an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) model, which allowed us to compare both systems. The AHP model considered a triple-bottom-line perspective using social, economic, and environmental impact criteria. The result showed that the initial costs of acquisition can be a barrier, but in the long run, cities adopting battery buses in their BRT system can benefit from the effects of reduction in gas emissions and longer lifetimes of electric bus components. Moreover, the results showed that the adoption of battery buses in BRT systems depends on local government subsidies being implemented.
Road traffic has a high variety of types of vehicles and cargo transported. One of the main difficulties in pavement design is forecasting the changes in traffic over time and evaluating the comparative deterioration power of the various loads with axle and tire settings and different levels of repetition. The road environment in Brazil, as we know, is the main means of the country's cargo transportation. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s the road modal accounted for over 60% of the total cargo transported in the country leaving the unbalanced Brazilian transport matrix with almost exclusive investments in such means of transportation.According to CNT 2012, which conducted a survey in approximately 45% of the paved network, evaluating the pavement functional conditions, traffic signs and geometry, 46% of the country's road network has some types of deficiency in the pavement. The goal of this work is to contribute to a better understanding of the complex influence of traffic in the design and service life of the pavement. The load pressure of commercial vehicle tires over the pavement has increased in recent decades. A more apparent effect of this increase in tire pressure would be the change in the pavement-tire contact area which in turn may result in an increase in the contact load between tire and pavement and other harmful effects on the structure. This study aims to determine the effect on the calculation of the N number, or the number of solicitations of the standard axle on the road pavement, measuring the overload as a percentage of the legal load indicated by a scale. Thus, we calculate how an increase in the overload percentage in comparison with the allowable load will influence the decrease of the calculated durability of the pavement designed for the highway.
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