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Onboard bus comfort significantly depends on the bus lanes characteristics, such as horizontal curvature, pavement roughness, longitudinal, and transversal slope. A literature review shows a statistical relationship between acceleration level and passenger features, such as age and gender. A large number of onboard interviews have been collected and correlated to bus-lane geometry parameters, to evaluate the vibrational comfort of different passengers. Passenger’s judgments are related to the lateral, longitudinal, and vertical shake. At the same time, a geometric investigation on bus-lane corridors, traveled during interviews, in the city of Cagliari in Italy allowed to extract infrastructure parameters in terms of numbers and density of turns, horizontal curvature radius, speed design, and acceleration variance. The paper analyzed the correlation between some geometric and cinematics road parameters that may affect the comfort and the different passenger’s judgments on the three acceleration components by age classes and hourly day. The results generally show weak correlations between the selected parameters and passenger judgments. Conversely, travel speeds have significant correlation values. There is a moderate inverse correlation between the vibrational level and the age of the passengers. The younger age groups tend to have more severe judgments, attributable to their higher demand for comfort. The presence of preferential lanes increases the onboard comfort quality in terms of speed regularity, without private cars interferences.
Today’s cities are meeting places, economic and social development centers, where all citizens should have the opportunity to live and move, according to adequate quality of life standards. However, this does not always correspond to reality in particular for the most vulnerable categories of the population. So, UN’s 2030 Agenda underlines the need to make cities inclusive and accessible by means, for instance, a suitable transport system for all, and in particular for vulnerable people as older people. A lot of studies presented interesting contributes on how older people choose to move and initiatives taken to address their public transport requirements, but no attention has been given to evaluate expected and perceived quality of public transport system, particularly referring to older people. So, the aim of this study is to highlight which should be the most important attributes of a public transport service (PTS) for over 65 years old passengers and if the local PTS satisfy their desires. By an intercept on board survey in the metropolitan area of Cagliari, it has been shown that, for all users, PTS appears qualitatively adequate with respect to each attribute analysed and vulnerable customers are more satisfied than all.
The principle that inspired the authors in the preparation of this study is the concept of “ expanded accessibility ” in terms of usability of spaces, places and services, for their users. From here, in the face of the periodic survey work carried out on local public transport vehicles managed by the transport company of the Municipality of Cagliari, the characteristics of the overall sample have been designated. The data sample is analyzed with focus on elderly people. Some statements are reported to show how much and how these passenger use public transport and related technological services. Finally this segment of demand is compared with the complementary one (under 65 years). The outcomes show that the key elements that distinguish the two segments concern multimodality and technological services.
This article describes the great distance that separates Sardinia from mainland Italy has made the island – the second largest island of the Mediterranean – a marginal and remote region. Its system of ferry links for people travelling to and from Sardinia has such long journey times (8-12 hours) that it is clearly in no way a valid alternative to air transport. It was mainly on the basis of these reasons and with a view to protecting and ensuring the mobility of Sardinian residents that Public Service Obligations (PSO) were imposed on some of the main air routes starting from 2002. Our study is set against this background. It aims to resolve one of the main critical factors that distinguish the PSO network: the shortage of flights on certain routes and the concomitant over-scheduling of others. More specifically, the insufficient scheduling of weekly flights to certain airports, such as Verona and Turin, forces a number of passengers to decide not to travel at all and another part to use connecting flights to Rome/Milan airports or to travel using more than one route, via air or ground transport, with inevitably higher transport costs. The problem was addressed by using a linear scheduling model applied to a network of nodes and arcs representing, respectively, the airports and their connecting routes, and the airport of Cagliari. The decision variables identified were the number of passengers travelling on all of the arcs and the impedance measures associated with the distance travelled by the arcs, represented by the generalized cost of transport. The objective is to determine a network structure which corresponds to the distribution of passengers on the various branches capable of minimizing the total cost. This cost was considered as a useful parameter for comparing the various network scenarios which were obtained by changing the passenger load coefficient and the number of flights. Our study demonstrates that a simple intervention, aimed at the internal reallocation of the flights on the various routes, is able to guarantee categories of users (here divided into business and non-business users) greater access to air transport services. The scenario that more than others is able to improve service efficiency, granting undeniable benefits for all users without having an impact on the costs of air carriers, particularly stands out because it: • Allows access to all network airports through direct flights; • Decongests the Rome and Milan routes
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