We address spatial granularity in route directions in relation to information needs in a case study that provides a situation involving different modalities of travel (i.e., walking and travel by public transport). Results reveal that the two sets of route directions investigated (human and web-based) provide the most crucial route elements in hierarchically structured ways that reflect the sal...

This paper investigates the effects of inter-organizational collaboration on the effectiveness of U.S. municipal fire departments. Almost all U.S. fire departments engage in the reciprocal exchange of fire services with neighboring departments. However, there is substantial variety in these relationships. First, some departments exchange help with greater frequency than others. Second, some dep...

While urban form in general and density in particular are believed by many to significantly influence travel behavior, various recent studies have argued that the true determinants of travel patterns are attitudes rather than land use characteristics. This research builds on this notion and investigates to what extent a lack of congruence between physical neighborhood structure and preferences ...

This paper compares four transportation energy conservation strategies using a comprehensive evaluation framework that takes into account how each strategy affects annual vehicle travel, and therefore mileage-related impacts such as traffic congestion, road and parking facility costs, and crashes. These mileage-related impacts tend to be large in magnitude compared with energy conservation bene...

The classical Wardrop System Optimum assignment model assumes that the users will cooperate with each other in order to minimize the overall travel costs. The importance of the System Optimum model lies on its wellrecognized ability of producing solutions that correspond to the most efficient way of using the scarce resources represented by the street and road capacities. In this paper, we pres...

A heuristic algorithm is described for vehicle routing and scheduling problems to minimise the total travel time, where the time required for a vehicle to travel along any road in the network varies according to the time of travel. The variation is caused by congestion that is typically greatest during morning and evening rush hours. The algorithm is used to schedule a fleet of delivery vehicle...

We propose a regression approach for estimating the distribution of ambulance travel times between any two locations in a road network. Our method uses ambulance location data that can be sparse in both time and network coverage, such as Global Positioning System data. Estimates depend on the path traveled and on explanatory variables such as the time of day and day of week. By modeling at the ...

Travel time estimation is a critical ingredient for transportation management and traveler information—both infrastructure-based and in-vehicle. Infrastructure managers and operators are interested in estimating optimal freeway sensor density for new construction and retrofits. Focusing on freeway travel time estimation for display on roadside variable message signs, this paper describes a conc...

Traffic routing is a well established optimization problem in traffic management. We address here dynamic routing problems where the load of roads is taken into account dynamically, aiming at the optimization of required travel times. We investigate ant-based algorithms that can handle dynamic routing problems, but suffer from negative emergent effects like road congestions. We propose an inver...

This paper compares four transportation energy conservation strategies using a comprehensive evaluation framework that takes into account how each strategy affects annual vehicle travel, and therefore mileage-related impacts such as traffic congestion, road and parking facility costs, and crashes. These mileage-related impacts tend to be large in magnitude compared with energy conservation bene...