Pictures from the internal workshop 30 Sep-1 Oct

Couldn't resist sharing a few pictures from the "internat". I thought it was great for many reasons - not least because I suddenly realised how many we are and that it became so apparent that the Centre "exists", if you get what I mean... The picture from the plenary session is rather impressive, I think.

And then there were the group discussions... don't people look intelligent and enthusiastic?

Executive group today

The executive group (Ledningsgruppen, LG) met today. Things of interest that we talked about:

New projects:

• Theoretical justification for additive and quasi additive travel costs in road networks with uncertain travel time (Leonid Engelson, KTH). (How can you specify penalty functions in a scheduling model to get link-additive costs for travel time variability? Rather technical but extremely relevant if you want to include travel time variability into assignment models.)
• ERSA-CTS-JIBS Summer school. Joint project with Jönköping International Business school. For PhD students and other interested, with the preliminary theme "Evaluation and Financing of Infrastructure Investments". Will take place in Aug 2010. Charlie Karlsson (JIBS) is coordinating this.
• A number of projects were endorsed by the LG but will need to go the Board for decision (there is a budget cap under which the LG can decide, after that it goes to the Board).

The scientific council (Mark Wardman, Michel Bierlaire, Stef Proost) visits us Nov 30. Several all of you will have very short (5-10 min) presentations of your research, and everyone is welcome to attend this - it's a good opportunity to get an overview of what the Centre is doing.

And don't miss that the 2-year seminar and buffet party takes place Dec 2! Seminar with several short presentations from 15:00, and then buffet later in the evening.

Emma's revising the home page

The CTS home page has been a sad affair for a long time - everyone seems to have had too much to do to get it in shape. Finally, Emma Frejinger has volunteered to fix it from its current rather embarrassing state to something better. In a couple of weeks we'll see more, but there's already visible improvement!

Travel time reliability in Vancouver

Me, Mogens, Joel and Maria are presenting on a TRB/OECD conference on travel time reliability in Vancouver. Lots of interesting things to hear. I'm happy to say, though, that Scandinavian reliability research seems to be well positioned compared to most of the rest of the world... The Dutch are also doing interesting things (first results from their national study of time and reliability valuation are due soon), John Bates were excellent as usual and Hani Mahmassani (U of Texas) presented at least 15 interesting observations and findings in a speech lasting less than 10 minutes... so I can't say I can fully explain everything, but I think it ought to be checked out.

Someone ought to write a paper called "Incorporating travel time variability in CBA - state-of-the-art and state-of-practice". There's a lot of unnecessary confusion out there regarding valuation, measures, forecasting, demand modeling etc.

My topic was "Reliability in Swedish CBA - state-of-practice and what needs to be done", and for those interested, here are my slides (there's quite a lot of text on them, but it's intentional to make them a little more stand-alone...).

Update: All of the presentations can now be found here

The cost of the Stockholm congestion charges

Carl Hamilton had a presentation at the ETC on the cost of the Stockholm congestion charging system. Here's a video:

The cost of putting Stockholm Congestion Charges in place from Carl Hamilton on Vimeo.

Carl mentioned that it might be an interesting idea to put CTS seminars on the web in this way. A simple DV camera, a microphone and you're set. And voila, those who missed a seminar can catch up afterwards. Not a bad idea at all, I think.

My highlights at the ETC

Several people from the Centre attended the European Transport Conference - I think we were 10 people there. I thought it was a great conference this year - lots of really interesting papers. Some of my highlights were (I'll link to the papers once they are up - note that the conference nowadays make the papers available, which is a huge improvement!):

• Robert Bain presented a survey on optimism bias when forecasting toll road traffic demand. In short, forecasts overpredict traffic volumes with 30% on average - mostly due to the incentives present in toll road contexts (i.e., the overpredictions aren't present to the same extent for public non-tolled roads)
• Pedro Abrantes presented an extension of Mark Wardman's meta-analysis of UK value-of-time studies (Mark and Jeremy Toner were co-authors). Lots of interesting results, and a huge material.
  
• Andrew Daly showed that when computing the willingness-to-pay from mixed logit models in the "standard form" (i.e. separate, random parameters for cost and time, for example - not the "WTP-space method" of Mogens Fosgerau and others), then without additional contraints on the distribution of the cost parameter, the WTP isn't even defined. In particular, normally distributed cost coefficients give undefined WTP:s... Bad news for all you out there estimating normally distributed cost coefficients (if you want to infer values of time etc., that is - forecasting is OK, of course)
• Andrew also showed a set of nice ideas on how to transform the deterministic part of the utility (the "V part") to improve fit. I guess others have tried some of it before, but it was a good summary and organisation of different methods to do it.
  
• Mogens Fosgerau presented a nice and simple derivation of the valuation of headway. The expression results in a decreasing marginal disutility of headway, just like the functions people often have estimated. Good to have a theoretical base for this. The paper is already published in Transportation Research B.
  

Carl Hamilton at the ITS World Congress in Stockholm

Carl is a PhD student at the centre (at KTH) and is doing research on (i.a.) incentives of road toll operators. He recently held a speech at the ITS World Congress in Stockholm, which apparently stirred up some dust....
It's called "Why the EETS directive will fail - and what can be done to save it". The EETS directive is the EU commission's directive that all road charging systems must be interoperable (it should be enough to sign up with one operator, and then it should work all over the EU), and it's a newly decided, long discussed and (by some) cherished reform. If someone who apparently knows what he's talking about says that it simply won't work - well, some will enjoy it and some won't. Here's the video.

Why EETS will fail, and what can be done to save it from Carl Hamilton on Vimeo.