New appointments at the Driving Simulator

The Institute is pleased to announce the recent appointment of two leading academics in the field of driver behaviour and driving simulation. Joining the Institute’s Safety and Technology Group, Professor Richard Romano and Dr Gustav Markkula will primarily contribute to the research direction and activities of the University of Leeds Driving Simulator and lead the driving simulation work on the Programme for Simulation (PSi) project, one of the Institute’s largest research programmes, jointly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR).

Professor Richard Romano (left) and Dr Gustav Markkula (right)

 Professor Richard Romano joins ITS from Realtime Technologies, Inc., where he was founder and president of the company for 18 years. Professor Romano has over two decades’ experience in designing, building, installing and developing advanced research driving simulators for academic and commercial clients across the globe. He completed his undergraduate studies in Engineering Science and an MSc in Aerospace Engineering, at the University of Toronto, before moving to the University of Iowa to complete his PhD on drive algorithms for large excursion motion bases. Speaking about his appointment, Richard said, “I love being in Leeds. The ITS team is an international powerhouse and I am looking forward to working with everyone. Oh, and the simulator is amazing.” As Chair in Driving Simulation, Richard will take a strategic lead in developing the technical capabilities of the motion-based Driving Simulator, which is already the most advanced of its kind in the UK.

Richard is joined by Dr Gustav Markkula who has been appointed as an Associate Professor in the Safety and Technology group. Dr Markkula joins Leeds from Volvo Group Trucks Technology in Sweden, where, for the past eleven years, he has been involved in research and development relating to driver behaviour, driver distraction and active safety; developing prototypes as well as running and analysing on-road and simulator studies.  Dr Markkula also has extensive experience in project management, and coordinated the multi-partner FP6 project AIDE, between 2007 and 2008. More recently, he has been focused on mathematical modelling of driver behaviour, and completed his PhD at Chalmers University of Technology in 2015,   where he developed driver behaviour models for evaluating automotive active safety. Speaking about his appointment, Gustav said, “At ITS, I see great opportunities for fascinating and fruitful cross-disciplinary research, connecting basic research on human behaviour with applied challenges in traffic safety. I’m especially excited about working with the very talented and ambitious PhD students in the PSi project.” Gustav will lead on the PSi project and will explore further opportunities for research on driver behaviour modelling.

Dr Natasha Merat, leader of the Safety and Technology Group at the Institute expressed her immense enthusiasm for the research opportunities now afforded to the Institute and the University of Leeds as a result of these appointments.  “We work in a very focussed and specialised research field and there are only a handful of individuals with the sorts of skills that Gustav and Richard can provide, I am therefore really excited that Leeds has managed to appoint not one but two such talented individuals, and I am thrilled about the research and teaching opportunities they will bring to the group and the University in what is a very fast developing and exciting research area”.

www.uolds.leeds.ac.uk

 

The CQC Efficiency Network – Helping Local Authorities understand the performance gap and learn from best practice

By Dr Phill Wheat

Since the start of the financial crisis, Local Authorities in Britain have been under pressure to do more with less. This has been particularly challenging for highway departments as over the same time period public satisfaction with roads has been falling.

To incentivise authorities to determine and adopt best practice, there have been two key ‘carrot and stick’ initiatives at the national level. Firstly, the Highways Maintenance Efficiency Programme (HMEP) is ‘by the highways sector, for the highways sector’ and aims to “[work] with people and organisations to enable change, so that greater savings and efficiencies can be achieved and the demand for improved roads and services can be met”. HMEP has supported a number of initiatives (including pilot work on this analysis) to help authorities meet the challenge that they face. Secondly, the Department for Transport is moving to make a proportion of highways funding conditional on demonstration of achievement of several performance related processes and outcomes.

The CQC Efficiency Network Offering

The CQC Efficiency Network (Cost, Quality, Customer) is an offering to local authorities throughout Britain to enable them to quantify the scope for cost savings in delivery of highway services and to identify what ‘peer’ authorities are relevant to each participant so that they can learn better practices. Importantly the analysis recognises the important interplay between the Cost of work done, the Quality of the work and the Customer perception of the highway service (CQC – Cost, Quality, Customer). These considerations are embedded within the identified potential cost savings and this is important because we are trying to avoid a ‘race to lowest quality’ in our measure.

This analysis will be supported by a set of case studies and working groups which will enable authorities understand how they can realise the potential cost savings identified in the analysis. Participation in the Network is recognised within the DfT’s highway incentive process as contributing to fulfilment of several criteria for enhanced funding. As of 10/09/15, the Network has 55 participating authorities. These include a mixture of County and Unitary Authorities as well as London Boroughs.

Exciting opportunities for Leeds

The CQC Efficiency Network is joint venture between the National Highways & Transport Network (NHT) and the University of Leeds. Both partners worked successfully together in two pilot studies of this approach funded by HMEP.

The network is an exciting opportunity for Leeds. It provides opportunities for us to apply our cost and efficiency analysis experience, developed primarily in the rail sector, to the local highways sector. Further, the current policy direction will ensure that the work will have real impact and value to stakeholders. Key to success will be clear communication of our approach, including the benefits of the specific statistical approach over more simplistic approaches, but also being up front about the limitations of the approach and indeed any other benchmarking approaches. Critical to this will be working with our NHT partners and the participants so that we can build a support framework around the statistical benchmarking work which allows authorities to translate ‘the numbers’ into real ‘on the ground’ actions.

The CQC Efficiency Network will also underpin new research in cost and efficiency analysis at Leeds. The work raises several methodological questions such as:

• How should public satisfaction data be used in cost benchmarking given its subjective nature?
• How can we deal with backlogs in investment in assets when measuring efficiency?

To support these important impact and research developments, Leeds is currently recruiting a Research Fellow in Efficiency Analysis. This represents a major investment in the capacity of the group at Leeds and will ensure that this venture will yield world leading research and create real impact and value for participating authorities and the public.

For more information please contact:

Dr. Phill Wheat

p.e.wheat@its.leed.ac.uk

New Book on Sustainable Transportation

A post to fanfare the arrival of a new book on Sustainable Transportation. The book is the fruit of six years work with Henrik Gudmundsson (DTU Denmark), Ralph Hall and Joe Zietsman (Texas TTI). The book, Sustainable Transportation: Indicators Frameworks and Performance Management , is written for students, academics and practitioners interested in how to make transportation more sustainable.

The book begins by providing a rich account of sustainable development, transportation’s contribution (positive and negative) to those goals and what is meant and intended in various interpretations of “sustainable transportation”. Whilst this part of the book reflects the state of art it is grounded in principles which can be explored and developed in a range of contexts. The book, as the title suggests then goes on to explore the importance of information in decision-support around sustainable transportation.

It is in the use of information to support decisions or challenge progress within and across agencies that the challenges of actually delivering more sustainable transportation are actually played out however and the book therefore turns to the governance of transportation, how transportation relates to other important policy sectors and the use, mis-use and non-use of information in taking decisions which affect the sustainability of transportation. The book is a key resource in how information can and should be used and how it can all be put together to provide a holistic sustainability perspective whatever the scale and remit of an organisation. It is a toolkit for how to work through the challenges rather than an off the shelf solution. We argue very strongly that context is so important to what information is available and what is important that, whilst common information needs exist, a one size fits all approach will not unlock the progress needed.

The second part of the book takes four case studies and reflects on the state of art in sustainability decision-making in transportation set against the framework and definitions we provide in the book. Here a critical academic analysis, presented in terms which practitioners can understand, unfolds of:

• A large scale strategic planning exercise (the EU Transport White Paper)
• A sustainability appraisal of a major infrastructure proposal (UK High Speed Rail)
• A green ratings tool for a state highways agency applied in a variety of contexts (New York State’s GREENLITES programme)
• A city based benchmarking and environmental improvement programme (Japan)

The case studies reveal the potential for sustainability appraisal tools to allow organisations to prioritise interventions and make improvements in areas where they have control but they also reveal challenges which result from the position they adopt in decision-making processes (e.g. mitigation rather than prioritisation) and in demonstrating tangible outcomes over short political time-scales.

The book concludes with a debate about the shape and scale of the challenges facing the sustainable transportation delivery agenda. That debate will continue and we look forward to hearing your thoughts. We will shortly be launching a website for supporting materials so keep an eye out @drgregmarsden or @RalphPHall for more details.

Sustainable Transportation: Indicators Frameworks and Performance Management is available via  www.springer.com/us/book/9783662469231

AHFE Las Vegas – days 2 and 3

By Sanna Pampel

The second and the last day of the AHFE conference prove to be somewhat more relaxed for me, because my main job, the presentation, had been done. These days, though, continued to be filled with very interesting talks. At each time slot a session took place with relevant subjects ranging from vehicle automation, distraction and workload, all kinds of driver support systems to, just before I left, a session dedicated to eco-driving.

Being curious about getting around in a tourist spot such as Las Vegas, I have tried a range of the available transport modes in my free time. I have used small hired buses, shuttles, for a few trips, which drove on roads with stunning views as below:

Taxis are available in front of every hotel, but at the destination of a short drive I needed to complain about the change as well as the receipt. In fact, the driver had handed me an empty card as receipt! Navigating through Las Vegas with air-conditioned buses turned out to be easy, cheap and convenient. A 24h ticket I purchased on the previous day for the hybrid Deuce bus ($8) could be used to travel all the way to the McCarran Airport. Finally, as I left, I received an upgrade to the business class on my flight to Minneapolis (thank you, thank you, thank you!) It provided a pleasant, more spacious, and therefore, I admit, a tad less sustainable, beginning of a long trip back to Leeds.

At the end of the blog I want to reveal the outcome of gambling the £1 coin from my friend. In a large casino I searched for the machine matching most clichés, and accepting $1 coins. I inserted the coin…

… and…

lost!

So, I am back in good old Europe by now and hope that I can be on the road – or in the air – again soon.

AHFE Las Vegas – day 1

By Sanna Pampel

The AHFE began for me with a keynote by Dr. Stephen R. Barley from Stanford University about unintended changes caused by technology, such as organisational tensions. The talk was followed by networking at the reception dinner, where I met a number of fellow PhD students, most of them supplied by the Technische Universität München.

The next morning it was my turn. During a very interesting session for automation of light vehicles I presented the first results of the second study of my PhD, in which I attempted to prompt drivers to use their eco-driving knowledge and skills.

Getting to the conference venue by the free hotel trams was not as easy as expected. In order to get to and from such a tram station I needed to walk a long way through casinos as well as past shops and restaurants. The tram-trip itself took a small fraction of the time, but in sum, walking turned out to be much faster, and bearable in the early morning hours.

Another option to move around the Las Vegas Strip is taking one of the hybrid/natural gas buses, owned by the city. The tickets for the more sustainable mode cost about three times as much as the ones for the standard diesel buses running perpendicular to the Strip.

As you go to Fremont Street, a very recommendable tourist experience, these Deuce/SDX buses commute on dedicated lanes, and become an example of BRT (bus rapid transport).

In the city I have hardly seen any cyclists, apart from police officers on the pavements and a few brave candidates, nor appropriate road infrastructure. However, as you can see on the rack below, all buses here provide the means for bringing your bicycle with you on the bus.

AHFE 2015 – arrived in Las Vegas

By Sanna Pampel

My trip to Las Vegas included three flights, and a drive with an electric bus in Schiphol, which I doubt made up for the emissions generated by my detour to Amsterdam. However, an electric fleet makes much sense on a restricted area such as an airport, and this one is even solar powered.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

… and then, late at night (early morning UK time), I finally arrived in Vegas:

The first impression of the city was amazing. It is warm and loud, crowded and welcoming, as the image above may suggest. A shuttle I had booked on-line brought me to my hotel, which is located on the main-tourist-stretch, the Las Vegas Strip. Searching for something to eat, I went on a first walk, and was quite astonished by the sheer amount of pedestrians.

A tourist guide explained to me that the number of pedestrians has increased substantially during the last ten years. In the 70s and 80s walking was almost unheard of. People would make sure they are not seen in public before dressing up and then travel virtually everywhere by taxi – even when the destination is across the street. Today, with ample street crossing facilities and pedestrian bridges it is so much easier to walk around the Las Vegas Strip than I had expected.

 

Lastly, being curious about the days ahead, I made sure that I caught a glimpse of the conference venue Caesars Palace, here on the left:

AHFE 2015 Las Vegas

By Sanna Pampel

I agreed to blog about my trip to Las Vegas for the AHFE, the 6th International Conference Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics 2015, so stay tuned! First I will have a few days to get to know Las Vegas and have a look at all kinds of transport means with different degrees of sustainability. Then on Tuesday 28th July I will present about ‘The activation of eco-driving mental models: Are regular reminders able to change driving habits?’

A fellow PhD student provided me with a dollar, which I will put into a gamble machine and see what happens…

A system dynamic approach to planning of resilient urban systems

Chandra Balijepalli [1], Christian Berretta [2], Martin Dallimer [3], Gordon Mitchell [4], Simon Shepherd [5] and Judith Wang [6]

Urbanisation and transport infrastructure development has resulted in increasing coverage by impervious surfaces. The consequent higher volume of runoff, due to reduced infiltration and evapotranspiration, poses serious challenges in urban areas, particularly in the context of climate change, which is changing the timing, duration and intensity of rainfall events. There are risks to infrastructure – buildings, transport networks, and critical infrastructure such as power generation and community assets (e.g. schools, hospitals), and the risk from built infrastructure to the natural environment through erosive flooding, combined sewer overflows, and diffuse urban pollution. Some 28% of UK rivers are designated as heavily modified water bodies, with 91% of these affected by urban water (Ellis et al., 2012). Highways are particularly notable pollutant sources, and with around 143,000 km of urban roads in the UK (Dept. for Transport, 2014) and c. 1500 km² of impervious surface, it is evident that urbanisation and associated transport system development changes both the quantity and quality of urban storm-water, with consequent risk to both existing infrastructure and the receiving environment.

We propose to study the dynamic relationship between built infrastructure and the natural environment, with a focus on the inter-relationship between urban transport infrastructure and storm-water management (including SuDS) – See Figure 1 for an overview. The mutual influence of these systems, previously considered in isolation, may be examined taking a long term, scalar approach to developing strategies to address the impact of urbanisation on resilience. This is a complex dynamic system, hence a systems analysis approach to planning and decision making is proposed. Systems thinking in ecology has a long history, stretching back to when the term ‘ecosystem’ was first defined by renowned British ecologist Arthur Tansley in 1935 to mean “the whole system, … including not only the organism-complex, but also the whole complex of physical factors forming what we call the environment”.

A key feature of both transport infrastructure and storm-water management is the need for space. In an urban area that comes from re-tooling existing ‘grey’ land uses (buildings, roads, hard surfaces) or, when a city is expanding, by converting green space to newly built infrastructure. However, doing so can have unintended consequences for the city and its residents through the pathways illustrated in Figure 1. Green spaces, such as parks, domestic gardens, playing fields, allotments and even road verges, street trees and brownfield land, play a vital role in making urban living more amenable through their delivery of ecosystem services (e.g., providing places for outdoor recreation, habitat for biodiversity such as birds and pollinating insects, storing and sequestering carbon, improving physical and mental health of city residents and mitigating air and noise pollution; Elmqvist et al 2013; Dallimer et al 2012a,b). Green spaces can also be very important in reducing the risks to infrastructure from natural hazards, such as flooding, and, similarly, mitigating the impact of transport infrastructure on water run-off volumes and quantity.

We therefore also wish to quantify the value (both financially and non-monetarily) of explicitly accounting for and including the roles of green spaces – the ecosystem of the city – when planning transport infrastructure and storm water management. We wish to develop an understanding of risk in the combined system over the long term relevant to spatial planning and climate change, and by developing an improved model for risk-based decision-making, this will contribute to more complete appraisal of investment impact on resilience in these sectors.

Figure 1: Overview of the urban systems 

Objectives
Our research aims to enhance the resilience of urban transport and water systems, both in terms of “engineering resilience” and “ecological resilience” (Wang, 2015), by:

• Determining the interdependency between the urban water management and transport systems in the context of changing climate;
• Developing a systems dynamic approach integrating the urban storm-water and land use/transport systems;
• Assessing the impact of different strategic plan options (land use, transport, storm-water), on resilience and combined system performance, and so inform investment decisions.

The system dynamic approach to the combined transport-water system is a key innovation of the project that offers scope for rapid co-appraisal of a wider range of strategic plan options,  potentially addressing different transport modes, development plans (location, land use), green infrastructure  (SuDS, permeable surfaces), and storm-water storage. We anticipate investigating (a) options in isolation and in combination, (b) the influence of different level of implementation of strategies, and (c)  new and, in particular, extant build where greater physical, economic and social constraints limit scope for single issue solutions, and hence where planning for resilience must take a more integrated systems and geographically broader approach.

Previous research by the team

Land use transport model
Land-use transport interaction (LUTI) models deal with the interdependencies between the land-use (residential, workplace locations) and transport (e.g. road, rail, terminals, stakeholders – users, operators, planners) systems (See Figure 2).

Figure 2: Land use and transport interactions

We use the MARS (Metropolitan Activity Relocation & Simulation) model for Leeds (Pfaffenbichler et al 2010), using system dynamics methodology, recently extended to the wider West Yorkshire conurbation, and this can be used to test options such as road pricing, strategic infrastructure decisions like Metro rail, and can simulate future location of residences/work in response (Balijepalli & Shepherd 2015). We intend to use MARS as the basis of a case study investigating the impact of climate change on the uncertainty associated with infrastructure investment decisions.

Water management system model
SuDS are an important way of controlling not just urban flooding, but discharge of pollutants that build up on urban surfaces, including roads, housing and commercial areas, and are then washed to river. These so called non-point source discharges are one of the main reasons rivers now fail to meet their water quality objectives. SuDS are increasingly implemented in new build developments, but are essential in existing built areas too, if problem discharges are to be tackled. Knowing where retrofit SuDS are needed most is a problem tackled in an urban diffuse pollution model (Mitchell, 2005), driven by land use and traffic data, and an associated probabilistic database of pollutant loadings.  The resulting maps (Figure  3) show non-point source hot spots where SuDS are most  needed, and have also been integrated with models of point source and agricultural area inputs, and river dispersion models, in whole catchment ‘source apportionment’ analysis, to inform integrated catchment management (Crabtree et al., 2008). The impermeability analysis function of the urban diffuse model has also been used in with the MEPLAN land use transport model, together with a battery of other environmental models, to understand the impact of urban form strategies on issues such as flood risk, atmospheric emission, energy use, and land take (Echenique et al., 2012).

Figure 3: Non-point source hot spots needing SuDS

Figure 3: Non-point source hot spots needing SuDS
Reproduced from OS digital map data, all rights reserved

Storm-water management strategies
In this research we propose to integrate the land use transport interactions and the resulting diffuse pollution analysis to assess strategies to improve the overall resilience of the joint infrastructure system of transport and water management system.

Several research studies investigated strategies for storm-water management in urban areas that aim at reducing runoff volume and controlling diffuse pollution. The findings of these studies will inform the analysis tool implementation and application. The performance of SuDS  to control pollutants associated to different land uses (e.g. permeable pavements, adsorptive and absorptive-filtration systems) have been investigated through laboratory and field tests (e.g. Kuang et al., 2007; Berretta et al., 2008; Liu et al., 2009; Berretta and Sansalone, 2012). The long term effect of the implementation of structural (storage tanks) and non-structural solutions (e.g. maintenance practices, mechanical removal of pollutants) on diffuse pollution control was investigated at the catchment scale through a hydrological model with pollutant build-up and transport module that aimed at supporting decision making in storm-water management in urban areas (Berretta, 2006). The hydrological performance of green roofs has been studied through monitoring programmes. The  results informed the development of modelling approaches to predict the long term performance (30 years) of green roof systems in different climatic regimes (Stovin et al., 2013) and to simulate the effect of different land use conversion scenarios at the catchment scale (10%, 20%, and 100% impervious to green roofs) (Palla et al., 2008). Commercial hydrological models like the EPA Storm Water Management Model – SWMM (Rossman, 2010) in the recent version (v. 5.1.007) include a SuDS module. SuDS can be assigned to selected sub-catchments by defining the correspondent areal coverage.

Outputs, expected impact
The outputs of the research will include a sketch-planning model of the system to facilitate relatively rapid assessment of the impact of strategic scale investment in infrastructure (housing, transport, drainage/SuDS, urban green infrastructure) on transport and urban water system resilience, performance and cost-effectiveness.

• A supporting database for the case study area, built in collaboration with partners and stakeholders;
• An understanding of combined system-infrastructure resilience under climate change and urbanisation, generated through application of the tool to stakeholder agreed scenarios.
• A more complete understanding of the costs and benefits associated with urban green spaces and their role in the urban water and transport systems, including their additional functions as providers of multiple ecosystem services.

The results of this proposed research could support additional research on addressing complexity in urban systems. Indeed, a key advantage of systems dynamic modelling is the ability to provide a model simulation environment around which multiple stakeholders can come together to conduct rapid evaluation of a wide set of stakeholder generated planning scenarios.

This proposed research considers the urban sub-systems of transport and storm-water management, but we invite expertise across other areas, which could be readily exploited to develop a more integrated model of urban systems resilience, relevant to a wider set of stakeholders.

References
Balijepalli, N.C. and Shepherd, S.P. (2015) Cordon tolls and competition between cities with symmetric and asymmetric interactions. Journal of Transportation. online April 2015 DOI 10.1007/s11116-015-9620-3.
Berretta, C. (2006). Assessment of stormwater runoff impact on receiving water bodies in densely urbanized areas. PhD Thesis, University of Genoa, Italy.
Berretta, C., Gnecco, I., Molini, A., Palla , A., Lanza, L.G., La Barbera, P., (2008) On the efficiency of catch basin inserts for storm water runoff treatment, Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Urban Drainage, 11ICUD, Edinburgh, 31 August – 5 September 2008.
Berretta, C., Sansalone, J., 2012. Fate of source area runoff phosphorus in a direct adsorptive-filter subject to intra- and inter-event phenomena. Journal of Environmental Management, 103, 83-94.
Crabtree, R W.,  Kelly, S., Green, H., Mitchell, G. and Squibbs, G. (2008) Cost Benefit Analysis of potential solutions for point and diffuse source pollution to achieve WFD good status: Ribble SIMCAT Pilot Study, UKWIR report WW17C205, 127pp.
Dallimer M, Irvine KN, Skinner AMJ, Davies ZG, Rouquette JR, Armsworth PR, Maltby LM, Warren PH, Gaston KJ. (2012) Biodiversity and the feel-good factor: understanding associations between self-reported human well-being and species richness. BioScience, 62, 47-55.
Dallimer M, Rouquette JR, Skinner AMJ, Armsworth PR, Maltby L, Warren PH, Gaston KJ. (2012) Contrasting patterns in species richness of birds, butterflies and plants along riparian corridors in an urban landscape. Diversity and Distributions, 18, 742-753.
Department for Transport (2014). Road lengths in Great Britain: 2013 data tables, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/rdl02-road-lengths-kms
Echenique, M., Mitchell, G., Hargreaves, A., and Namdeo, A. (2012).  Growing cities sustainably: Does urban form really matter? Journal of the American Planning Association, 78:2, 121-137.
Ellis, J.B., Revitt, D.M., Lundy, L. (2012). An impact assessment methodology for urban surface runoff quality following best practice treatment. Science of the Total Environment, 416 (2012), 172-179.
Elmqvist et al., 2013. Urbanization, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services: Challenges and Opportunities: A Global Assessment. SpringerLink, The Netherlands.
Mitchell, G. (2005).Mapping Hazard from Urban Non-Point Source Pollution: A Screening Model to Support Sustainable Urban Drainage Planning. Journal of Environmental Management, 74, 1, 1-9
Kuang X., Sansalone J.J., Gnecco I., Berretta C. and L.G Lanza. (2007). Cementitious Permeable Pavement as an LID Practice Hydrologic and Particle In-situ Control. The World Environment & Water Resources Congress – EWRI, May 15-19 2007, Tampa, Florida (USA), 243, 37 (2007)
Liu B., Berretta C., Gnecco I., Ying G., Sansalone, J. (2009) Control of Highway Stormwater during Event and Inter-Event Retention in BMPs. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2120, 115-122.
Palla A., Berretta C., Lanza L.G. and La Barbera P. (2008). Modeling storm water control operated by green roofs at the urban catchment scale. ICUD 2008, 11th International Conference on Urban Drainage, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, August 31 – September 5 2008.
Pfaffenbichler, P., Emberger, G. and Shepherd, S.P. (2010): A system dynamics approach to land use transport interaction modelling: the strategic model MARS and its application. System Dynamics Review vol 26, No 3 (July–September 2010): 262–282.
Rossman, L. A. (2010). “Storm water management model User’s manual, version 5.0.” EPA/600/R-05/040, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Cincinnati, OH.
Stovin, V., Poë, S., Berretta, C., 2013. A modelling study of long term green roof retention performance. Journal of Environmental Management, 131, 206-215.
Wang, J.Y.T., 2015. “Resilience thinking” in transport planning.  Civil Engineering and Environmental Systems 32(1-2), 180-191 open access to 16^th June 2016 http://www.tandfonline.com/r/gcee3212

[1] Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds e-mail: N.C.Balijepalli@leeds.ac.uk
[2] Water@Leeds, School of Civil Engineering, University of Leeds e-mail: C.Berretta@leeds.ac.uk
[3] Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth & Environment, University of Leeds e-mail: M.Dallimer@leeds.ac.uk
[4] School of Geography, and Water@LeedsUniversity of Leeds e-mail: G.Mitchell@leeds.ac.uk
[5] Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds e-mail: S.P.Shepherd@its.leeds.ac.uk
[6] Institute for Resilient Infrastructure, School of Civil Engineering and Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds e-mail: J.Y.T.Wang@leeds.ac.uk

Transport, housing, domestic energy: an affordability crisis in the UK?

Transport and energy affordability in the uk

The electoral campaign is over, but it is easy to predict that questions of living standards and affordability will continue to be debated in the UK.
The parties’ housing policies have been under intense scrutiny (see here and here) as opinion surveys show that “69% of people believe the UK is bereft of affordable housing“. A comprehensive study on “Housing in 2040” sponsored by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation concludes that, “unless some of the trends in housing policy are reversed” (including a rapid increase in house building rates):

the link between income poverty and housing deprivation is likely to strengthen, with housing costs becoming a more important cause of poverty, and the experience of poverty more likely to be combined with the experience of housing deprivation

Affordable housing may be scarce in the UK, but how does it compare to other European countries? Poorly, according…

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Rail industry costs, open access, Labour’s plans for rail, and overseas perspectives on the UK

Interview of Professor Chris Nash by Lorna Slade of Rail Professional.
(Interview first published at www.railpro.co.uk and reproduced with permission).

As the first speaker at a recent forum on developing the UK rail network, Professor Chris Nash proved to be one of the highlights in a day of bland PowerPoint explanations marked at the half way point by an ultra-safe discourse from Clare Moriarty.

Nash’s talk was titled Competition, contracts and setting out a future roadmap’ and relaying some conclusions based on research he and his colleagues have done at the ITS, Nash began by informing us that the main problem in the industry is that costs are too high.

‘For all of my career’ said Nash, ‘I’ve taught my students that rail has big economies of density, so if you have a massive expansion of traffic on an existing network you can expect unit costs to come down. Actually of course they have gone up – since 1997 costs per train km have risen in real terms by 25 per cent, which given that train kms are growing is not what would be expected.’

Speaking to me in our subsequent interview, Nash points out that a big part of that has been infrastructure costs, and that’s all mixed up with the failure of Railtrack and then Network Rail’s costs being above European best practice, ‘although they are coming down and that will continue’.

What is more surprising to Nash is that competitive tendering hasn’t reduced train operating costs. ‘One would be hard pushed to make the case that franchising has failed to deliver good services, but in almost every other field, competitive tendering gets costs down, in almost every other country I’ve looked at it gets costs down. However in our case costs per train kilometre is a bit above what it was when the first round of competitive tendering finished.’

Some new evidence for the reasons why has come from Nash’s colleagues Phil Wheat and Andrew Smith who did some econometric work which suggests that actually our franchises are typically too big, and that the medium-sized ones have been more successful in controlling their costs. ‘In that context it’s interesting to know that on average our franchises are ten times the size of those in Germany and Sweden in terms of train kilometres,’ points out Nash. ‘We know about the problems of managing franchise failure, and I think the lesson has been learned that negotiated management contracts are a way of losing control of costs. We also know there have been totally exogenous factors but there are two big issues; the rise in staff costs, where real costs per train km are 30 per cent above where they were at the completion of the franchise process, and the trade unions, which have done very well out of privatisation – fragmentation has made them stronger I would say.’

Franchise lengths are also a key issue, he believes:  ‘My impression is that train operators really tend to want results for anything they do within four or five years, which is not surprising given our current franchise lengths, so when it comes to investment for instance, where the train operator is responsible for choosing rolling stock, what they really want is something they know they can rely on to work immediately, rather than looking at innovations that will reduce life-cycle costs. If you’re on a seven year franchise you’re really not interested in what happens beyond the next four or five years, and that’s a disastrous approach to rolling stock.

‘I see something of the same argument applies with working practices, if changing them is going to mean a big struggle and the results only really show in the longer-term, then there’s no incentive for the current franchise holder, so that’s why I would advocate longer franchises.’

Another factor that affects costs is a lack of alignment of incentives between infrastructure and operations according to Nash, who was part of a team which did some econometric work for the Community of European Railways looking at data for the past 20 years for all the countries of Europe and some in Asia, including Japan and Korea. ‘Our work suggested that this is a serious problem when we looked across the countries. What we found was that on more densely used networks, vertical separation tended to raise costs, and it’s not surprising this happens because these networks are where the integrated planning of operations and infrastructure matters most. We did some interviews that showed that while to some extent access charges and performance regimes and so on do give the right incentives to the different partners, there are lots of respects – despite all the efforts that have gone into sophisticated track access charging systems and a sophisticated performance regime – in which the partners don’t have an incentive to work together for the best solution, and simply pursue what’s best for them.’

Nash believes the South West Trains/Network Rail alliance with its sharing of changes in revenue and costs is something to be held up as a model that overcomes the misalignment problem, ‘except, because of the length of the franchise it’s still too short, but with longer franchises you can have much longer alliances as well.’

While acknowledging that alliances ‘are not necessarily the solution where there are a lot of different operators and where you can’t design franchising regimes to avoid that,’ Nash would like to see some arrangement to try to bring the incentives on different operators together.

Open access not the answer

Open access competition is not the answer believes Nash, and he is forthright about his scepticism. ‘We increasingly hear the argument: ‘If franchising didn’t control costs surely allowing much more open access will’, and that for intercity franchises maybe we don’t need a franchise at all, that everything could be open access.  But there are some significant disadvantages.

‘The DfT is concerned that where it competes with franchises it reduces their profitability and increases the total subsidy bill for the railway, and I think there’s an argument that it makes wasteful use of track capacity, but maybe that could be countered by higher track access charges, particularly where capacity is scarce. More importantly I think it fails to produce a well-integrated timetable; Network Rail recently produced a paper on improving connectivity in which it has gone for the ideal solution which costs a lot of money in infrastructure investment. We did some work at the Institute that suggested that if you accepted less than ideal you could still get a lot of benefits through a more systematic approach to timetabling.

Nash continued: ‘Despite having some criticisms of how it’s been done I think the principle of franchising – profitable services and unprofitable – is the best way of introducing competition, however open access competition is certainly a growing trend around Europe and the European Commission seems to favour it for commercial services but with not much evidence of a financially sustainable system of on-track competition, and most of the entrants have lost money.

‘So I think the answer overall lies in looking further at how we franchise, particularly at the length and size of franchises. We definitely need longer franchises, where the train operator is in the lead on planning and marketing, and Chiltern of course is the model, I think everyone agrees it’s a success.’

Labour’s plans 

Labour’s plans regarding franchising are well-documented, and Nash is thoughtful on this. ‘They’ve spoken of allowing a public sector operator to compete with the private sector for franchises, which is the case in Sweden, Germany, Netherlands and Denmark, and it seems to work. So I don’t think it’s as silly an idea as some people are saying. It provides a public sector comparator and ensures competitive bidding, although we generally have had fierce competition for franchises so I’m not sure that it’s necessary from that point of view, but it is some sort of a safeguard.

‘The other thing Labour has spoken of is an enhanced role for Network Rail although I’m not too clear what this would be. Certainly in some respects if Network Rail did have a bigger role things would work better, for example it recently carried out a study of East Anglia on improving connectivity which concluded that if the timetable were planned as an integrated whole you could provide a lot of benefits, to smaller flows in particular. So if Network Rail played a much more forceful role in the timetabling that could improve the system.’

Overcrowding and fares

The industry is perceived by many to be mostly foreign-owned, feeding profits back to countries’ native rail networks and paying hefty amounts in dividends to shareholders. How can that image be altered? ‘I think to a degree the Rail Delivery Group, by providing a voice for the industry is doing something to alleviate that needless to say distorted view. Generally satisfaction with the rail industry is quite high and on the whole we do now have good services, but I think the two big causes of dissatisfaction are overcrowding and fares. The latter partly because people think they’re high and partly because the system remains very complicated. If there was more of a common framework for fares between the different operators that would help – currently we have things like off peak returns but they mean different things for different operators and it just confuses people.’

Rail Professional columnist Andrew Meaney of Oxera recently pointed out that regulated fares are no longer serving passengers in a transformed rail market, especially in the area of consumer protection. I wondered if Nash believes they should continue to be regulated? ‘I think they should, but with changes in how it’s done.’  There are currently strong incentives on Toc’s to market all their cheaper offers as advanced purchase tickets for specific trains, and if walk-on fares became extremely high that would be a significant disadvantage for consumers who don’t always want to tie themselves to a particular train or who have to travel at short notice. So I think some regulation is needed although it’s currently working to create artificial peaks and that needs to be avoided.’

One possibility, he suggests, ‘would be to regulate a basket of walk on fares rather than simply the saver fare – for the longer distance services. For shorter distances there are major issues involved regarding transport and land use planning as a whole. To what extent do we want to encourage rail commuting into large cities? To what extent do we want flexible ticketing covering bus and rail? I think it’s sensible for the franchising authority particularly where the franchising is devolved, to set the fares, not just regulate them but actually set them.’

Widespread activities

Nash has had a long and illustrious career in transport economics, much of it connected to the University of Leeds where he started in 1975 as British Rail Lecturer in Rail Transport.  He became a professor of transport economics in 1989 and then a research professor at the University’s Institute for Transport Studies in 2008.  Now semi-retired he plays more of an advisory role but in outlining his activities, by most people’s standards he is extremely busy.

In terms of current research, one of Nash’s big interests remains railway reform, and what works best in different circumstances, and there are plans for further work on this with Japanese and Korean colleagues. He continued: ‘I am also contributing with colleagues to an examination of the effectiveness of track access charges in encouraging efficient design of rolling stock, as part of the SUSTRAIL project for the European Commission which is just reaching its conclusion. The wider SUSTRAIL work also involved carrying out a business case appraisal of the proposed technical innovations, as well as new work to understand the marginal wear and tear costs of rail infrastructure usage, combining econometric and engineering methods.’

Nash also recently prepared a review for the International Transport Forum with colleague Andrew Smith of the measurement of rail efficiency, ‘an area in which ITS has done a lot of work both relating to infrastructure and operations.’

He serves on the HS2 advisory panel and also a Transportation Research Board committee in the US which is examining high speed rail as a part of a general review of intercity transport. ‘That keeps me involved on the debate on high speed rail, where the work of my colleagues on demand forecasting and valuing time savings is playing an important role.’

As well as that he is still does some teaching, including leading a short course on rail economics for staff of the DfT’s Rail Executive in the near future.

Speaking of the Rail Executive, I mentioned that I had interviewed Peter Wilkinson, head of its Passenger Services directorate, who is disappointed at the lack of true market liberalisation across Europe, with countries ‘spending nearly all their time resisting and fighting it’, as he put it, despite having their national operators here. Without overtly agreeing Nash observes that although British Toc’s such as National Express are making some gains in Germany, ‘either they’ve not been bidding or they haven’t been successful even where they have had the opportunity, which is a bit surprising given the experience they have.’

An overseas view of us

I wondered what Nash’s doctoral students think about UK rail? ‘That’s an interesting question. A lot of them are from overseas and very often they find it hard to understand how such a fragmented system could work; for instance when I talk with Japanese doctoral students and other academics, the Japanese view is absolutely that track and services need to be provided by the same company. I would say the same with North America – almost all North American transport economists believe vertical integration is absolutely essential to a railway. That’s certainly one thing that comes out.’

Our rail regulator is well-regarded though: ‘I have a foreign student working on regulation and can say that in terms of the role of the rail regulator Britain tends to be looked upon as a model of how to do it. I’ve criticised some of the things we’ve done but in terms of regulation I think we’ve pretty well got it right in terms of independence and in terms of putting pressure on the infrastructure manager, which in many countries the regulator doesn’t do and has no powers to do.’

In his free time, Nash enjoys hiking and is chairman of the ‘rather unusual’ Dales & Bowland Community Interest Company, which procures the Sunday Dales bus network – ‘we get funding from various sources and contract out the actual operation but we plan and market the services, so I’ve got a foot in the bus industry and that’s an area that’s harder than rail, certainly in terms of funding.’ Needless to say, I’m certain Nash will put his mind to a solution.

www.its.leeds.ac.uk/people/c.nash