Big Drive on Automation Research at Leeds

The Institute’s Safety and Technology (S&T) Research Group is driving forward with research to help understand how humans will perform and interact with the vehicles of tomorrow.

The team, currently led by  Associate Professor Dr Natasha Merat, has been involved in a range of projects which have looked at the effect of new vehicle technologies on driver behaviour. Increased automation, involving systems and technology that provide further support to the driving task, is being developed and implemented at a rapid pace in vehicles and, according to PhD candidate Tyron Louw, it has opened up a whole new field of research. “On the most basic level, the way we drive hasn’t changed much since the invention of the car. In the coming decades, however, the driving task is going to become increasingly automated, which fundamentally changes the way in which we will use and interact with our vehicles, both personal and public,” said Louw.

As project partners in the AdaptIVe (Automated Driving Applications & Technologies for Intelligent Vehicles) and CityMobil2 projects, funded by the European Commission, the S&T Group at Leeds is currently building on expertise gained in previous projects on automation, such as EASY (Effects of Automated Systems on Safety) and CityMobil.

AdaptIVe

The AdaptIVe project (coordinated by VW), which continues the work achieved from previous projects, HaveIT and InteractIVe, has set out to develop and test new functionalities for cars and trucks, offering both partially automated and highly automated driving on motorways, in urban scenarios, and for close-distance manoeuvres. Using the University of Leeds Driving Simulator, researchers in the S&T Group will conduct a series of simulator experiments with the focus on understanding how drivers will behave before, during, and after they are required to take control of an automated vehicle.

The importance of investigating the driver’s role in automation is self-evident, says Louw. “There is a common assumption that giving vehicles automation will automatically be safer for the driver. However, (for the foreseeable future) automation technology in vehicles will still require the driver to take control in some situations, and because we know driver error has some role in the majority of crashes, we need to look closely at that interaction. It is our goal, as human factors experts, to understand the drivers’ capabilities and limitations in this new environment, because automation is marching towards us and humans aren’t going anywhere,” said Louw.

CityMobil2

The other project on automation currently in progress at Leeds, CityMobil2 (coordinated by CTL, University of Rome), is a major research, development and demonstration project addressing the integration of Automated Road Transport Systems (ARTS) in the urban environment. The team at Leeds is working closely with researchers at The German Aerospace Centre (DLR) to understand road users’ interaction with automated public transport systems. Talking about the importance of this aspect of the project Louw said, “An ARTS is similar to existing public (bus and tram) transport systems in many ways but it differs in one important respect, there is no driver. On the surface it doesn’t seem like this would be a problem, but seeing the driver has become a familiar and important cue for road users; it is important to understand whether and to what extent their behaviour around these vehicles will change if there is no driver. Using this information we hope to create a smoother integration of ARTS into the existing transport infrastructure.”

In addition, the Institute for Transport Studies has two PhD students doing research in the area. Pablo Guillen, in collaboration with the School of Computing and the Institute of Psychological Sciences, is developing an Adaptive Automation system for drivers who fall asleep behind the wheel. “The main goal is to develop/adopt a Machine Learning algorithm that can use physiological (EEG, blinking, heart rate, etc.) and driving behaviour (lane deviation, steering deviation, etc.) variables of the driver to determine their level of sleepiness. After that, it will decide if the driver needs partial or complete help in driving tasks by changing the level of automation of the car,” said Guillen. Tyron Louw, supervised by Dr Natasha Merat and Dr Hamish Jamson, is researching how to ensure drivers can safely take back control of an automated vehicle. “Fatigue/sleepiness, distraction and monotony reduce drivers’ ability to respond to critical events. The idea behind automation is that if you remove the human error element from the equation, then there should be fewer collisions. The irony of automation, however, is that if the system suddenly needs a sleeping or movie-watching driver to take back control of the vehicle, you may find drivers more sleepy and/or distracted, which means they would be in a worse off position to respond to a critical situation than if they were driving all along. My goal is to better understand the human capabilities and limitations in that situation, which will hopefully encourage a more human-centred approach in the design of automated vehicles,” said Louw.

The desire to test the feasibility of implementing ‘driverless cars’ on real roads is gaining momentum in the UK and Europe, and although one main aim may be to investigate the technological feasibility of such systems, the question of how drivers and road users perceive and interact with these vehicles and an appreciation of their added value by the general driving population is clearly crucial for public acceptance and uptake. Through its involvement in the iMobility working group and its recent selection as one of seven academic centres of excellence by the Transport Systems Catapult (TSC) – the national research and innovation centre for Transport Systems – the S&T group and the Transport Systems Hub, is hoping to engage policy makers in discussions concerning the human factors relevance and challenges posed by these systems.

As a result of her involvement in the European iMobility group on Vehicle Automation and the Vehicle & Road Automation (VRA) project, Dr Merat is organizing a special session on Human Factors: Challenges of Vehicle Automation this September, at the 21st World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems in Detroit. She is also currently editing a special section of Transportation Research Part F on this topic. This work complements a special issue of the Human Factors journal on Vehicle automation and driver behaviour, published in 2012.

 AdaptIVe will run until 2018 and CityMobil2 will run until 2016.

 www.its.leeds.ac.uk/research

Road safety performance: is Britain as ‘SUNny’ as we think?

By Oliver Carsten, Professor of Transport Safety

The three countries in the world that do best in terms of road safety performance – Sweden, the UK and the Netherlands – are collectively termed the SUNflower countries based on the fact that their initial letters spell SUN. The name was first applied in a report from SWOV by Matthijs Koornstra and others in 2002 entitled SUNflower: a comparative study of the development of road safety in Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. Since then, these countries have continued to perform rather well with Great Britain often ranking as the best in the world. The International Transport Forum’s Road Safety Annual Report 2013 rates the UK as a top performer and the Daily Mail proudly announced on 10 September 2010 that Britain was first in the world in road deaths per 100,000 population. Even the Americans are envious as evidenced by a recent report from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute with the title Why is road safety in the U.S. not on par with Sweden, the UK, and the Netherlands.

It is also noteworthy that, we along with the other SUN countries, have continued to improve over the years. The accompanying chart shows road deaths per million population for the three countries from 2000 onwards. It can be seen that all three have improved, but in the last few years Great Britain and Sweden have improved considerably more than the Netherlands, and that, compared to Sweden, British performance has been one of steady gains.

But are we really as good as we claim to be? We are continually being told that we don’t exercise enough and that we should walk and cycle more. The latest pronouncement was a 2013 report from the Ramblers and Macmillan Cancer Support stating that being more active – moderate physical exercise for just 150 minutes a week – could save 37,000 lives a year. It can be argued that our comparative lack of exercise and disdain for walking and cycling makes the country look good in terms of road safety performance. For travel on foot or by bicycle is far more dangerous than travel in a car. That is why we talk about “vulnerable” modes.

So how would our national performance look if the average Brit had the modal split of the average Swede or Dutch person? I have done a little bit of rooting around in the travel statistics of the three countries in order to answer this question. My assumption is that the British safety performance stays as it is in 2012, but that we travel as much or as little as the Swedes and Dutch.
So first of all, let’s become Swedes. Per head of population, they walk about 1.6 times as much as we do and cycle 2.6 time as far each year. On average, they motorcycle just a little more than we do and travel by car a little less (approximately 91 percent of our car travel). The average Swedish truck travels somewhat less than the average British truck (true for both light and heavy trucks), but the average Swedish bus covers twice the annual mileage of a British bus. If we then adjust the British fatalities to each group of road users by the ratio of Swedish to British travel, we end up with considerably more pedestrian and cyclist deaths than we have now: 1,002 a year as compared with 538 now. Our overall number of road deaths per million population increases from 28 to 34, which puts us well behind Sweden, Denmark and Norway. So it does appear to be true that our reluctance to walk and cycle makes us look unduly good.

Then we can do the same calculation and become Dutch. The Dutch walk about the same amount as we do, but it’s no surprise that they cycle far more – on average 10.9 time as much. We cycle 85km per person per year and they cycle 923km a year. But – and this was more of a surprise to me – they motorcycle far more than we do: 8.8 times as much per person. Admittedly in the Dutch case that is mainly on mopeds and scooters whereas we tend to ride big bikes. But any kind of motorcycle use is inherently risky. If we adjust only for motorised vehicle travel by vehicle with four or more wheels and for walking and cycling (and ignore the difference in motorcycling), then the British performance in road deaths per million population falls from 28 to 46. That puts our performance below that of the Netherlands itself as well as below that of Ireland, Spain, Germany and Japan.

If we include the motorcycle travel in the calculation, then we come out far worse. We are now at 87 road deaths per million population which is equal in performance to Latvia. So from being top, we have moved to being one of the worst in the EU.

This exercise should stop us from being so self-congratulatory. If we aspire to being best in the world, then we should have world-leading safety performance in the vulnerable modes too.

Oliver Carsten, Professor of Transport Safety
http://www.its.leeds.ac.uk/people/o.carsten
March 2014

Will it be ‘all change’ on the UK railways after Dawlish?

Professor Greg Marsden comments

With the collapse of the line at Dawlish in Devon cutting off railway services to Plymouth and the southwest for months, Secretary of State for Transport Patrick McLoughlin MP and Network Rail chiefs were brought before the Transport Select Committee to answer questions about the implications.

In terms of future investment, while losing a railway line or road undoubtedly inconveniences some, the two questions to answer are over the economic impact of such a loss, and how often losses of such severity are expected.

Within hours of the news, calculations adorned the backs of hundreds of envelopes, producing seven, eight or even nine-figure sums of economic turmoil. Any transport economist would first calculate the cost to the system’s users, following a well established tradition which shows that users value loss of their time during a disruption at around three times the rate that they value time saved on a journey. Typically these are for disruptions over the course of a day, not over a month or more as will be the case due to repairs at Dawlish. There are also well understood penalties for travellers that have to change between modes of transport – the dreaded replacement bus services do not score highly.

So these costs can and will be quantified. As a rough measure, Plymouth station serves around 2.6m passengers per year and Penzance another half a million, so the costs generated by these comparatively quite modest passenger numbers (London Underground carries 3.36m passengers a day) won’t take us close to vast sums bandied about by the back-of-the-envelope economists.

Figures to lay foundations on

The really big figures are derived from the effects on the wider economy, as put forward by the Local Enterprise Partnerships, town and county councils from the southwest appearing before the select committee. They provided figures that claimed losses to tourism, trade, and potential investment of £4m-£5m a day to the Plymouth economy and £8m to Cornish tourism.

Can it seriously be argued that losing a train service alone has led to a 75% drop in tourist bookings? Clearly any research based on self-reporting by the local chambers of commerce is limited, and the impression given at the hearing by the councillors and executives was that the collapse at Dawlish was also an opportunity to argue for a reversal of historic underinvestment in the region.

So while there will certainly be economic losses, we don’t know what or how much, nor how to disentangle the short term effects such as tourism bookings from the long term effects, for example of major businesses not locating to the region. To me, the figures thrown about are not credible, but to quibble is to miss the point: the effects of major transport disruptions on the wider economy are not well understood, and are not properly accounted for in the decisions that underpin infrastructure investment.

The implication is that those areas that are particularly vulnerable to severe damage and disruption from events like Dawlish will have been short-changed in terms of past investment.

Doing nothing may be the right thing

The second question is how often this scale of service outage is likely to occur. Network Rail and the Met Officehave concluded that the combination of high winds, high seas and rain had led to a scale of damage not seen before – but the past is not necessarily a good guide to the future. While it was good news for the representatives of the southwest that it had opened up discussion around proposals for alternative bypass routes, or additional breakwaters around the Dawlish stretch of the line, that was as far as the good news went.

Network Rail’s chief executive reeled off tales of weather-related woe: flooding at 250 sites across the network, and more than 50 landslips in Kent alone (compared to the usual three) at an estimated cost of £170m. Such extreme weather has led to calls for investment from areas besides just the southwest, and while £170m is a significant spend, the demand for investing in network resilience will surely force some re-evaluation of priorities.

The problem is that we don’t know how often these types of events will happen – and that information is a major factor in whether to carry on with business as usual, or to call “all change”, and launch a much greater programme of investment in resilience measures throughout the network. New investments are assessed over a 60-year period: if we think another Dawlish-level-event will remain a rare, it makes little sense to spend heavily on preparing for it – however inconvenient it may be if, or when, such a severe event happens again. And if we should adopt some kind of precautionary principle, the question is what it would look like, and how much would we (the passenger or the taxpayer) be prepared to pay?

When the water recedes and attention moves on elsewhere, I believe that in the absence of any clear evidence the purse strings will close and it will be business as usual. History is full of examples of major events that fail to bring significant change to policy, despite initial interest – security incidents on US domestic flights before 9/11 are a prime example, and the largely unfulfilled calls for institutional change in the UK after the MP’s expenses scandal another. This is a phenomenon Jones and Baumgartner call the Politics of Attention.

The UK’s limited infrastructure spending is allocated on the basis of what benefits the user, primarily time savings on journeys that affect thousands of passengers every day. The recent passenger satisfaction surveys suggest that many louder voices will reassert themselves, each with arguments for different investment priorities. But it’s difficult to see an under-used emergency rail bypass around Dawlish making much headway against demands to tackle overcrowding on trains servicing London and the southeast.

I hope to be wrong in some of what I have written above. I believe that the UK does not invest enough in its existing infrastructure, instead focusing on the promise of what economic growth new infrastructure might bring. In the absence of better evidence or perhaps a sudden lurch towards a more risk-averse attitude towards resilience, Dawlish will most likely be consigned to history as a particularly memorable storm in a tea cup.

www.its.leeds.ac.uk/about/news/comment

Introduction

New runways to support leisure even as transport at home is cut

Professor Greg Marsden comments (19/12/2013)

The interim report of the Davies Airports Commission presents an in-depth analysis of aviation’s value to the UK economy and suggests the country will need a new runway by 2030, and a second by 2050.

The report examines various future predictions and possible plans of action to cope with what could be a doubling of flight demand by 2050. Even with significant carbon emission limits and capacity constraints, the report estimates that by 2030 runways will be operating so close to their capacity that major reliability issues will emerge. Yet despite these strong words, the report will take another two years to come to a conclusion on which of the two contenders – Heathrow and Gatwick – will get extra runways. Shouldn’t we just get on with it?

I was fortunate to work in Parliament at the time the 2003 Airports White Paper was produced. I saw the reports and arguments that underpinned the last policy statement, which ultimately failed to achieve what it set out to. At the time it seemed clear that the majority business interest and the strongest economic case was for a third runway at Heathrow. Gatwick was then out of the question as there was a moratorium on further development until 2017. Expansion of Stansted was supported, although ultimately that seemed more like the option with the least collective opposition rather than one which had logic behind it and buy in.

The politics of expansion was huge then and it clearly has not diminished now, with the commission’s final report not due until after the next election (check the constituency maps near the airports for further details).

Economic vs environmental concerns

Those against airport expansion question the growth figures and the government’s proposals as a “predict and provide” approach. They claim it is inconsistent with our environmental commitments. This line of argument is important to explore.

The Davies report examines flight demand worldwide as well as in the UK. Demand for flights from emerging economies is growing (more than doubling in the past 20 years) and this is beyond the control of UK policy makers. Heathrow retains a globally leading status as an international hub airport, but faces competition from Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt.

From an environmental perspective it doesn’t matter much if the demand is truly global (it matters of course for those under the flight path). So does UK Plc benefit more from having these flights going through London and making it a more accessible city than we lose from not having those flights? The report suggests it does and a failure to act will cost the UK economy between 48 and 65 billion pounds over the next 60 years.

Demands of business vs leisure

What about overall demand? The report relies heavily on models based on the past decades, with grown driven by rising disposable income. In London the average person takes 2.7 flights a year, almost double that of a resident of the West Midlands. From that it’s clear that there’s room for demand to rise not only with a growing population, but with growth from areas of the country where demand is currently low.

But dig a little further and you see that even in London, fewer one sixth of the flights are for business, with this being around one ninth for the whole of the UK. The real question is why we are travelling so much more for leisure or to visit friends and relatives, and whether this is sufficient to justify expansion.

If expansion is driven by the needs of business, then there is surely plenty of capacity to expand business use of existing flights by pricing some leisure trips out of the market. Any debate on proposals that would imply a significant environmental impact must include a discussion on changing patterns of business travel, and whether supporting leisure travel is the best use of resources. This is not just about which proposal brings about the most value, but what sort of society we want our transport system to support.

Are we also happy for a different logic to apply to aviation than to other parts of the transport system? This is also the week where further cuts were announced to local authority budgets. The subsidised evening and weekend bus network continues to shrink as we prioritise education and social care over transport. What are essential transport services for some are being lost, while we debate not whether, but where to expend resources that will mainly support leisure travel. That is something worth talking about. 

Professor Greg Marsden, 19 December 2013

High Speed Rail 2 (HS2): Six Questions

By Peter Mackie
Professor of Transport Studies, Institute for Transport Studies (ITS), University of Leeds
www.its.leeds.ac.uk/people/p.mackie

It is a feature of many big transport projects that they go through massive wobbles. The Third London Airport, the Channel Tunnel, HS1, Crossrail are all examples and the very name Thameslink 2000 is a reminder of the syndrome which HS2 is now experiencing. 

My overall position having had the benefit of membership of HS2’s Analytical Challenge Panel until March 2012 is that HS2 is not a stupid ill-conceived vanity project but neither is it a game changing transformational project for the economy. It is best viewed as a major transport project with wider economic, social and planning impacts. It is worth doing provided the price is right, and that is not yet clear. It absolutely must be considered on its merits and the starting point for doing that is the costs and benefits to the transport system, and then to the spatial economy. It is actually pretty implausible that HS2 on its own could fundamentally change the North/South divide. That would require some bigger decisions such as relocating Westminster to Birmingham! But that is not to deny that HS2 could make a very useful contribution to improving the connectivity of the core cities which are the best prospects of engines of growth we have got.

Britain has a lot of infrastructure challenges not just in the transport sector but in energy, water, flood protection and urban renewal. Those who say we would be better off with an Infrastructure Planning Commission to help mediate these choices are undoubtedly right, but in its absence the best we can do is to imagine that the x billion committed to HS2 would otherwise be committed to useful public infrastructure, some but not all in the transport sector, with a decent social rate of return. So therefore the fundamental requirement ahead of the Hybrid Bill is to assess the case for HS2 starting from the bricks and mortar of the transport business case. One of the strengths of the Public Inquiry system is that the scheme promoter is required to state its case and be subject to cross-examination. With that in mind, here are six questions on which clarity is going to be required.

Question 1: What has happened to the costs and what can reasonably be expected to happen?
My appreciation is that the costs were based on the unit costs for HS1, the most expensive railway in the world, and then loaded with a further 66% mark up for optimism bias. That produced the 32bn number. Then on top of that there were some subsequent specification changes, for example the link to Crewe, which pushed it up further, maybe to 35bn. Then it was decided that we wanted the 95% probability value of the costs rather than the central 50^th percentile pushing the headline number up to 42 bn. But there are questions about this – surely if you move to the 95^th percentile you should reduce the optimism bias mark up because you are taking a far more conservative position. In any case for the cost-benefit analysis central case, what is required are the central values – the expected 50^th percentile costs, revenues and benefits – with a risk analysis around the central case. This needs explaining very clearly: the system seems set up to produce a very high cost forecast which the contracting system will then magically just manage to achieve.

Question 2:  How robust are the traffic splits between classic and high speed rail at equal fares?
There seems to be a bit of a conundrum about HS2. In some ways it serves some places off the line such as Newcastle, Liverpool and Preston better than several of the places on it. We seem to be unable to connect HS2 properly to the main stations at Birmingham, E Midlands, Sheffield or Leeds. Realistically this is going to be a middle class project so where potential users live is important. How will the respectable  burghers of Ilkley, Bingley, Dore, Fulwood, Bingham, Edgbaston, Wilmslow, Prestbury and so forth choose to get to London and how is a bracing walk from say New Street to Curzon Street on a February day with a suitcase reflected in the choice process?

Question 3: How does HS2 scrub up in financial appraisal terms?
There are numerous aspects to this. One is what the trade off is between revenue and benefits in the fares policy. There seems to be a curious dichotomy here. On the one hand the value of a step change in journey times is stressed. On the other, when it comes to converting that into revenue through a premium fare,  the analysts seem to run into modelling problems. I can accept that representing yield management systems in models is difficult, but if we are unable to say how much of the user benefit from reduced journey times we could convert into additional revenue, we are in trouble. More generally, we just have to know the expected impact on the finances of the railway industry as a whole. If the Government cannot build HS2, endow it to the industry and operate the industry within the same financial envelope as without HS2, that is an acid test failed in my book. The crucial financial test is not what the HS2 franchise can be sold for as a job lot – Lord Heseltine has suggested £10bn – it is the impact on the rail financial envelope as a whole. Obviously answering that question implies the need for the Government of today to take a view on the future organisation of the railways in terms of infrastructure, franchise and open access.

Question 4: What is the social and economic value of increased capacity delivered by HS2?
I think a big criticism of Government as opposed to the DfT,  still less HS2 Ltd, is the siloed approach to the strategic case for this scheme. It is very difficult to evaluate the benefits of more capacity on the WCML without a plan describing how that capacity will be used. My appreciation is that we have a national problem of accommodating serious population growth in South-East England without much idea how the infrastructure is going to deliver it. HS2 has the potential to help solve some serious social problems but no-one seems to dare to think of HS2 as more than a transport project. Surely a more prescriptive less dirigiste approach to planning is required in which we say for example that we are going to exploit HS2 by building Milton Keynes 2, and  developing the areas around Old Oak and Park Royal in London and Birmingham International in certain ways.  It is really difficult to make the strategic case for HS2 without a spatial strategy.

Question 5: What exactly is not yet in the HS2 Benefit : Cost Ratio  and when and how will it be decided if the Value for Money category of HS2  is affected by the omitted items?         
The promoters have made much of the delays to users of existing lines under maintenance if HS2 is not built. It is not yet clear how many of those delays will happen anyway but it is also unclear whether the HS2 BCR yet includes delays during construction of the scheme itself, particularly but not exclusively at Euston.  More generally we hear that the Environmental Statement will run to 55,000 pages but more interesting is how and when that will be summarised and brought into the overall assessment of social value for money according to Green Book guidance.

Question 6: What weight can be attached to GVA methods in general as indicators of strategic impact?
The details of the methodology used in the KPMG report have been the subject of evidence to the Treasury Select Committee by KPMG and Professors Overman and Graham. Without entering the detailed fray, there are some general points about this which have an importance far beyond the HS2 project.

The cost-benefit analysis framework, represented in the Green Book and WebTAG, has a history of forty years behind it. It is not to everyone’s taste (see for example letter of Alan Wenban-Smith to Local Transport Today of 15/11/13). But it has some strengths :

• It provides a coherent framework within which the assessment of transport projects takes place
• It provides a basis for taking the results of models required for traffic forecasting and using those results in an internally consistent manner for project appraisal
• It operates within a defined set of assumptions relating to the macroeconomy which are debatable but are at least a level playing field
• It relies on values for travel time, safety, overcrowding etc which are evidence based even if, just like all the other parameters in the process, the quality of the evidence is open to challenge
• It starts from the proximate impacts of projects on travellers and transport operators and then works out from that to the spatial and additional wider economy impacts
• It should be comprehensive in nature and provide the basis for bringing together  the economic, social and environmental impacts in one place.

My appreciation of Gross Value Added metrics in general – as opposed to particular applications — is:

• They are relatively new and there is limited experience of using them
• They focus on the GDP effects of an intervention but actually in a sector like transport this is inherently difficult to forecast. For example, how do business travel time savings, commuter time savings, overcrowding, reliability and safety benefits convert into GDP effects? This is not an easy question because these things overlap the ‘real’ and ‘wider’ economy but unless it can be answered, the changes in accessibility at zonal level cannot be relied upon
• The implicit macroeconomic model on which the results are based is not highly transparent. For example, where improved accessibility is expected to increase output at regional, local or even national level, it is not clear how the net value of the increased output after taking account of input costs and displacement from other sectors is computed
• They clearly omit impacts which are non-market but included in the CBA

Overall, if GVA methods are to find a place as a reliable component in transport assessment, work is needed to build the appraisal rules within which they can be used. In the particular context of HS2, the obvious question is ‘ How could the GVA impact of HS2 be of the order of ten times the benefit impact in the CBA?’ Some degree of sense-checking and rationale needs to be brought to this. For the moment, the combination of the direct user and operator benefits, the induced land use change impacts and the additional wider economy impacts is likely to provide a more robust appraisal metric.

Professor Peter Mackie, November 2013

Taiwan Day 6

I was leaving Taiwan after 5 packed and intensive days – arrived on Sunday 10 pm and leaving on Saturday 9 am. It was not supposed to be a working day but I managed to squeeze in a meeting with an alumnus at the airport because he works there.

Spotted an interesting self check-in lounge at the airport…

Taiwan Day 5 – National Cheng Kung University again

Two student talks – one at Department of Transport Science and Management and one at Department of Urban Planning. Also met various people for discussions on collaboration – started working at breakfast and was still working over dinner…too many people to see but too little time…and no time for photos…

Taiwan Day 4 – National Cheng Kung University

An old stream train exhibited outside Taipei Rail Station. This drags the time back to 1923. I know UK had a much glorious history on trains, so I’d better stop here…

A giant Christmas tree at Taipei Rail Station. A bit early? who cares. it’s the spirit that counts…

High Speed Rail…my favourite. The planning started when I was an undergraduate student. It took nearly 20 years from planning to operation. Chris Nash once said that China builds high speed rails incredibly quick (best record is 4 years, I think, but better double check with Chris)…well, Taiwan isn’t China, I am afraid.

Anyway, back to academic topics, this is the poster at NCKU telling students about my talk.

Visited the Department of Transport Science and Management and had a very fruitful discussion with various colleagues there. Seen a student who granulated from ITS last year as well.

Went to Kaohsiung City where Jeff is heading the Department of Transport there. They have rental bicycles, like Taipei, there too. Jeff is also trialling free bus ride to promote PT.

Most cycle lanes there are sharing space with foot path, rather than within the carriageway.

Taiwan Day 3 – more visits…

Another busy day. I visited a couple of University appointed recruitment agents today – we don’t want to miss out any opportunity which would make applicants who are interested in transport aware of ITS.

UK Star: Mina Huang, Yuer Huang, me, and Gary Chang

Oxbridge: Maxine Chung, me, and Elaine Lin

Traffic signal countdown: what don’t we have them in the UK?

 

I also had a very pleasant meeting with Chih-Wen Fang, who received his PhD from ITS back in 1999 and is currently Deputy Director General of Taiwan’s Civil Aeronautics Administration. Susan and Frank M will remember him well. I have known Chih-Wen and his wife back in 1996 when I came to Leeds. Their elderly son was born at LGI when I had the pleasure to pick them up and take them back home. He is 16 years old now – time flies, doesn’t it.

Taiwan Day 2 – visit National Taiwan University

National Taiwan University (NTU) is the top university in Taiwan, either based on overall ranking or pretty much every subject. There are seven Divisions in the Department of Civil Engineering, one of which is Transport. The overall size of the Department of Civil Engineering is similar to ITS – there are 54 faculties in total. The size of annual research funding is similar to ITS too. Prof Tang-Hsien Chang taught me when I was an undergraduate student. I have known a few other colleagues here; so it was a very pleasant visit. I talked to a class of 25 Masters students too.

I spotted something new in Taipei this time. There are lots of rental bikes around, which seem to be well utilised. This is a joint venture by the Taipei MRT Ltd and the giant bicycle manufacturer, Giant Ltd. I heard that lots of people have been encouraged to use the MRT and cycling between places. The first 30 min is free.