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Encyclopedia > Transport economics

Transport economics is a cross-disciplinary study linking civil engineering and economics. Transport economics differs from some other branches of economics in that the assumption of a spaceless, instantaneous economy does not hold. People and goods flow over networks at certain speeds. Demands peak. Advanced ticket purchase is often induced by lower fares. The networks themselves may or may not be competitive. A single trip (the final good from the point-of-view of the consumer) may require bundling the services provided by several firms, agencies and modes. The Falkirk Wheel in Scotland. ... Face-to-face trading interactions among on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor Economics, as a social science, studies human choice behavior and how it effects the production, distribution, and consumption of scarce resources. ... Competition characterises a biochemical, ecologic, economic, political, or sporting activity whereby two or more individuals or groups strive antagonistically against one another for some reward. ...

Contents

Supply & demand

Although transport systems follow the same supply and demand theory as other industries, the complications of network effects and choices between non-similar goods (e.g. car and bus travel) make estimating the demand for transportation facilities difficult. The development of models to estimate the likely choices between the non-similar goods involved in transport decisions (discrete choice models) led to the development of an important branch of econometrics, and a Nobel Prize for Daniel McFadden. The supply and demand model describes how prices vary as a result of a balance between product availability at each price (supply) and the desires of those with purchasing power at each price (demand). ... The network effect is a characteristic that causes a good or service to have a value to a potential customer dependent on the number of customers already owning that good or using that service. ... Econometrics literally means economic measurement. It is a combination of mathematical economics and statistics. ... Nobel Prize medal. ... Daniel L. McFadden (born July 29, 1937) is an econometrician who won (jointly with James Heckman) the 2000 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his development of theory and methods for analyzing discrete choice. He is currently the E. Morris Cox Professor of...


In transport, demand can be measured in numbers of journeys made or in total distance travelled across all journeys (e.g. passenger-kilometres for public transport or vehicle-kilometres of travel (VKT) for private transport). Supply is considered to be a measure of capacity. The price of the good (travel) is measured using the generalised cost of travel, which includes both money and time expenditure. The supply and demand model describes how prices vary as a result of a balance between product availability at each price (supply) and the desires of those with purchasing power at each price (demand). ... Skytrain Bangkok. ... Private transport, as opposed to public transport, is transport in ones own vehicle (e. ... Supply has a number of meanings: In economics, supply is the aggregate amount of any material good that can be called into being at a certain price point; it one half of the equation of supply and demand. ... Capacity may mean one of the following: Capacity, when used with the mathematics meaning, is another word for volume Legal capacity refers to the legal ability to engage in certain acts, such as making a contract Cranial capacity is a measure of the volume of the interior of the skull... In economics and business, the price is the assigned numerical monetary value of a good, service or asset. ... In transport economics, the generalised cost is the sum of the monetary and non-monetary costs of a journey. ... An example of Money. ... Two distinct views exist on the meaning of time. ...


The effect of increases in supply (capacity) are of particular interest in transport economics (see induced demand), as the potential environmental consequences are significant (see externalities below). Induced demand is the phenomenon that after supply increases, more of a good is consumed. ...


Externalities

In additional to providing benefits to their users, transport networks impose both positive and negative externalities on non-users. The consideration of these externalities - particularly the negative ones - is a part of transport economics. An externality occurs in economics when a decision (for example, to pollute the atmosphere) causes costs or benefits to individuals or groups other than the person making the decision. ... An externality occurs in economics when a decision (for example, to pollute the atmosphere) causes costs or benefits to individuals or groups other than the person making the decision. ...


Positive externalities of transport networks may include the ability to provide emergency services, increases in land value and agglomeration benefits. Negative externalities are wide-ranging and may include local air pollution, noise pollution, light pollution, safety hazards, community severance and congestion. The contribution of transport systems to potentially hazardous climate change is a significant negative externality which is difficult to evaluate quantitatively, making it difficult (but not impossible) to include in transport economics-based research and analysis. Emergency services are services that deal with emergencies and other aspects of Public Safety. ... In economics, land comprises all naturally occurring resources, such as geographical locations, mineral deposits, and even portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. ... The term Economies of agglomeration is used in urban economics to describe the benefits that firms obtain when locating near each other. ... Before flue gas desulfurization was installed, the emissions from this power plant in New Mexico contained excessive amounts of sulfur dioxide. ... Noise pollution is unwanted human-created sound that disrupts the environment. ... This time exposure photo of New York City shows sky glow, one form of light pollution. ... The field of road safety is concerned with reducing the numbers or the consequences of vehicle crashes, by developing and implementing management systems based in a multidisciplinary and holistic approach, with interrelated activities in a number of fields. ... Severance is the debut album by Australian melodic death metal band Daysend. ... Traffic jams are common in heavily populated areas. ... Variations in CO2, temperature and dust from the Vostok ice core over the last 400 000 years Climate change refers to the variation in the Earths global climate or in regional climates over time. ...


Congestion

Traffic congestion is a negative externality imposed by each road user on every other road user (or potential road user). Within the transport economics community, road pricing is considered to be an appropriate mechanism to deal with this problem (i.e. to internalise the externality) by allocating scarce roadway capacity to users. Capacity expansion is also a potential mechanism to deal with traffic congestion, but is often undesirable (particularly in urban areas) and sometimes has questionable benefits (see induced demand). Traffic jams are common in heavily populated areas. ... Road pricing is a generic term for charging for the use of streets and roads through direct methods. ... An urban area is a term used to define an area where there is an increased density of human-created structures in comparison to the areas surrounding it. ... Induced demand is the phenomenon that after supply increases, more of a good is consumed. ...


Congestion is not limited to road networks; the negative externality imposed by congestion is also important in busy public transport networks as well as crowded pedestrian areas. A road ascends a mountainside using hairpin bends in the French Alps. ... Skytrain Bangkok. ... Look up Pedestrian in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...


Funding & financing

Methods of funding and financing transport network maintenance, improvement and expansion are debated extensively and form part of the transport economics field. Funding or financing is to provide capital (funds), which means money for a project, a person, a business or any other private or public institution. ... Finance addresses the ways in which individuals, business entities and other organizations allocate and use monetary resources over time. ...


Funding issues relate to the ways in which money is raised for the supply of transport capacity. Taxation and user fees are the main methods of fund-raising. Taxation may be general (e.g. income tax), local (e.g. sales tax or land value tax) or variable (e.g. fuel tax), and user fees may be tolls, congestion charges or fares). The method of funding often attracts strong political and public debate. This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... An income tax is a tax levied on the financial income of persons, corporations or other legal entities. ... A sales tax is an excise tax on the privilege of selling or renting certain property or services in a state or locality. ... Land value taxation (LVT) is the policy of raising state revenues by charging each landholder a portion of the value of a site or parcel of land that would exist even if that site had no improvements. ... A fuel tax (also known as a petrol tax, gasoline tax, gas tax or fuel duty) is a sales tax imposed on the sale of fuel. ... Road pricing is a generic term for charging for the use of streets and roads through direct methods. ... Road pricing is a generic term for charging for the use of streets and roads through direct methods. ... Fares (Dhivehi: ފަރެސް) is one of the inhabited islands of Gaafu Dhaalu Atoll. ...


Financing issues relate to the way in which these funds are used to pay for the supply of transport. Loans, bonds, public-private partnerships and concessions are all methods of financing transport investment. A loan is a type of debt. ... Bonds can refer to: A financial bond (including a junk bond or a zero-coupon bond) Barry Bonds A chemical bond (including the ionic bond, covalent bond, coordinate covalent bond, metallic bond, hydrogen bond, Carbon-carbon bond, Disulfide bond and Glycosidic bond) This is a disambiguation page — a navigational... Public-private partnership (PPP) is a variation of privatization in which elements of a service previously run solely by the public sector are provided through a partnership between the government and one or more private sector companies. ... A concession is a facility operated under a contract or license. ... Invest redirects here. ...


Regulation & competition

Regulation of the supply of transport capacity relates to both safety regulation and economic regulation. Transport economics considers issues of the economic regulation of the supply of transport, particularly in relation to whether transport services and networks are provided by the public sector (i.e. socially), by the private sector (i.e. competitively) or using a mixture of both. Warning signs, such as this one, can improve safety awareness. ... Regulatory economics is the economics of regulation, in the sense of the application of law by government that is used for various purposes, such as centrally-planning an economy, remedying market failure, enriching well-connected firms, or benefiting politicians. ... < [[[[math>Insert formula here</math>The public sector is that part of economic and administrative life that deals with the delivery of goods and services by and for the [[government </math></math></math></math> Direct administration funded through taxation; the delivering organisation generally has no specific requirement to meet commercial... The private sector of a nations economy consists of those entities which are not controlled by the state - i. ...


Transport networks and services can take on any combination of regulated/deregulated and public/private provision. For example, bus services in the UK outside London are provided by both the public and private sectors in a deregulated economic environment (where no-one specifies which services are to be provided, so the provision of services is influenced by the market), whereas bus services within London are provided by the private sector in a regulated economic environment (where the public sector specifies the services to be provided and the private sector competes for the right to supply those services - i.e. franchising). An early motorized bus - a Benz truck modified by Netphener company (1895) A bus is a large automobile intended to carry numerous persons in addition to the driver and sometimes a conductor. ... London (pronounced ) is the capital city of England and the United Kingdom. ... A market is, as defined in economics, a social arrangement that allows buyers and sellers to discover information and carry out a voluntary exchange. ... Franchising (from the French for free) is a method of doing business wherein a franchisor licenses trademarks and tried and proven methods of doing business to a franchisee in exchange for a recurring payment, and usually a percentage piece of gross sales or gross profits as well as the annual...


The regulation of public transport is often designed to achieve some social, geographic and temporal equity as market forces might otherwise lead to services being limited to the most popular travel times along the most densely settled corridors of development. National, regional or municipal taxes are often deployed to provide a network that is socially acceptable (e.g. extending timetables through the daytime, weekend, holiday or evening periods and intensifying the mesh of routes beyond that which a lightly regulated market would probably provide).


Franchising may be used to create a supply of transport that balances the free-market supply outcome and the most socially desirable supply outcome.


Project evaluation

The evaluation of changes in the transport network is one of the most important applications of transport economics. In order to make an assessment of whether any given transport project should be carried out, transport economics can be used to compare the costs of the project with its benefits (both social and financial). Such an assessment is known as a cost-benefit analysis, and is usually a fundamental piece of information for decision-makers, as it places a value on the net benefits (or disbenefits) of schemes and generates a ratio of benefits to costs which may be used to prioritise projects when funding is constrained. Cost-benefit analysis is the process of weighing the total expected costs vs. ...


A primary difficulty in project evaluation is the valuation of time. Travel time savings are often cited as a key benefit of transport projects, but people in different occupations, carrying out different activities and in different social classes value time differently. In transport economics, the value of time is the opportunity cost of the time that a traveller spends on their journey. ...


Evaluating projects on the basis of their supposed reductions in travel times has come under scrutiny in recent years with the recognition that improvements in capacity generate trips that would not have been made (induced demand), partially eroding the benefits of reduced travel times. Therefore an alternative method of evaluation is to measure changes in land value and consumer benefits from a transport project rather than the measuring benefits accruing to travellers themselves. However, this method of analysis is much more difficult to carry out. Induced demand is the phenomenon that after supply increases, more of a good is consumed. ... In economics, land comprises all naturally occurring resources, such as geographical locations, mineral deposits, and even portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. ... Consumers are individuals or households that consume goods and services generated within the economy. ...


See also


  Results from FactBites:
 
Transport Economics & Sector Policy: Urban Policy Reform (986 words)
Public transport is one part of the total transport facilities of urban areas, which should be carefully co-ordinated to ensure the best overall use of resources.
First, there is the issue of the contribution of public transport to the reduction of road congestion which may be a justification for provision of priorities in the use of infrastructure, or even subsidy, for public transport as a whole (though never on a discriminatory or open ended basis for public sector suppliers).
Transport commercialization can also have potentially harmful effects insofar as it leads to increases in fares and hence a shift to the more environmentally damaging automobile.
  More results at FactBites »


 

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