Mind the Gap! Can Achieving Green and Efficient Rail Travel, with a Focus on Passenger Experience, Be Effectively Delivered Through Service-Based Contracts?

Author(s):  
Stewart Birrell ◽  
Philip Davies
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Zamir Khan ◽  
Farzana Naheed Khan

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (26) ◽  
pp. 204-214
Author(s):  
Nur Ainna Aznida Abdullah ◽  
Syed Muhammad Rafy Syed Jaafar

Rail sometimes serves mainly as a transportation corridor connecting rural areas, or urban settings and green strips. However, the rise in the tourism industry in a developed country has increased the popularity of trails used in recreation. Apart from that, rail travel can be experienced as an enhancement of travel especially the onboard journey. Even though the rail tourism industry is well developed around the world, the studies related to rail travel in Malaysia are less plentiful. Therefore, this paper aims to review the idea of traveller’s experiences in rail tourism and identify the factors that contribute to rail tourism in Sabah Malaysia, especially among Special Interest Tourists (SITs). SITs can be defined as a specialized style of touristy that focuses on one topic and personally conducted tour by folks that wish to develop their interests. A content analysis on rail tourism, traveller’s experience, and the dimension of rail services was conducted for this paper. This is also involved an interview with the stakeholder to clarify and explain the features of rail tourism based on the content analysis and literature review. As for that, it's pointed out that the features and characteristics of the rail tourism setting as the variables of development criteria can make the touring route from the railway station is a pleasurable experience for tourists. It will give an impact on the experience and generate the intention of travellers to revisit and experience the services again. The final theoretical framework has been developed to show the concept of rail tourism among Special Interest Tourists (SITs) in Sabah Malaysia.


Author(s):  
Jun Cai ◽  
Bo Xu ◽  
Karen Kie Yan Chan ◽  
Xueying Zhang ◽  
Bing Zhang ◽  
...  

There is increasing concern about another influenza pandemic in China. However, the understanding of the roles of transport modes in the 2009 influenza A(H1N1) pandemic spread across mainland China is limited. Herein, we collected 127,797 laboratory-confirmed cases of influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 in mainland China from May 2009 to April 2010. Arrival days and peak days were calculated for all 340 prefectures to characterize the dissemination patterns of the pandemic. We first evaluated the effects of airports and railway stations on arrival days and peak days, and then we applied quantile regressions to quantify the relationships between arrival days and air, rail, and road travel. Our results showed that early arrival of the virus was not associated with an early incidence peak. Airports and railway stations in prefectures significantly advanced arrival days but had no significant impact on peak days. The pandemic spread across mainland China from the southeast to the northwest in two phases that were split at approximately 1 August 2009. Both air and road travel played a significant role in accelerating the spread during phases I and II, but rail travel was only significant during phase II. In conclusion, in addition to air and road travel, rail travel also played a significant role in accelerating influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 spread between prefectures. Establishing a multiscale mobility network that considers the competitive advantage of rail travel for mid to long distances is essential for understanding the influenza pandemic transmission in China.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmad Nazrul Hakimi Ibrahim ◽  
Muhamad Nazri Borhan ◽  
Nur Izzi Md. Yusoff ◽  
Amiruddin Ismail

While rail-based public transport is clearly a more advanced and preferable alternative to driving and a way of overcoming traffic congestion and pollution problems, the rate of uptake for rail travel has remained stagnant as a result of various well-known issues such as that commuters either use a more reliable and comfortable alternative to get from A to B and/or that they are not satisfied with the quality of service provided. This study examined the factor of user satisfaction regarding rail-based public transport with the aim of discovering precisely what factors have a significant effect on the user satisfaction and uptake of rail travel. This was approached using both the Delphi approach and a thorough review of the current literature, focusing on a total of nine possible factors affecting passenger satisfaction with rail travel availability of service, accessibility of service, ticket or pass, punctuality, clarity of information, quality of customer service, comfort, safety, and image. Also discussed were 29 extra possible attributes and several measures that were implemented in various countries to increase the service quality. It was concluded that this review will provide valuable information for policymakers, researchers and service providers in terms of specifying the service factors most worth investigating if the quality of this crucial means of transport is to be raised.


2020 ◽  
pp. 120633122096541
Author(s):  
Amy Cox Hall

Research on tourism to Machu Picchu rarely addresses the ways in which transportation, particularly rail travel, is integral to a visit to the UNESCO world heritage site. Yet the majority of visitors to Machu Picchu arrive by train, making rail travel a crucial component to the way in which the site is understood and experienced. This article examines rail travel to Machu Picchu through archival research and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cuzco and at Machu Picchu to argue that rail travel capitalizes on historic and cultural imaginings of Machu Picchu as a lost city, transforming the tourist into an explorer in the process. The experience relies on vision and affect as the train acts a temporalizing machine, taking the tourist back in time to visit another world, perpetuating the myth of lost cities, discovery and dispossession in the process.


1992 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 291-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Duffell ◽  
Reg Harman
Keyword(s):  

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 01058
Author(s):  
Farah Atiqah Mohamad Noor ◽  
Vikneswaran Nair ◽  
Paolo Mura

Transfers ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-130
Author(s):  
George Revill

As the articles in this special section show, railways mark out urban experience in very distinctive ways. In the introduction, Steven D. Spalding makes plain there is no clear relationship between railway development and the shape and size of cities. For many cities, suburban rail travel has been either substantially insignificant or a relative latecomer as a factor in urban growth and suburbanization. Walking, tramways and the omnibus may indeed have had a much greater impact on built form, yet the cultural impact of railways on the city life should not be minimized. Iconic city stations are both objects of civic pride and socially heterogeneous gateways to the promise of a better urban life. The physical presence of substantial tracts of infrastructure, viaducts, freight yards and warehousing, divide and segregate residential districts encouraging and reinforcing status differentials between communities. Subways, metros, and suburban railways open on to the often grubby quotidian underbelly of city life whilst marking out a psychic divide between work and domesticity, city and suburb. Railways not only produced new forms of personal mobility but by defining the contours, parameters, and possibilities of this experience, they have come to help shape how we think about ourselves as urbanized individuals and societies. The chapters in this special section mark out some of this territory in terms of, for example: suburbanization, landscape, and nationhood (Joyce); the abstractions of urban form implicit in the metro map (Schwetman); the underground as a metaphor for the topologically enfolded interconnections of urban process (Masterson-Algar); and the competing lay and professional interests freighting urban railway development (Soppelsa). In the introduction Spalding is right to stress both the multiple ways that railways shape urban experience and the complex processes that continuously shape and re-shape urban cultures as sites of contest and sometimes conflict. As Richter suggests, in the nineteenth century only rail travel demanded the constant and simultaneous negotiation of both urban social disorder and the systematic ordering associated with large technological systems and corporate business. Thus “the railroad stood squarely at the crossroad of the major social, business, cultural and technological changes remaking national life during the second half of the nineteenth century.”


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document