Generating Transit Performance Measures with Archived Data

2003 ◽  
Vol 1841 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert L. Bertini ◽  
Ahmed El-Geneidy

Measuring the performance of a transit system is the first step toward efficient and proactive management. Since 1990, the use of performance measures for transportation planning and operations has gained a great deal of attention, particularly as transportation agencies are required to provide service with diminishing resources. In the past, it was very difficult and costly to collect comprehensive performance data. Thus, until recently, the transit industry has relied on limited, general, and aggregate measures for reporting performance to external funding and regulatory agencies. In Portland, Oregon, the local transit provider (TriMet) has developed a bus dispatch system (BDS) consisting of automatic vehicle location, communications, automatic passenger counters, and a central dispatch center. Most significantly, TriMet had the foresight to develop a system to archive all of its stop-level data, which are then available for conversion to performance indicators. It is demonstrated that there are powerful ways in which the data collected by the BDS can be converted into potentially valuable Transit Performance Measures (TPMs). These TPMs have been proposed in the past but were not implemented because of data limitations. It is envisioned that systematic use of TPMs can assist a transit agency in improving the quality and reliability of its service, leading to improvements for customers and operators alike.

2013 ◽  
Vol 308 ◽  
pp. 159-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jozef Žarnovský ◽  
Viera Petková ◽  
Róbert Drlička ◽  
Jozef Dobránsky

The most serious sources of the air pollution are the studied company compressor stations of the transit system equipped with the number of gas turbine. [1] Pipeline parts have smaller degree of importance and gas boiler and emergency resources of thermal and electric energy have minimum influence. These sources emit into atmosphere mainly nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, paraffine with the exception of the methane and unburned rest of the fuel. In comparison with these emissions are emissions of sulfur dioxide and the solid contaminations substances minimal, insignificant. Along with reduction of transit performance deploys the company in recent time significantly more energy effective power units for transit of natural gas. These drive units are mainly gas turbines burning part of transported natural gas. [2] Russian natural gas is used as a fuel which in comparison with the others kinds of fuels contains only little amount of sulfur and contain almost no As, Na and heavy metals. The main parts of combustions are CO2, CO, NOx which are products of burning and N2, O2, untouched atmosphere elements. CO and NOx are considered to be harmful substances.


2008 ◽  
Vol 53 (02) ◽  
pp. 215-244
Author(s):  
CHANTAL HERBERHOLZ

Using quarterly bank-level data over the period 1997–2005, this paper examines the effect of foreign bank presence on commercial banks incorporated in Thailand, using traditional and value-based performance measures as indicators of the degree of competition and proxies for the efficiency in the provision of banking services. The findings suggest that foreign bank presence is not only beneficial in terms of traditional performance measures, but also in terms of economic profit. The results with respect to economic value added and cash value added, however, cast some doubt over the presumed benefits of opening up, underlining the importance of using a proxy that considers the cost of equity and departs from standard accounting principles. Furthermore, the results indicate that foreign entry through the acquisition of domestic banks appears to have a stronger and more beneficial impact on locally incorporated banks than through the establishment of branches, with majority ownership by a foreign blockholder being of importance.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Fort

It is widely held that collegiate athletic directors are trapped in an expenditure arms race.  But the arms race explanation completely omits the actual consideration of the university budgeting process.  In its place, the arms race logic imposes strained assumptions about the cooperative setting and the naïveté of university administrators, along with a curious distinction of one type of revenue to reach its conclusions.  And the interpretation of the data on spending and benefits from college sports has not been done particularly well in the past. This paper presents an alternative principal-agent explanation that is based on the observed actual financial (budget) relationship between university administrators and their athletic department and consistent with the entirety of the aggregate-level data on college athletics finance.  Empirically discerning between the two models is crucial since each generates decidedly different policy implications.


2017 ◽  
Vol 145 (11) ◽  
pp. 4501-4519 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. Allen ◽  
Michael K. Tippett ◽  
Yasir Kaheil ◽  
Adam H. Sobel ◽  
Chiara Lepore ◽  
...  

The spatial distribution of return intervals for U.S. hail size is explored within the framework of extreme value theory using observations from the period 1979–2013. The center of the continent has experienced hail in excess of 5 in. (127 mm) during the past 30 yr, whereas hail in excess of 1 in. (25 mm) is more common in other regions, including the West Coast. Observed hail sizes show heavy quantization toward fixed-diameter reference objects and are influenced by spatial and temporal biases similar to those noted for hail occurrence. Recorded hail diameters have been growing in recent decades because of improved reporting. These data limitations motivate exploration of extreme value distributions to represent the return periods for various hail diameters. The parameters of a Gumbel distribution are fit to dithered observed annual maxima on a national 1° × 1° grid at locations with sufficient records. Gridded and kernel-smoothed return sizes and quantiles up to the 200-yr return period are determined for the fitted Gumbel distribution. These results are used to illustrate return levels for hail greater than a given size for at least one location within each 1° × 1° grid box for the United States.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hampton Gray Gaddy

Increasing development is historically associated with fertility declines. However, demographic paradigms disagree about whether that relationship should hold at very high levels of development. Using national-level data through 2005, Myrskylä, Kohler, and Billari (2009) found that very high levels of the Human Development Index (HDI) were associated with increasing total fertility rates (TFR). This paper updates that finding with data up to 2017. It investigates whether the observed association has continued to hold for the countries originally studied and whether it holds for countries that have more recently reached very high HDI. For countries that reached HDI ≥ 0.8 in 2000 or before (n=27), the data indicate no clear relationship between changes in HDI and TFR at HDI ≥ 0.8. There is also no clear relationship for countries that reached HDI ≥ 0.8 between 2001 and 2010 (n=13). For countries that reached HDI ≥ 0.8 in 2000 or before, there appear to have been notable increases in TFR between 2000 and 2010, but those gains appear to have completely reversed between 2010 and 2017. The past finding of TFR increases at very high levels of development has not borne out in recent years. In fact, TFRs declined markedly in very high development countries between 2010 and 2017. This paper contributes to the debate over the relationship between development and fertility. That debate has an important bearing on how low fertility is conceived by social scientists and policymakers.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Prem Bhandari

This paper examines the uses of remittances in various household activities by remittance-receiving households in rural Nepal. Specifically, this paper focuses on the allocation of (a) remittances in agriculture and other dimensions of household activities, and (b) whether there is any association between the amount of remittances received and the amount allocated by households to agriculture and other dimensions. This study utilizes the detailed household level data (n=139 remittance-receiving households) collected from the Chitwan Valley in 2014, a rural migrant-sending setting of southern Nepal that collected remittances received by households and remittance used in various household activities with monthly precision in the past 12 months. Using the multilevel multivariate OLS regression, the results showed that of the total amount of remittances used, farming (e.g. purchase of seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides) received only about 3.1 percent. In contrast, a large proportion of remittance was used in buying fixed assets such as land, houses, and jewelry (27.1%), followed by food and vegetables (15.3%), savings and business investment (12.3%), loan payment (11.0%), education, (11.2%), and health (4.1%). Adjusted results from multivariate analysis (multilevel OLS) showed that the amount of remittances received by households was not significantly associated with its use in farming. However, the amount of remittances received was positively associated with the amount used in buying fixed assets, media (electronic) items, clothing, covering cultural expenses, paying utilities, and repaying debt. Implications from the findings are presented.


2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jones Chuang ◽  
Peter Chu

This research contributes to the improvement of the optimal headway solution for the transit performance functions (e. g., minimize total cost; maximize social welfare) derived from the traffic model proposed by Hendrickson. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, we prove that that model has a unique solution for headway. Second, we offer a formulated approximation for headway. Third, numerical examples illustrate that our formulated approximation performs more accurately than the Hendrickson?s.


2006 ◽  
Vol 45 (4II) ◽  
pp. 873-890 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Sabir ◽  
Zehra Aftab

It is apparent from various labour force surveys that during the past 20 years Pakistan’s employed labour force has become more “educated”. For instance, according to the Labour Force Survey 1982-83, 28 percent of the employed labour force had attained formal education.12 In comparison, the literate employed labour force in 1999- 2000 is estimated at 46 percent, while the formally educated is 43 percent. However, the pattern of growth in educated labour force is not uniform in all four provinces of the country. A closer look at disaggregated provincial level data reflects the disparity in employed labour force in the four provinces: Punjab, Sind, NWFP, and Baluchistan.


Author(s):  
Elena Aikawa ◽  
Mark C. Blaser

Cardiovascular calcification is an insidious form of ectopic tissue mineralization that presents as a frequent comorbidity of atherosclerosis, aortic valve stenosis, diabetes, renal failure, and chronic inflammation. Calcification of the vasculature and heart valves contributes to mortality in these diseases. An inability to clinically image or detect early microcalcification coupled with an utter lack of pharmaceutical therapies capable of inhibiting or regressing entrenched and detectable macrocalcification has led to a prominent and deadly gap in care for a growing portion of our rapidly aging population. Recognition of this mounting concern has arisen over the past decade and led to a series of revolutionary works that has begun to pull back the curtain on the pathogenesis, mechanistic basis, and causative drivers of cardiovascular calcification. Central to this progress is the discovery that calcifying extracellular vesicles act as active precursors of cardiovascular microcalcification in diverse vascular beds. More recently, the omics revolution has resulted in the collection and quantification of vast amounts of molecular-level data. As the field has become poised to leverage these resources for drug discovery, new means of deriving relevant biological insights from these rich and complex datasets have come into focus through the careful application of systems biology and network medicine approaches. As we look onward toward the next decade, we envision a growing need to standardize approaches to study this complex and multifaceted clinical problem and expect that a push to translate mechanistic findings into therapeutics will begin to finally provide relief for those impacted by this disease.


Author(s):  
Robert Coulson

The U.S. Department of Transportation in cooperation with FHWA and several state transportation agencies is collecting a highway noise database for the development of noise-level regression equations. These data and equations will provide the foundation for the new traffic noise software, TNS. In addition to collecting reference energy mean emission level data, this test plan also requires an extensive database of source heights and subsource spectra covering all vehicle classes and possible roadway parameters. A description is provided of a turnkey rapid data acquisition and analysis system that was developed to collect a large database of vehicle noise source heights and subsource spectra for subsequent incorporation into TNS. Included is a summary of the analysis algorithm used to calculate the source heights, a description of the data collection system, and a brief summary of the data collected to date.


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