Economics and Finance

Increasing the provision of public transport is not only desirable in a time of concern over climate change and high fuel prices, it may also have important effects on employment and wages. Using current and historic data from over 360 U.S. metropolitan areas, Daniel G. Chatman and Robert B. Noland argue that public transport increases employment in central city areas, whilst also leading to higher wages in these areas totaling from between $1.5 million and $1.8 billion yearly depending on the city.

Economic benefits are sometimes used to justify transport investments. Such was the case with the River Line of southern New Jersey, USA, which broke ground in 2000 and began operating in 2004. Recently, the line has been performing near full capacity and there is evidence that it has spurred development. Disaggregate data on owned-home appreciation are used to investigate the initial economic impacts of the line, looking carefully at non-linearity in the appreciation gradient, differential effects of station ridership and parking, redistribution of property appreciation gains and...

Knowing parking price response curve allows one to set the price right. This response curve is often estimated by observing changes in occupancy concomitant with small changes of price. In the authors' Value Pricing Pilot (VPP) Program study, called FlexPassPlus, the authors have used a new method to measure this quantity. By setting up repeated 2nd price auctions via an app the authors were able to get a lot more information about elasticity than through a traditional change-the-price-and-see-what-happens experiment. This leads to a better understanding of the parking incentive response...

The notion of optimal supervisory control of discrete event dynamical systems (DEDSs) is formalized in the framework of Ramadge and Wonham. A DEDS is modeled as a state machine and is controlled by disabling some of its transitions. Two types of cost functions are defined: a cost of control function corresponding to disabling transitions in the state machine, and a penalty of control function corresponding to reaching some undesired states or not reaching some desired states in the controlled system. The control objective is to design an optimal control mechanism, if it exists, so that the...