Rail

The use of carsharing vehicles over a period of 16 months in 2006-07 was compared to built environment and demographic factors in this GIS-based multivariate regression study of an urban U.S. carsharing operator. Carsharing is a relatively new transportation industry in which companies provide members with short-term vehicle access from distributed neighborhood locations. The number of registered carsharing members in North America has doubled every year or two to a current level of approximately 320,000. Researchers have long supposed that public transit access is a key factor driving...

Shared mobility—the shared use of a motor vehicle, bicycle, or other mode—enables travelers to gain short-term access to transportation modes on an as-needed basis. The term “shared mobility” includes the modes of carsharing, personal vehicle sharing (peer-to-peer carsharing and fractional ownership), bikesharing, scooter sharing, traditional ridesharing, transportation network companies (or ridesourcing), and e-Hail (taxis). It can also include flexible transit services, including microtransit, which supplement fixed-route bus and rail services. Shared mobility has proliferated in global...

While transportation funding can be collected in a variety of direct (e.g., fares, tolls, and gas taxes) or indirect (e.g., property and sales tax) ways, dynamic demand responsive pricing not only collects revenue but also incentivizes travelers to avoid peak-demand periods, thus utilizing infrastructure capacity more efficiently. Unfortunately, the demand response to price changes, called the price elasticity of demand, is generally greater for longer-term travel planning (e.g., air and rail travel) than it is for more atomized short-term planning (e.g., highway tolls and transit fares)....

The formation of new firms is one process by which economies grow and innovate. Public transportation services may facilitate the birth of new firms by both providing better access and causing local densification that leads to agglomeration economies. In this study firm births are investigated to determine how they are related to newly provided light rail transit service in two metropolitan areas in the United States. A geocoded time-series database of firm establishments in Dallas, Texas, and Portland, Oregon, from 1991 through 2008 is used. The data set allows the study of spatial...