Smarter choices ?changing the way we travel. Case study reports

This report accompanies the following volume:Cairns S, Sloman L, Newson C, Anable J, Kirkbride A and Goodwin P (2004)Smarter Choices ? Changing the Way We Travel. Report published by theDepartment for Transport, London, available via the ?Sustainable Travel? section ofwww.dft.gov.uk, and from http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/archive/00001224/

Smarter choices - changing the way we travel

Summary: In recent years, there has been growing interest in a range of initiatives, which are now widelydescribed as 'soft' transport policy measures. These seek to give better information and opportunities,aimed at helping people to choose to reduce their car use while enhancing the attractiveness ofalternatives. They are fairly new as part of mainstream transport policy, mostly relativelyuncontroversial, and often popular. They include:. Workplace and school travel plans;. Personalised travel planning, travel awareness campaigns, and public transport information andmarketing;. Car clubs and car sharing schemes;. Teleworking, teleconferencing and home shopping.This report draws on earlier studies of the impact of soft measures, new evidence from the UK andabroad, case study interviews relating to 24 specific initiatives, and the experience of commercial,public and voluntary stakeholders involved in organising such schemes. Each of the soft factors isanalysed separately, followed by an assessment of their combined potential impact.The assessment focuses on two different policy scenarios for the next ten years. The 'high intensity'scenario identifies the potential provided by a significant expansion of activity to a much morewidespread implementation of present good practice, albeit to a realistic level which still recognisesthe constraints of money and other resources, and variation in the suitability and effectiveness of softfactors according to local circumstances. The 'low intensity' scenario is broadly defined as aprojection of the present (2003-4) levels of local and national activity on soft measures.The main features of the high intensity scenario would be. A reduction in peak period urban traffic of about 21% (off-peak 13%);. A reduction of peak period non-urban traffic of about 14% (off-peak 7%);. A nationwide reduction in all traffic of about 11%.These projected changes in traffic levels are quite large (though consistent with other evidence onbehavioural change at the individual level), and would produce substantial reductions in congestion.However, this would tend to attract more car use, by other people, which could offset the impact ofthose who reduce their car use unless there are measures in place to prevent this. Therefore, thoseexperienced in the implementation of soft factors locally usually emphasise that success depends onsome or all of such supportive policies as re-allocation of road capacity and other measures toimprove public transport service levels, parking control, traffic calming, pedestrianisation, cyclenetworks, congestion charging or other traffic restraint, other use of transport prices and fares, speedregulation, or stronger legal enforcement levels. The report also records a number of suggestionsabout local and national policy measures that could facilitate the expansion of soft measures.The effects of the low intensity scenario, in which soft factors are not given increased policy prioritycompared with present practice, are estimated to be considerably less than those of the high intensityscenario, including a reduction in peak period urban traffic of about 5%, and a nationwide reductionin all traffic of 2%-3%. These smaller figures also assume that sufficient other supporting policies areused to prevent induced traffic from eroding the effects, notably at peak periods and in congestedconditions. Without these supportive measures, the effects could be lower, temporary, and perhapsinvisible.Previous advice given by the Department for Transport in relation to multi-modal studies was that softfactors might achieve a nationwide traffic reduction of about 5%. The policy assumptionsunderpinning this advice were similar to those used in our low intensity scenario: our estimate isslightly less, but the difference is probably within the range of error of such projections.The public expenditure cost of achieving reduced car use by soft measures, on average, is estimated atabout 1.5 pence per car kilometre, i.e. £15 for removing each 1000 vehicle kilometres of traffic.Current official practice calculates the benefit of reduced traffic congestion, on average, to be about15p per car kilometre removed, and more than three times this level in congested urban conditions.Thus every £1 spent on well-designed soft measures could bring about £10 of benefit in reducedcongestion alone, more in the most congested conditions, and with further potential gains fromenvironmental improvements and other effects, provided that the tendency of induced traffic to erodesuch benefits is controlled. There are also opportunities for private business expenditure on some softmeasures, which can result in offsetting cost savings.Much of the experience of implementing soft factors is recent, and the evidence is of variable quality.Therefore, there are inevitably uncertainties in the results. With this caveat, the main conclusion isthat, provided they are implemented within a supportive policy context, soft measures can besufficiently effective in facilitating choices to reduce car use, and offer sufficiently good value formoney, that they merit serious consideration for an expanded role in local and national transportstrategy.AcknowledgementsWe gratefully acknowledge the many contributions made by organisations and individuals consultedas part of the research, and by the authors of previous studies and literature reviews which we havecited. Specific acknowledgements are given at the end of each chapter.We have made extensive use of our own previous work including research by Lynn Sloman funded bythe Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 on the traffic impact of soft factors and localtransport schemes (in part previously published as 'Less Traffic Where People Live'); and by SallyCairns and Phil Goodwin as part of the research programme of TSU supported by the Economic andSocial Research Council, and particularly research on school and workplace travel plans funded bythe DfT (and managed by Transport 2000 Trust), on car dependence funded by the RAC Foundation,on travel demand analysis funded by DfT and its predecessors, and on home shopping funded byEUCAR. Case studies to accompany this report are available at: http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/archive/00001233

An adaptive policy-based framework for network services management

This paper presents a framework for specifying policies for the management of network services. Although policy-based management has been the subject of considerable research, proposed solutions are often restricted to condition-action rules, where conditions are matched against incoming traffic flows. This results in static policy configurations where manual intervention is required to cater for configuration changes and to enable policy deployment. The framework presented in this paper supports automated policy deployment and flexible event triggers to permit dynamic policy configuration. While current research focuses mostly on rules for low-level device configuration, significant challenges remain to be addressed in order to:a) provide policy specification and adaptation across different abstraction layers; and, b) provide tools and services for the engineering of policy-driven systems. In particular, this paper focuses on solutions for dynamic adaptation of policies in response to changes within the managed environment. Policy adaptation includes both dynamically changing policy parameters and reconfiguring the policy objects. Access control for network services is also discussed.Accepted versio

The Search for Invariance: Repeated Positive Testing Serves the Goals of Causal Learning

Positive testing is characteristic of exploratory behavior, yet it seems to be at odds with the aim of information seeking. After all, repeated demonstrations of one’s current hypothesis often produce the same evidence and fail to distinguish it from potential alternatives. Research on the development of scientific reasoning and adult rule learning have both documented and attempted to explain this behavior. The current chapter reviews this prior work and introduces a novel theoretical account—the Search for Invariance (SI) hypothesis—which suggests that producing multiple positive examples serves the goals of causal learning. This hypothesis draws on the interventionist framework of causal reasoning, which suggests that causal learners are concerned with the invariance of candidate hypotheses. In a probabilistic and interdependent causal world, our primary goal is to determine whether, and in what contexts, our causal hypotheses provide accurate foundations for inference and intervention—not to disconfirm their alternatives. By recognizing the central role of invariance in causal learning, the phenomenon of positive testing may be reinterpreted as a rational information-seeking strategy

Feature integration in natural language concepts

Two experiments measured the joint influence of three key sets of semantic features on the frequency with which artifacts (Experiment 1) or plants and creatures (Experiment 2) were categorized in familiar categories. For artifacts, current function outweighed both originally intended function and current appearance. For biological kinds, appearance and behavior, an inner biological function, and appearance and behavior of offspring all had similarly strong effects on categorization. The data were analyzed to determine whether an independent cue model or an interactive model best accounted for how the effects of the three feature sets combined. Feature integration was found to be additive for artifacts but interactive for biological kinds. In keeping with this, membership in contrasting artifact categories tended to be superadditive, indicating overlapping categories, whereas for biological kinds, it was subadditive, indicating conceptual gaps between categories. It is argued that the results underline a key domain difference between artifact and biological concepts

Effect of acute copper sulfate exposure on olfactory responses to amino acids and pheromones in goldfish (Carassius auratus)

Exposure of olfactory epithelium to environmentally relevant concentrations of copper disrupts olfaction in fish. To examine the dynamics of recovery at both functional and morphological levels after acute copper exposure, unilateral exposure of goldfish olfactory epithelia to 100 μM CuSO4 (10 min) was followed by electro-olfactogram (EOG) recording and scanning electron microscopy. Sensitivity to amino acids (L-arginine and L-serine), generally considered food-related odorants, recovered most rapidly (three days), followed by that to catecholamines(3-O-methoxytyramine),bileacids(taurolithocholic acid) and the steroid pheromone, 17,20 -dihydroxy-4-pregnen- 3-one 20-sulfate, which took 28 days to reach full recovery. Sensitivity to the postovulatory pheromone prostaglandin F2R had not fully recovered even at 28 days. These changes in sensitivity were correlated with changes in the recovery of ciliated and microvillous receptor cell types. Microvillous cells appeared largely unaffected by CuSO4 treatment. Cilia in ciliated receptor neurones, however, appeared damaged one day post-treatment and were virtually absent after three days but had begun to recover after 14 days. Together, these results support the hypothesis that microvillous receptor neurones detect amino acids whereas ciliated receptor neurones were not functional and are responsible for detection of social stimuli (bile acidsandpheromones).Furthermore, differences in sensitivity to copper may be due to different transduction pathways in the different cell types

The transformation of transport policy in Great Britain? 'New Realism' and New Labour's decade of displacement activity

In a 1999 paper, Goodwin announced ‘the transformation of transport policy in Great Britain’. His central point was that consensus was emerging among policy makers and academics based on earlier work including Transport: The New Realism, which rejected previous orthodoxy that the supply of road space could and should be continually expanded to match demand. Instead a combination of investment in public transport, walking and cycling opportunities and – crucially – demand management should form the basis of transport policy to address rising vehicle use and associated increases in congestion and pollution / carbon emissions. This thinking formed the basis of the 1997 Labour government’s ‘sustainable transport’ policy, but after 13 years in power ministers neither transformed policy nor tackled longstanding transport trends. Our main aim in this paper is to revisit the concept of New Realism and re-examine its potential utility as an agent of change in British transport policy. Notwithstanding the outcome of Labour’s approach to transport policy, we find that the central tenets of the New Realism remain robust and that the main barriers to change are related to broader political and governance issues which suppress radical policy innovation

The morphofunctional approach to emotion modelling in robotics

In this conceptual paper, we discuss two areas of research in robotics, robotic models of emotion and morphofunctional machines, and we explore the scope for potential cross-fertilization between them. We shift the focus in robot models of emotion from information-theoretic aspects of appraisal to the interactive significance of bodily dispositions. Typical emotional phenomena such as arousal and action readiness can be interpreted as morphofunctional processes, and their functionality may be replicated in robotic systems with morphologies that can be modulated for real-time adaptation. We investigate the control requirements for such systems, and present a possible bio-inspired architecture, based on the division of control between neural and endocrine systems in humans and animals. We suggest that emotional epi- sodes can be understood as emergent from the coordination of action control and action-readiness, respectively. This stress on morphology complements existing research on the information-theoretic aspects of emotion

What if best practice is too expensive? Feedback on oral presentations and efficient use of resources

We evaluate feedback methods for oral presentations used in training non-quantitative research skills (literature review and various associated tasks). Training is provided through a credit-bearing module taught to MSc students of banking, economics and finance in the UK. Monitoring oral presentations and providing ‘best practice’ feedback is very resource-intensive. Do we withdraw oral presentations from the module, because best feedback practice is prohibitively expensive in a world of limited resources, or choose a second-best alternative? To what extent might the latter compromise intended learning outcomes? We used the same provision of video feedback for all students but used two verbal feedback regimes. For one regime, we decreased the amount of verbal feedback and increased the number of presentations. The impact was measured by academic outcome, rating scales and questionnaire. Overall satisfaction with the module was very high for both feedback regimes, and there were no statistically significant differences between regimes, suggesting that less resource-intensive methods need not compromise learning outcomes