When it comes to European postal services, it is clear that different market segments have different needs. RAND Europe, in conjunction with Accent and Swiss Economics, undertook a study for the European Commission to help identify consumer needs in relation to postal services. Among the conclusions: big business valued letter services more than did small and medium enterprises or the public, whereas all consumers valued parcel services as well as high levels of reliability and low levels of loss. The research was conducted using stated preference experiments in three countries.
Transport for New South Wales (NSW) operates the Sydney Strategic Travel Model (STM) to inform long term transport planning, policy development, and infrastructure assessment in Greater Sydney, Australia. RAND Europe implemented new travel frequency, mode, and destination model components of the STM, extended the model scope to include toll road choice for car drivers, and park-and-ride and kiss-and-ride access to train, and analysed and enhanced the pivoting component of the STM that helps to predict future travel patterns.
Considering the challenges associated with continued growth and demographic changes, the government of Qatar is interested in updating its school transportation system (STS). RAND Europe helped to assess the perspectives of parents and school administrators, identify a vision for the STS, and discuss strategies to achieve it. The four elements of the vision: providing safe, efficient, and high-quality transportation; enabling mobility and access; supporting Qatari values and culture; and minimizing the impact on traffic congestion and the environment.
To understand the factors affecting the wider adoption of electric vehicles, RAND Europe has sponsored a project to evaluate the barriers, as well as relevant government and public-private interventions that have been used in other countries to facilitate adoption. The project team will also conduct a survey to determine the potential uptake of electric vehicles within a municipality, using Cambridge, UK, as a case study.
The UK Migration Advisory Committee commissioned RAND Europe to collate evidence on how migration is likely to impact transport networks. Our analysis finds that migrants tend to live in metropolitan areas and make transport choices strongly in favour of public transport, walking, cycling, and car-sharing when they first arrive in the UK; over time, however, their behaviour becomes more similar to the native population. The report also provides monetised estimates of migrants’ transport impacts.
Growing interest in the use of models that recognise the role of individuals' attitudes and perceptions in choice behaviour has influenced a team of RAND Europe researchers to examine the latent nature of attitudes. In an article in
Transportation they present an application of jointly estimated attitudinal and choice models to a real-world transport study, looking at the role of latent attitudes in a rail travel context. The result of their work is an ordered logit structure that explains how the choices people make may be strongly influenced by their attitudes, but that the choices also say something about those attitudes.
RAND Europe, in collaboration with URS/Scott Wilson, has developed models to predict demand for long-distance passenger travel in Great Britain to appraise the impact of new transport infrastructure and operation policies aimed at this market, such as high-speed rail, highway management, and policies directed towards domestic air travel. Stated preference surveys were conducted with rail, air and car travellers to enable better representation of high-speed rail in the models.
The European Commission is considering revising its Tobacco Products Directive and commissioned RAND Europe to help assess the key health, social, and economic impacts of five policy options under consideration. The study used a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods, including rapid evidence reviews and econometric and health-economic modelling techniques, to assess the economic and health effects of future regulation.
To combat climate change, the British government has thus far valued the cost of carbon emissions based on how much people
should pay, rather than how much they are
willing to pay, or the value they place on carbon emissions reduction. An analysis of a series of RAND Europe studies suggests there is an opportunity for a large consumer surplus — a social benefit — by introducing a carbon tax to pay for the damages caused by carbon emissions.
Social care is an increasing important public service, but little is known about its impact and how effective or efficient different care interventions are. To help remedy this situation, RAND Europe has undertaken research for the Office of National Statistics and the Personal Social Services Research Unit that quantifies the value placed on different aspects of social care related quality of life. This research forms part of the new Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit (ASCOT), which provides a tool for commissioners, service providers and regulators to quantify the outcomes of care interventions and help prioritise expenditure in areas which offer the greatest return to service users.
It has long been known that new roads have a more complex impact on behaviour than drivers merely changing routes. Travellers may reschedule trips, make additional trips, switch from public transport to car, visit new destinations or even move home. To understand and measure the 'induced traffic' effects resulting from the completion of the Manchester Motorway Box, the Department for Transport commissioned RAND Europe to develop a robust predictive choice model whose results were broadly in line with measured changes.
Cost damping is a feature in some travel demand models by which the marginal disutility of cost (and, possibly, of time) declines as journey lengths increase. As cost damping is present in many models in practical use in the UK, the Department for Transport sought recommendations for the advice it issues to local planners in its WebTAG system.
To understand the privacy, liberty, and security trade-offs individuals are willing to make, and so policy makers can be better informed about citizens' true preferences in this domain, RAND Europe undertook an innovative stated-preference discrete-choice modelling study. The research included three real-life case studies where these factors come into play: applying for a passport, traveling on the national rail network, and attending a major public event such as the opening ceremony of the Olympics.
Hosting the 2012 Olympic Games will place London and the UK at the centre of the world's attention - something that carries with it a wide range of potential security risks. RAND Europe offers policy makers a methodology that will help foster evidence-based decisions as they approach security planning for the Games.
Local authorities requesting capital funding to improve transport infrastructure need to estimate the cost benefits that travellers will receive from these improvements. RAND Europe developed a travel demand model for Cornwall County, using locally collected data, to predict travellers’ responses and quantify their benefits from different ferry service options to the Isles of Scilly. The model predicts changes in modal shift and in total travel demand as a result of changes in ferry services.
Park-and-ride schemes can be effective as a means to reduce car travel within congested city centres. Olympic organisers for London 2012 Games have recently announced plans to ban all car travel, making consideration of using Park-and-ride sites more critical. In this REsource note RAND Europe describes findings from research related to the feasibility and growth in demand of P&R sites.
RAND Europe developed the Policy Responsive Integrated Strategy Model in order to forecast future transport demands in the West Midlands in response to a range of different policy interventions. RAND Europe recently used innovative methods to extend the model to assess the impact of road user charging policies.
RAND Europe's Choice Modelling and Valuation team develops state-of-practice tools to enable a detailed assessment of transport policy over large areas. These tools assist transport authorities across the globe in mitigating congestion and the environmental hazards that result from traffic.
The development of a robust method to appraise the monetary benefits of different possible ways to improve regularity of the Paris suburban train network required values for its level of reliability. These values-of-reliability were obtained from a large-scale Stated Preference (SP) data set that was collected specifically for this project. This technical report presents the estimation results of models developed using this data set.
The London Patient Choice Project (LPCP) was established to offer choices to patients who were clinically eligible for treatment and had been waiting for treatment at an NHS London hospital beyond a target waiting time. This report covers the choice process and the trade-offs patients are willing to make in order to obtain earlier treatment.
Carried out for the European Commission, the EXPEDITE project produced a transport model for application in forecasting and policy simulation for passenger and freight transport.
FORWARD (Freight Options for Road, Water, and Rail for the Dutch) is a major transportation research study that examined the benefits and costs of a broad range of policy options for mitigating the negative impacts of the expected growth in Dutch road freight transport while retaining the economic benefits. A Decision Support System was developed and used to estimate the effects of numerous policy options and can be used to re-evaluate policy options as projections change and/or more data become available.
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