A Resource Allocation Model towards Urban Sustainability based on Transport Diversity Perspective

• Main Authors: Hsieh, Cheng-Hsien, 謝承憲
• Other Authors: Feng, Cheng-Min
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/02406904339832926991

博士 === 國立交通大學 === 交通運輸研究所 === 97 === Different transport stakeholders have different needs for transport infrastructure and services. Meeting the needs of stakeholders implies a trade-off of benefits and costs between supply and demand and creates issues of transport diversity. However, the literature has largely ignored these issues. This study aims to provide a framework evaluating transport diversity to promote quality of life. Transport diversity is defined as the satisfied level of stakeholder needs in this study and measured as the gap between expected goal and present values of stakeholder needs in the form of the Shannon-Weaver Index, or namely the Entropy. Transport diversity can assess whether the level to which important needs are satisfied equitably, and monitor whether the transportation system is moving towards sustainability via confirming the targets and the basic level of quality of life. The proposed framework suggests that the evaluation of transport diversity should consider distinct transportation needs, such as mobility, economic health, reliability, safety, accessibility, affordability, level of universal design, externality and resource over-utilization, of different stakeholder including various modal users, specific users and non-users simultaneously. Accordingly, transport diversity is thus the necessary condition for quality of life and sustainability. Improving the sustainability and quality of life with regard to transportation requires the support of transport diversity. This study hopes that the conceptual framework developed can assist decision-makers in understanding the relationship between transport diversity and sustainability, and provide a new assessing method for improvements in quality of life. After identifying the appropriate indicators referring to stakeholder needs, a preliminary spatiotemporal analysis is illustrated through an empirical study to discuss the managerial implications in the Taipei metropolitan area. The results reveal that transport diversity is improved from 2000 to 2005. In fact, the transportation system has progressed in the satisfactions of safety and reliability. However, the achievements of emission, accessibility and level of universal design perform poorly. Decision-makers could understand better resource allocation policies according to the analytical results. In particular, deficient quality of life for disable users should be improved effectively and efficiently. Additionally, resource allocation policies help planners decide when and how to invest transportation infrastructure and services. However, policies for improving transport diversity are difficult to design, implement, and quantify because of the uncertainty, feedback interaction, and complexity of system relationships. This study proposes a hybrid model integrating system dynamics, cognitive maps, and sensitivity model to tackle the problems. Notably, the result of sensitivity model reveals that the increment of private vehicle trips reduces transport diversity due to the increase of energy consumption, emission and accident rate. However, tuning policy delays does not significantly impact system performance through managerial choices of resource allocation. Moreover, the simulation results indicate that the gaps in stakeholder needs are generally opposite to transport diversity and positive proportion to private vehicle trips. This verifies that increasing public transit trips helps the system bridge the gap between user satisfactions of stakeholder needs. According to the system relationships constructed by the hybrid systematic simulation tool, fuzzy multi-objectives programming, a Pareto based mathematical approach is employed to solve the non-linear multi-objectives problems focusing on urban public transit systems for determine the impact of resource allocation on need satisfactions related to stakeholder behaviors. The proposed approach evades inefficient and inequitable resource allocation. Furthermore, analytical outcomes show that recent investments allocated to public transit system considered equitable stakeholder satisfactions both of MRT and bus, as well as promoted transport diversity in the Taipei metropolitan area.