This article explores the behaviour of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) regarding mandatory and voluntary measures established by the French government to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions generated by freight transport operations. Through semi-structured interviews with fourteen SMEs (five shippers, eight carriers and a consultant) located throughout France, this research examines the integration of sustainable development into organizational and decision-making practices since the introduction of these programmes on the French territory. Our qualitative study suggests that active environmental implications stem mainly from the company's internal dynamics, driven by its management, as well as end customers’ expectations. The voluntary policies seem to appeal more to SMEs than the mandatory measures implemented since 2013. This research shows that the carriers surveyed are highly environmentally proactive, regardless of their size. It also sheds light on techniques that could increase the efficiency and widespread adoption of governmental measures, in particular through the increasing use of on-board telematics.
The purpose of this article is to show the extent to which road safety communication influences users’ behavior. To achieve this, we collected data through a survey over a five-month period in between February and June 2019. Then exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were carried out, and finally structural equations were used to test the hypotheses. Results show that communication has a direct effect on road users’ behavior, communication influences perception of bodily risk which in turn does not affect road users’ behavior, communication does not affect equipment risk which in turn influences road users’ behavior. Results also show that the strength of the relationships among the above-mentioned variables depends upon user’s location, user type and user’s age.
As the international transport of goods by sea involves various kinds of international trade operators, uniformity of the law appears to be the best way to satisfy the security requirements of these various operators. Nevertheless, individual States cannot create new rules for this activity, by simply unifying regulations in a conventional manner. There is a conflict between the desire for uniformity and the realities of implementing rules, as a consequence of divergences within the convention. This is the reason for which maritime actors have tried to standardize contracts, and support ruling jurisdictions. How can such practices contribute to the uniformity of soft law?
Transit ridership varies over time, within the behaviour of a same user, and from one user to another. These variations make it difficult to adjust service and demand forecasting models, potentially leading to additional operating costs and a non-optimal allocation of vehicles on the network. However, the growing availability of longitudinal and individualized data now allows to better understand travel behaviour. In particular, this paper benefits from smart card data from the OPUS system of Montreal, Canada. More than 429 million validations, made by nearly 2 million cards, are mined to investigate transit use variability at a totally disaggregated level over a one-year period. Four indicators are proposed to measure several types of variations: trip dispersion among the users, variability of the frequency of use, temporal variance of the monthly number of trips and spatial diversity of the boarding locations. These indicators are applied to evaluate the regularity of 10 distinct groups of cards defined by their fare composition. Because of the sensitivity of statistical tests on sample size, an effect size analysis is provided to better quantify the magnitude of the differences between the groups. The results reveal relationships between transit use and the typeof product used. Both annual and monthly pass users are found to be regular and frequent passengers, whereas ticket book users are rather occasional travellers. Moreover, variability tends to increase with the […]