London Congestion Charge: Cost-Benefit Analysis

London Congestion Charge: Cost-Benefit Analysis Road pricing is the application of various charges to the usage of roads. These charges include fuel taxes, tolls, parking taxes, licence fees, and congestion charges. Pricing may vary by time of day, or by the specific road or vehicle type using the road. The two main aims of road pricing are generating revenue and managing demand. The latter can be achieved through congestion pricing, which is a system of surcharging users of a transport network in periods of peak demand to reduce traffic volumes to optimal levels. This variable pricing strategy aims to regulate demand, thus enabling congestion management without increasing supply. Market economics theory, which includes the congestion pricing concept, proposes that road users will be forced to pay for the negative externalities they create, making them conscious of the costs they impose upon each other when consuming during the peak demand, and more aware of their environmental impact. The very notion of urban congestion pricing w as proposed in London as a response to the challenges faced by the Ministry of Transport around 1960. These challenges consisted of a significant increase in the number of new car registrations, the considerable cost of congestion for the road users due to the reduced average travel speed and corresponding delay, and other negative impacts on the environment. In this regard, the positive and negative aspects of the London congestion charge can be considered as follows: Positive Aspects Of The London Congestion Charge: Analysing the results of the TfL study(2003) indicates that the most important positive aspect of the London congestion charge is the time-saving to drivers and passengers of vehicles that continue to use the road system after charging is introduced including cars, taxis, buses, and commercial vehicles within and outside the charging zone. This is a common point highlighted by Leape(2006), Mackie(2005), Raux(2005) and Prudhomme and Bocajeros(2005). In addition to time-saving, a reduced travel time and an improved journey time reliability (of an average of 30%) are two other key positive aspects of the congestion charge(Leape,2006, Mackie,2005, Raux,2005 and PB,2005). Factors that contribute to these two positives include an almost 30% reduction in congestion, a 30% decrease in traffic delays inside the zone, an 18% decrease in traffic entering the zone during charging hours, and a 15% reduction in traffic circulating (vehicle Km) within the zone. Evidence on average travel speeds on roads inside the charging zone indicates that the all-day average network travel speeds increased from a pre-charging average almost 17% (Leape,2006). Other benefits include a considerable decrease in queuing time at junctions (Leape,2006), the environmental benefit of reducing the pollution emissions by 34% (PB,2005), and an improvement in safety, by 2-5% or 30-70 fewer accidents per year for Central London(Mackie, 2005). Through reallocating road space from private cars to public transportation (Leape,2006), the congestion charge has increased public transport patronage. For example, bus passengers entering the charging zone in the morning peak period rose by 38%, while number of private cars decreased by 16%, which in addition to direct time savings, reduced accidents and lowered carbon dioxide emissions (Leape,2006). Increased number of bus passengers and reduced average operating costs (increased speed, travel time reliability) have enabled providers to offer some combination of improved service levels (more routes, higher frequencies) and lower fares (Leape,2006). These effects can encourage an even greater use of public transport whilst also reducing average costs per passenger to transport providers, leading to further shifts from car travel to public transport, and an additional reduction in congestion. Negative Aspects Of The London Congestion Charge: The higher-than-expected set-up and operational costs for the congestion charge must be considered as the most prominent negative aspect. In London, the operational costs were more than twice the level initially estimated (implementation costs averaged  £95 million in the first two years). This resulted in the net annual revenue falling far short of expected levels (Leape,2006, Mackie,2005, Raux,2005 and PB,2005). A congestion charge is likely to have different effects across businesses and land value in the long term. Negative effects are the changing land-use patterns and reduced land value caused by a restriction on car mobility within the congestion charge area (Tehran Congestion Charge Study, 2005). This decrease in car trips could have an adverse impact on retail businesses located within the congestion area, whereas it could benefit those outside the zone (Leape,2006). Summary: Although the cost-benefit estimates for the London congestion charge, produced by Transport for London (2003a), is subject to some controversy by PB(2005), Mackie (2005) and Charles (2005), generally the London congestion charge has been both a political and practical success in reducing congestion and related negative externalities. It has also been met with a high level of satisfaction from most Londoners. As mentioned above, the time-savings to drivers and passengers of vehicles resulting from increased average speed and decreased delay is the most important positive aspect of congestion charging. Increasing reliability of travel time for car and bus, decreasing queuing time at junctions, decreasing the level of pollution emission and improving safety, as well as improving public transport patronage and improving its level of service all must be considered as positive aspects of congestion charges. In contrast, the high operational costs of running the scheme is the dominant negat ive aspect of congestion charging. This can significantly influence the net annual revenue for the congestion charging scheme. Moreover, other factors such as decreasing the flow of mobility in the congestion charging zone in the long term can lead to changing the land-use patterns and probably decreasing the land value. As mentioned by PB(2005) there were concerns that the diverting impact of the congestion charge could lead to higher levels of congestion on the inner ring road that borders the zone and the area surrounding congestion zone, which needs to be considered in more detail. Therefore, a degree of caution is appropriate before generalizing from the London experience.

The Future of Airports and New Larger Aircraft (NLA) Essay -- Aviation

The first airplanes carried only one individual. Today an average commercial airplane will carry approximately four-hundred to five-hundred people. However, recently new larger aircraft (NLA) have been designed to carry anywhere from five-hundred to eight-hundred persons. The need for NLA’s has been recognized as demand for air travel continues to increase. Furthermore, by deploying larger aircraft the problem of capacity will be addressed: more people on a plane will translate to a lower number of planes on the runway and while still accommodating the same number of passengers. The effects of these NLA’s are far-reaching and potentially detrimental to airport management. By utilizing appropriate airport planning, managers can overcome the pitfalls related to new larger aircraft. The first consideration which must be addressed is the runway. Is the length of the runway capable of supporting the NLA’s? What about the weight of the NLA’s, how will they effect maintenance? Do airports need to be redesigned to accommodate NLA’s? Thankfully, many of these types of questions have been answered. Although the maximum takeoff weight of the A380 will be over 1.2 million pounds, new and better wing and higher performance engines will allow the aircraft to operate from the same runway lengths as existing B747-400s†¦ However, accommodating the aircraft’s wingspan of close to 262 feet may require significant modifications to airfields at airports intending to serve the new large aircraft. Burns & McDonnell 2001 Of course, heavier aircraft will adversely affect a runway’s integrity. Maintenance cycles will need to be amplified in order to remain operable. The key will be acting before the runway becomes unusable. The next iss... ...ess, trouble-free adaptation† (Young and Well, pg. 473, 2011). This holistic approach aided the transition, yet the future will present new problems as demand will likely increase and NLA’s will be used more widely. Learning from those who have successfully accommodated NLA’s can help airport managers who have yet to engage the giants of the air. Works Cited Burns & McDonnell, (2001). What’s you NLA? How will new large aircraft affect your airport facility? Retrieved on March 27, 2012. http://www.burnsmcd.com/Resource_/Issue/283/PdfFile/aviationreport2.pdf Gomes de Barros, A., Wirasinghe, S., (1997). New aircraft characteristics related to airport planning. Retrieved on March 27, 2012. my.fit.edu/~dkirk/3241/Lectures/Atrgpap.pdf Young, S., and Wells, A., (2011). Airport planning and management. 6th Edition. New York, New York. McGraw-Hill Professional.

Metaphysical Poets Essay

The term metaphysical poets was coined by the poet and critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of British lyric poets of the 17th century, whose work was characterized by the inventive use of conceits, and by speculation about topics such as love or religion. These poets were not formally affiliated; most of them did not even know or read each other (Wikipedia). Their work is a blend of emotion and intellectual ingenuity, characterized by conceit or â€Å"wit†Ã¢â‚¬â€that is, by the sometimes violent yoking together of apparently unconnected ideas and things so that the reader is startled out of his complacency and forced to think through the argument of the poem. Metaphysical poetry is less concerned with expressing feeling than with analyzing it, with the poet exploring the recesses of his consciousness. The boldness of the literary devices used—especially obliquity, irony, and paradox—is often reinforced by a dramatic directness of language and by rhythms derived from that of living speech. Esteem for Metaphysical poetry never stood higher than in the 1930s and ’40s, largely because of T.S. Eliot’s influential essay â€Å"The Metaphysical Poets† (1921), a review of Herbert J.C. Grierson’s anthology Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth Century. In this essay Eliot argued that the works of these men embody a fusion of thought and feeling that later poets were unable to achieve because of a â€Å"dissociation of sensibility,† which resulted in works that were either intellectual or emotional but not both at once. In their own time, however, the epithet â€Å"metaphysical† was used pejoratively: in 1630 the Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden objected to those of his contemporaries who attempted to â€Å"abstra ct poetry to metaphysical ideas and scholastic quiddities.† At the end of the century, John Dryden censured Donne for affecting â€Å"the metaphysics† and for perplexing â€Å"the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy when he should engage their hearts . . . with the softnesses of love.† Samuel Johnson, in referring to the learning that their poetry displays, also dubbed them â€Å"the metaphysical poets,† and the term has continued in use ever since. Eliot’s adoption of the label as a term of praise is arguably a better guide to his personal aspirations about his own poetry than to the Metaphysical poets themselves; his use of metaphysical underestimates these poets’ debt to lyrical and socially engaged verse. Nonetheless, the term is useful for identifying the often-intellectual character of their writing (Encyclopedia Britannica). Without doubt Samuel Johnson’s choice of the word metaphysical to describe the followers of Donne was directly influenced by these earlier usages (th e Cleveland passage is quoted in Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755 to illustrate the definition of ‘Metaphysicks’). The category of poetry that indulged in metaphysics was a live one for later seventeenth-century poets, but for them metaphysics was a word used to mark the point at which strongly argued verse bordered on self-parody. There is more value than this, however, in the group name. Even in the earlier seventeenth century members of the core group of metaphysical poets were connected by a number of social, familial, and literary ties. Izaak Walton relates that Donne and George Herbert enjoyed ‘a long and dear friendship, made up by such a Sympathy of inclinations, that they coveted and joyed to be in each others Company’ (Walton, 57–8). Donne addressed poems to Herbert’s mother, Magdalen, and preached her funeral sermon, as well as writing a poem to Herbert’s brother, Edward, Lord Herbert. Herbert of Cherbury in turn read both Donne’s poetry and that of his own brother with care, and was a friend of Thomas Carew and Aurelian Townshend. Henry Wotton was the addressee of epistles in both verse and prose from his close friend John Donne, and at one point intended to write a life of Donne. Henry King (whose father ordained John Donne) was in daily contact with Donne at St Paul’s Cathedral, where the older poet was dean while King was chief residentiary. Donne bequeathed to King a portrait of himself dressed in his winding-sheet. Not surprisingly King’s verse is haunted by that of his friend, from whom he received manuscripts, as well as books and themes for sermons. Later in the century there were other close groupings of poets, who, although not linked by direct personal familiarity with Donne and Herbert, were bound to each other by ties of family, friendship, and literary consanguinity. Thomas Stanley was a cousin of Richard Lovelace and the nephew of William Hammond, and became a friend of John Hall, one of the most underrated of the minor metaphysical poets. Cowley was a friend and eventually elegist of Richard Crashaw. Pockets of metaphysicality also survived in several institutions: it cannot be an accident that Henry King, Abraham Cowley, Thomas Randolph, William Cartwright, and John Dryden all attended Westminster School. But by the later seventeenth century the bonds of friendship and affinity that had linked Donne and Herbert were in the main replaced by looser ties of literary indebtedness. Declaratory utterances to imagined or absent addressees who are summoned into being by the force of the speaker’s eloquence are common among poems by members of these networks, as are works that explore the balance and imbalance between the demands of the body and the spirit. Direct attempts to persuade, either through comparisons or through arguments that self-consciously display their logical elisions, are also among the most evident legacies left by Donne to his poetical heirs. No single one of these elements constitutes a metaphysical style, and it would also be wrong to suppose that all of them must be present in a given poem for it to be regarded as belonging to the tradition. It is also incorrect to believe that a poet who sometimes wrote poems in a metaphysical manner was always and in every poem a metaphysical. The metaphysical style was various. It also changed in response to historical events. Donne’s Poems and Herbert’s The Temple were both posthumously printed in 1633. Those publications immediately extended the literary communities of their authors through time and space, and the fact that both volumes were posthumous had a significant effect on the kind of influence they exerted. Donne and Herbert rapidly became models for imitation, but they could also be regarded as ideal representatives of an age that had passed. Imitation of them could therefore become an act not just of nostalgia, but of politically or theologically motivated nostalgia—as occurs most notably and heavy-handedly in the high Anglican pastiches of Herbert included in The Synagogue by Christopher Harvey, which was regularly bound with The Temple after 1640. In the political and ecclesiastical upheavals of the 1640s the metaphysical style moved on. Imitating Herbert in particular could signal a desire to resist the depredations suffered by the English church during the civil war. Richard Crashaw’s Steps to the Temple (1646) explicitly links itself by its title to Herbert’s volume. The editions of 1646 and 1648 include ‘On Mr. G. Herberts Booke’, which declares ‘Divinest love lyes in this booke’. Henry Vaughan’s preface to the second volume of Silex scintillans (1655) ascribes to Herbert’s influence his conversion from writing secular poems, and he marks the debt by adop ting the titles of several poems by Herbert for his own works. By the second part of Silex these allusions to Herbert carried a political charge, intimating Vaughan’s resistant attitude to the forcible ejection of conservatively minded ministers from churches in his native Wales by commissioners acting under the parliamentary ordinance for the propagation of the gospel. The gradual replacement of networks of closely connected individuals by relationships between dead authors and their readers is perhaps a central reason for the emergence of metaphysics (in the pejorative sense) in later seventeenth-century verse. The two later poets stigmatized by Johnson as ‘metaphysical’, Cleveland and Cowley, knew Donne only as a voice in a book. Efforts to reanimate that voice often show signs of strain. But the move from personal to textual connection between members of the group did not always have undesirable consequences. Andrew Marvell, who ever since John Aubrey’s ‘Brief life’ has tended to be regarded as an isolated figure in the literary landscape, has perhaps the most distinctive poetic voice of any member of the group. By describing pastoral figures with wounded or sullied innocence who argue perplexedly about their own fate and the unattainability of their own desires, Marvell transformed the metaphysical style into an idiom appropriate for a period of political division and national crisis. He was not entirely disconnected from its other practitioners: he was at Trinity College, Cambridge, at the same time as Abraham Cowley, and he wrote a commemorative poem for Henry, Lord Hastings, in Lacrymae musarum (1649), a volume that included poems by Dryden as well as John Hall. He and Hall were both among those who composed dedicatory poems for Richard Lovelace’s Lucasta (1648). Like Cleveland, Marvell owed his reputation in the later part of his career largely to his political and satirical poems, but his posthumously published Miscellaneous Poems (1681) shows that a reader of earlier metaphysical verse who actively responded to his changing times could transform the idiom of his predecessors (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). Works cited Colin Burrow, ‘Metaphysical poets (act. c.1600–c.1690)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, Oxford University Press, Feb 2009 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/theme/95605, accessed 5 Aug 2012] Encyclopedia Britannica www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/377915/Metaphysical-poet Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_poets

Analysis of the Discrimination Against Service Animals essays

Analysis of the Discrimination Against Service Animals essays Service animals perform a wide variety of services and tasks for people with disabilities, and many disabled people would not be able to function effectively without their animals. Initially, service animals were trained to help lead their blind owners through everyday tasks, from walking to work to negotiating around their homes. Called "guide dogs," many were trained by "Seeing Eye," Inc., and those dogs were known as "seeing-eye" dogs. Today, animals, not just dogs, provide a variety of services for the disabled and elderly. Guide dogs still help the blind, and service animals also are trained to help the deaf "hear," and aid wheelchair bound individuals by leading or pulling them, or helping them with balance and movement. They can also pick up and carry items, notify others if their owner is having a seizure, and even act as companions and therapy dogs for people with severe disorders such as autism. One expert writes, "Service dogs perform tasks such as operating light switches, retrieving items, pulling wheelchairs, and opening doors. Hearing dogs assist people who are deaf or hearing impaired by alerting them to sounds such as telephone rings, crying infants, alarms, and people calling them by name" (Henderson). Service animals are not pets, they are highly trained assistants who can make the difference between a disabled person living on their own or living in a group home or other assisted-living situation. Today, they are more than dogs. A variety of animals have been trained to assist the disabled, from miniature horses to pot-bellied pigs and beyond. The use of service animals is not a new idea. One researcher notes, "The use of animals to assist their ailing human counterparts dates to the early Greeks who gave horseback rides to raise the spirits of people who were incurably ill, and documentation from the seventeenth century makes medical reference to h...

Shyness1 essays

Shyness1 essays Personality is an abstract science about a very warm, personal, concrete subject matter (Klinger,21). In my first paper I described my personality according to the first five chapters of Derlega. In this paper I am going to describe how my greatest fear, shyness, relates to the last half of class and the whole picture. Shyness may be defined experientially as discomfort or inhibition in interpersonal situations that interferes with pursuing one's interpersonal or professional goals. It is a form of excessive self-focus, a preoccupation with one's thoughts, feelings and physical reactions. Shyness reactions can occur at any or all of the following levels: cognitive, affective, physiological and behavioral, and may be triggered by a wide variety of arousal cues. Among the most typical are: authorities, one-on-one opposite sex interactions, intimacy, strangers, and having to take individuating action in a group setting (Lynne Henderson, Ph.D. Shyness Clinic, 1996). These are just a few that I fall into. To put it in other terms, shyness is a shrinking back from life that weakens the bonds of your human connection with others and us. There are many symptoms that overt shyness. Some are as follows; speech dysfluencies, sweating, dry mouth, trembling or shaking, fear of negative evaluation and loo king foolish to others, depression, anxiety and low self-esteem are just a few that I experience. Research has distinguished shyness from introversion, although they are typically related (Zimbardo, P. G. 1977/1990). Shyness: What it is, what to do about it. Introverts simply prefer solitary to social activities but do not fear social encounters as do the shy, while extroverts prefer social to solitary activities. Although the majority of shyness is introverted, shy extroverts are found in many behavioral settings. They are privately shy and publicly outgoing. They have the requisite social skills and can carry them out flawlessly i...

Managing financial resources in health and social care Essay

Managing financial resources in health and social care - Essay Example One more key principal that the company may follow is that past costs should not be taken into the consideration for the future. The company should meet its all costs related with business control within stipulated time frame. If costs of earlier period are recovered in future period then it will be a wrong step from the organization. The organization can go for activity based costing. It will help the organization to measure each and every step of different activities. In this way the company can keep firm controls on its different activities. The organization needs information related with the different financial indicators of the company. Different information is EBITDA, revenue, earning per shares, profit before tax, dividend distribution, cash inflows of the company and different acquisition costs. All these information were very important for CareTech holding to manage their financial resources. EBITDA helps the organization to measure it operating profitability. This information is very important for the company to manage their operating expenses. It helps the organization to measure its core profitability. Revenue informs the organization about the amount of money that, the company earns from its different activities. Earnings per shares talks about the profitability of the company. The company’s profit related to each outstanding share can be measured with the help this indicator. PBT helps the organization to understand all its profit before paying tax. It gives significant importance to the organization. Cash inflows related information helps the company to understand and measure different cash inflows within a fixed time period. The Company can get significant information from their acquisition related costs. It will help the organization to understand different costs related with their recent acquisitions. Dividend distribution is also a very important aspect as far as the stakeholders are

Legal skills learning portfolio Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

Legal skills learning portfolio - Essay Example during the module sessions have encompassed a wide range of methodologies, many of which have focused actively on student learning, role plays, team work and interaction to develop the essential skills needed to become a successful lawyer. In a similar fashion, I have been constantly assessed during this module through a number of evaluations, examinations, reports, and moot court sessions apart from a certain degree of oral presentations. In fact, our entire class has undergone through a strict and rigorous curriculum that has required my study group to constantly re-invent itself through peer and self assessments. I am further of the opinion that the ALS module has comprised a level of distinctiveness with focus on a number of areas like criminal law, contracts, company law, civil procedure, constitutional law, evidence and professional conduct. I have undertaken complex and elaborate case studies in each of these disciplines together with my study group and have evolved as a prospective lawyer through rigorous and dedicated analysis and application to practice moot court sessions. Based on the guidelines of McCarthy (2003, pg. 28), developing ideas and strategies to tackle cases, presenting them in mock sessions an d arguing them in a highly competitive environment have streamlined my vision to approach and analyze cases in a manner that is highly practical and thought provoking in nature. During this course, I have sensed that elaborate resources have been devoted to determining ways of teaching skills within the overall academic program. I also feel that this has been the case even with embedding these skills in students which has enabled them to improve upon incrementally by applying them to cases of increasing complexity, building the sense of independence and confidence that is highly required of a lawyer. Thus, the ALS Module can be termed as a comprehensive skill-based curriculum. The creation of groups among students to learn skills like advocacy and