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Firms are key drivers of urban growth along with households, yet data on businesses and commercial vehicle movements can be difficult to obtain. An understanding of firm behavior over time is critical in anticipating urban futures and addressing transportation, land use, and other concerns. Firm birth and death, migration, and location choice are defining events in a firm's life cycle, and a study of firm evolution requires estimating and applying models for each. Such an exercise is hindered primarily by a lack of quality microdata for businesses. A basic framework is proposed for modeling firm demographics by using a micro-simulation approach. Year 2005 employment point data for the Austin, Texas, region and 7 years of aggregate data from the Statistics of U.S. Businesses have been used to simulate firm entry, exit, and evolution over time and space. A Markov process is used to anticipate firm growth and contraction, along with logit and Poisson models for firm location choice. Austin's commercial vehicle survey data are used to estimate commercial trip generation and distribution models, and applications of these are tied to forecasts of firm counts by location over time. Simulation results for both low- and high-growth scenarios suggest an increasing movement of firms toward central zones.

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The Rapid increase in urban population has put extraordinary pressure on transport infrastructure. Public transport frameworks in small and medium-sized cities in developing countries include of IPT modes. However, these midsized cities in developing countries face congestion problems and have severe environmental pollution. The paper focuses on the assessment of willingness to pay for improvement in service quality of IPT mode of transportation in urban India. A Stated Choice (SC) survey instrument was designed and data was collected from IPT users to collect respondent’s socio-economic characteristics and their attributes for the stated hypothetical scenarios. Respondents were approached randomly and face-to-face interviews were carried out. The present study aimed at finding the willingness to pay for different attributes of an IPT mode to assess the relative importance of these attributes. The multinomial logit model was developed using the econometric software NLOGIT 4.0. The results obtained from the analysis suggest that the commuters in the city perceive safety as the most important attribute of an IPT mode followed by comfort and waiting time. The findings of the study shall be useful for policy makers and operators in urban planning and improvement of the transportation systems of mid-sized cities of developing countries and any new mode incorporating high comfort and safety shall be preferred. Doi: 10.28991/cej-2021-03091696 Full Text: PDF