ITS Monday: Edition 5, 2025

‘A house battery you can drive around’: how a handful of Australians are selling power from their cars back to the grid

We start this week with an article in The Conversation, and it’s about progress on one of iMOVE’s projects, Leading the charge in bi-directional charging. The article was co-authored by a group of academics at UTS: Scott Dwyer — Research Director, Energy Futures, Jaime Comber — Senior Research Consultant in Energy Futures, and Kriti Nagrath — Research Principal in Energy Futures. It is in essence a progress report on the project, notable as presents results and thoughts from 5 absolute trailblazers of vehicle-to-grid implementation.

We also have a piece on the progress, along with a downloadable report, at Being a V2G trailblazer: Lessons for mass market adoption.

Queensland’s 50c public transport fares hit six-month mark, with patronage up nearly 20pc

“For six months now, every trip on Queensland public transport has cost just 50 cents — whether it’s a four-hour trip from Gympie to the Gold Coast, or a five-minute bus from the Gabba into the CBD. It’s proven very popular with public transport users, to the surprise of absolutely no-one. Now it’s hit the six-month mark, this is what the data tells us about who’s benefiting, and where.”

iMOVE is currently running a project on this Queensland fare pricing. Find out more at: Implications of large-scale price reductions in public transport fares.

Here’s why some people still evade public transport fares – even when they’re 50 cents

Another story on the Queensland 50 cent public transport fares. I seems whatever the price, fare evaders gonna evade fares.

Discussion paper: towards safer and more liveable urban streets

A new policy paper from Transport Australia Society. “It examines how physical improvements to the street system can improve accessibility, safety and connectivity for everyone. It advocates for a holistic approach to street planning and design and proposes 10 key principles to guide urban street design, including reducing street speeds to safe speeds, primarily through design. It focuses on a limited number of measures that have been found to be effective in improving safety and liveability in urban areas.”

The paper, Towards safer and more livable urban streets, is downloadable from the links provided here.

The MaaS Blueprint for Regional Towns and Rural Hinterlands

A new academic paper, and another article that’s derived from an iMOVE project, in this instance MaaS blueprint design for regional towns and rural hinterlands (the final report of which is available at What should MaaS be in regional towns and rural hinterlands?

Co-authors of this paper are John Nelson, Corinne Mulley, David Hensher, Chinh Ho, Haoning Xi, and Camilla Balbontin.

The paper’s abstract:

“This Blueprint document presents a vision for how transport services in rural and regional areas in the NSW context could be better organised to meet the needs of residents and visitors. The Blueprint features a mobility framework for Rural and Regional MaaS which is multi-modal (including all modes available, including the private car) and multi-service (e.g., non-mobility services such as parcel deliveries, library services, food and medicine distribution, media streaming). The Blueprint also provides a focus on decarbonising transport and combatting social exclusion.”

Related iMOVE articles:

• MaaS (Mobility as a Service) in Australia: Info, Projects & Resources
• MaaS: What have we learned, and where to next?
  

Related iMOVE projects:

• Sydney MaaS trial: Design, implementation, lessons, the future
• Behavioural change for sustainable transport
• Mobility landscapes: Mobility as a Service customer impact trial
• Gippsland community e-Bus pilot

NSW firefighters battling more than one lithium-ion battery fire a day this month, fire commissioner fears more fatalities

“A spate of fires linked to lithium-ion batteries has prompted NSW’s top fire chief to warn it is only a matter of time until there is another fatality. According to data from Fire and Rescue NSW, there have been 13 lithium-ion battery fires reported since February 2. This includes four fires in a 12-hour window last week. There have been 25 such fires recorded so far this year.”

Related iMOVE project:

• Fire safety for EVs and micromobility: Best practice assessment

E-bike fire crisis won’t be tamed without federal support

A second story on the dangers of lithium-ion batteries, this one from the USA. “The epicenter of this problem is New York City, where the expansion of delivery services post-pandemic created a huge market for cheap, unregulated lithium batteries that could keep those e-bikes humming at all hours.”

EV battery longevity concerns unfounded, study finds

Still on batteries, but switching over to car batteries. “Pickles has released its Quarterly Automotive Report for the fourth quarter of 2024, and it details how EV batteries may be able to last longer than many critics believe.”

Related iMOVE article:

• Electric Vehicles: Info, Projects & Resources
  
• Alternative Fuels: Info, Projects & Resources
• FACTS: A Framework for an Australian Clean Transport Strategy
• The Conductor Series: The electrification of transport

Related iMOVE projects:

• EV batteries: Repair, refurbish, repurpose, recycle
• Second lives for electric vehicle batteries

Systematic assessment of push and pull initiatives in behavioural responses associated with public transport fares, service frequency, car-related tolls, distance-based road user charges, and parking charges

A new academic paper, co-authored by David Hensher, Edward Wei, and Wen Liu. The abstract:

There has been a constant flow of empirical evidence suggesting the likely modal trip impact that stand-alone policy initiatives such as public transport fares or service frequency and road pricing reforms (be it tolls or distance-based charging) have on the change in travel behaviour. While the evidence, typically converted to mean direct elasticity and cross elasticity modal estimates, is informative, there is a dearth of empirical evidence on elasticities associated with policy initiatives that combine policies such as a public transport fare or service frequency change and a car-related toll and /or distance-based charge and/or parking charges.

This paper investigates the one-way trip and arc elasticity impacts of stand-alone policy initiatives and compares the two elasticity effects when push and pull policy initiatives are at play. We find not only that there are asymmetric effects according to whether the policy involves an increase or a decrease, but that the combined policy initiatives suggest very different mean arc elasticity impacts, opening up opportunities for behavioural changes that are not obtained to the same extent from a stand-alone policy initiative. Each policy by itself generally, although not always, has a lower relative elasticity compared to when it is combined with another policy. We use the advanced Metroscan integrated transport and land use strategic model system to obtain the evidence for 2024 in the Sydney Metropolitan Area.

Related iMOVE article:

• Electric Vehicles: Info, Projects & Resources
  
• Alternative Fuels: Info, Projects & Resources
• FACTS: A Framework for an Australian Clean Transport Strategy
• The Conductor Series: The electrification of transport

Related iMOVE projects:

• EV batteries: Repair, refurbish, repurpose, recycle
• Second lives for electric vehicle batteries

Real-time vehicle relocation, personnel dispatch and trip pricing for carsharing systems under supply and demand uncertainties

One final new academic paper for the week, this co-authored by Li Mengjie, Xi Haoning, Xie Chi, Zuo-Jun Max Shen. and Hu Yifan. The abstract:

In one-way carsharing systems, striking a balance between vehicle supply and user demand across stations poses considerable operational challenges. While existing research on vehicle relocation, personnel dispatch, and trip pricing have shown effectiveness, they often struggle with the complexities of fluctuating and unpredictable demand and supply patterns in uncertain environments.

This paper introduces a real-time relocation-dispatch-pricing (RDP) problem, within an evolving time-state-extended transportation network, to optimize vehicle relocation, personnel dispatch, and trip pricing in carsharing systems considering both demand and supply uncertainties. Furthermore, recognizing the critical role of future insights in real-time decision making and strategic adaptability, we propose a novel two-stage anticipatory-decision rolling horizon (ADRH) optimization framework where the first stage solves a real-time RDP problem to make actionable decisions with future supply and demand distributions, while also incorporating anticipatory guidance from the second stage.

The proposed RDP problem under the ADRH framework is then formulated as a stochastic nonlinear programming (SNP) model. However, the state-of-the-art commercial solvers are inadequate for solving the proposed SNP model due to its solution complexity. Thus, we customize a hybrid parallel Lagrangian decomposition (HPLD) algorithm, which decomposes the RDP problem into manageable subproblems. Extensive numerical experiments using a real-world dataset demonstrate the computational efficiency of the HPLD algorithm and its ability to converge to a near-globally optimal solution.

Sensitivity analyses are conducted focusing on parameters such as horizon length, fleet size, number of dispatchers, and demand elasticity. Numerical results show that the profits under the stochastic scenario are 18 higher than those under the deterministic scenario, indicating the significance of incorporating uncertain and future information into the operational decisions of carsharing systems.