Bus travel time analysis is essential for transit operation planning. Then, this topic obtained large attention in transport engineering literature and several methods have been proposed for investigating its variability. Nowadays, the availability of large data quantities through automated monitoring allows more in-depth this phenomenon to be pointed out with new experimental evidence. The paper presents the results of some analyses carried out using automatic vehicle location (AVL) data of bus lines and automated vehicle counter (AVC) data on some corridors in the urban area of Rome where the bus services are mixed with other traffic and travel times are subject to high degrees of variability. The results show the effect of temporal dimension and similarity between travel time and traffic temporal patterns, and could open the road for the improvement of the short-term forecasting methods, too.

This paper reviews the ex-post assessment of city logistics measures implemented in some European cities and, in a “what if” framework, proposes an analysis of tested environmental effects which may be useful in defining city logistics scenarios to be evaluated ex ante by simulation models. The analysis is performed in relation to the goals of environmental sustainability to pursue and the main characteristics of the cities in question (i.e., population and density). The paper aims to provide a tool that could be used in an ex-ante assessment methodology to identify a priori which measures (or set of measures) could best work in a specific city with respect to the environmental sustainability goals to pursue. Future scenarios can, thus, be readily defined and subsequently assessed by simulation tools in order to verify whether they meet the planned objectives. Although all measures can produce considerable environmental effects, the study shows that the choice of their implementation should be driven by the type of pollutant to detect.