PhD defence Sahar Babri

On Thursday 20 August 2015, Sahar Babri will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend her thesis "Essays on Transportation" for the PhD degree at NHH.

11.08.2015 - Ed.


The thesis contains five papers on topics related to transportation. Two of the papers deal with long-term effects of road pricing, particularly its impacts on the location decision of households and local sector firms. Modelling such effects is usually done through detailed and resource consuming models such as Land Use Transportation Interaction models. In this thesis, Babri attempts to propose a simple model that captures important characteristics of the available models. In the third paper, the interaction between the road pricing and public transit fare is studied. In the last two papers, the thesis contributes to improving the model fit for traditional doubly constrained gravity model, which is used as one of the basic functions in the first three papers.

Road pricing is a well-known transport policy, which has received great attention both from planners and from academics. When a road toll is introduced in a network, several changes are observed in people's travelling behaviour. Some changes are visible short after the implementation, such as changes in departure time, route choice and modal choice. In addition to the short-term effects, road pricing also has some long-term impacts on preferences in residential/workplace locations or car ownership. Although there are a few studies which consider the long-term effects of road pricing, these effects have attracted less attention in the literature than short-term effects.

The findings from the thesis give us some insights on long-term effects of implementing road pricing. It highlights the importance of considering such effects and show that ignoring them may lead to substantial suboptimalities and biased results. In addition, it sheds light on the importance of considering both public and private transport prices simultaneously, especially in analysis such as studying subsidy schemes for public transport, emission cost of congestion and cost-benefit analysis of capacity expansion of roads.

Time and place
The trial lecture is at 10:15am and the defence at 12:15 in Kristian Gerhard Jebsen Centre, NHH.

Trial lecture
The prescribed topic for the trial lecture is "An overview of operational land use and transport models".

Members of the evaluation committee

Chair: Professor Lars-Göran Mattsson, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Professor Svein Bråthen, Molde University College, Norway
Professor Siri P. Strandenes, NHH, Norway

Supervising committee
Chair: Professor Jan Ubøe, NHH
Professor Leif K. Sandal, NHH
Professor Kurt Jörnsten, NHH
Professor Inge Thorsen, Haugesund University College

Sahar Babri

Sahar Babri (b. 1984 in Iran) has been a PhD research Scholar at the Department of Business and Management Science, NHH. She holds a Master of Science in Project Management from NTNU and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Iran.

The trial lecture and defence will be open to the public. Copies of the thesis will be available from: bib@nhh.no


Kontakt: paraplyen@nhh.no
Redaktør: Astri Kamsvåg
Ansvarleg redaktør: Kristin Risvand Mo

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