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© 2018 Elsevier Ltd Given that the majority of the world's population lives in urban places, the quality of the urban environment has emerged as an issue of fundamental concern for citizens, academic researchers, and policy makers. This study explores residents' preferences and valuation of living in proximity to urban amenities in the built environment. The study demonstrates that environmental evaluation techniques can be used as a tool to help relevant decision makers (e.g., urban managers, developers, city officials, planners, realtors and researchers) with policy making, effective decision making and efficient city management procedures. The models indicate how household preference for proximity to urban amenities change as a function of the cost of provision as exemplified by a change (increase or decrease) in annual property tax. The study reports the results for two different models: one which assumes preference homogeneity and the other preference heterogeneity in the sampled population. The results show that older residents and higher educated people are more likely to be willing to pay a higher property tax for having proximity to parks. Middle and low income residents prefer close proximity to bus stops and local shopping centres. This research suggests that a win-win strategy for residents and local government lies in increasing and maintaining residents' accessibility to urban amenities, and in increasing an urban area's sustainability.

The world is experiencing an unprecedented time due to the ongoing coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak. People around the world are experiencing life-altering challenges while governments are imposing restrictions to control the spread of the virus which have impacted on several aspects of individual lives. This study aims to evaluate different policies affecting employment, job flexibility, shopping behaviour, exercising, traveling, and socialising. Using a sample of 1,006 Australians, this study explores people's preferences and perceptions.This study shows that during the COVID-19 pandemic on average Australians require an annual compensation of $22,612 if they become unemployed, $8,653 if they are only limited to travel within their suburb and $4,897 if they work in the healthcare system. On the other hand, they are willing to pay $14,040 to remain employed and work from the office, $13,469 to be employed and work from home and $5,318 to have no travel restrictions.

Transportation scientists employ modeling and simulation techniques to capture the complexities of transportation systems and develop and assess solutions to alleviate existing and future transportation-related problems. This book introduces transportation engineering students and junior engineers to the concept of transportation network modeling, network coding, model calibration and validation, and model evaluation. Travel demand models are sensitive to demographic changes and can explain and forecast how a new transportation supply system leads to a new transportation demand pattern. This book also describes how demand models evolved from trip-based to the newer generation of activity-based and agent-based to overcome some of the shortcomings of the four-step approach and improve models' prediction power.

© 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Coastal environments are increasingly under threat from multiple stressors and pressure from human activities across the land-sea interface. Managing these pressures from people requires, more than ever, understanding what is at stake in terms of the benefits and values associated with coastal waters. This article presents the results of a choice experiment which was designed to elicit society's willingness to pay in the context of economic and environmental trade-offs people to improve coastal water quality. The study site is a coastal Australian city, Adelaide, South Australia. The city discharges a large proportion of its stormwater and treated wastewater to the coastal waters of Gulf St Vincent. Willingness to pay for a package of improvements to urban water management is considerable. A mix of projects that restores 25 days per year of water clarity, seagrass area from 60% to 70% of the original area and five reef areas is worth $AUS67.1. M to households in the Adelaide metropolitan area. The results can inform public policy discussions including the cost-benefit analysis of different water management strategies including investments in urban infrastructure.