Khoirunurrofik (p), Calista Endrina Dewi, Annisa Marwah Zulkarnain

Carlos Raul Leon Gomez

This study explores public opinion observable on news sites and Twitter regarding the development of the Trans-Sumatra Toll Road (JTTS) and identifies the factors influencing public opinion on Twitter concerning the JTTS. Applying a lexicon-based approach to calculate sentiment scores and multinomial logit estimation to examine the determinant factors, we found that news and tweets about the development of the JTTS contained more positive opinions. There was no specific relationship between JTTS segment completion and the public opinion visible on news sites and Twitter. Nonetheless, the association changed and was noticeable after controlling for socioeconomic characteristics toward the sentiment scores on Twitter. Positive sentiment was higher in regions with more cars, working-aged people, and educated people, thus indicating the group set to benefit more from the new toll road. The development status of a JTTS segment, in terms of whether it was fully operational, considerably influenced public opinion. The study recommends that the government is sensitive toward how different community strata and regions have different sentiments concerning the development of the new major infrastructure.

Momoko Enomoto, Kuniaki Sasaki (p)

Khoirunurrofik

In Japan, the society is rapidly aging, and the population in local area is decreasing. Every year, older drivers made fatal traffic accidents successively in Japan. After these miserable accidents, the number of the surrendering their driver's license were increased in mainly urban area. On the other hands, even those who have the anxiety about driving are yet unable to surrender their driver's license if they are in the poor public transport environment and no support from the others.
Uenohara city in Japan is about 30,000 population and located in the west of Tokyo. The city is covered by mountain and citizens live in the limited area along the river. This city has begun the supportive policy for senior drivers to surrender their driver's license. To make those policies more effective, we started the study on the attitudinal changing process of those who surrendered driver's license. The process of this study is below.
1) questionnaire survey on the attitude and behavior before and after surrendering of drivers' license. This survey was conducted to those who use the support policy by the city. The number of respondents is sixteen.
2) Supplementary interview survey to the several respondents of the questionnaire survey. This was conducted to understand the process to the decision of driver's license surrender. We selected four respondents as the interviewee.
3) Through the questionnaire survey and the interviews, we construct an attitude-behavior model of surrendering the driver's license. Our process model has four constructs. Those are attitude, personal norm, perceived behavioral control, moral obligation and meta-cognition.
4) Based on the process model, we conduct a questionnaire survey on the attitude and intention of the drivers who did not surrender their license. This survey randomly included two different stories in the questionnaire. One is about the traffic accident by the senior drivers and another is the physical change by aging. We can compare the effect of these contents on their response. We compared the data and the result shows that, there is no significant difference between them, but these stories are only positively effective in encouraging to think of surrendering driver's license only those who have thought about it. We assumed that these stories will encourage thinking of surrendering driving licenses, but the reality is that they do not.

Carlos Raul Leon Gomez (p), Daniel Albalate

Kuniaki Sasaki

Spain has the largest High-Speed Rail (HSR) network in Europe, and in per capita terms, the largest in the World. The deployment of such a network was aimed to increase social cohesion across mainland Spain through enhancing access to their province’s capitals. Thousands of millions of euros have been invested so far, however, for this policy to work, there should be an actual inter-modal substitution from more polluting modes of transportation (e.g. cars) to the HSR. This paper sheds light on this relation by analyzing the impact of HSR on motorway transport. We analyzed this relationship in a quasi-experimental setting using information from the whole HSR network in Spain, and with annual information that covers the period 1988-2019 (i.e. few years before the opening of the first HSR line in 1992/3). We used a generalized difference in difference approach to assessing the impact of the openings of new lines in the motorway's traffic. The analysis is strengthened by following the new literature in econometrics techniques that correct potential biases induced by the different timing in the treatment (e.g. Callaway, B. and Sant’Anna, P., 2021), that is, the different timing in which new HSR lines open. Although with few exceptions, on average, the HSR has not induced a shift from cars to trains, which makes us wonder if the high cost in deploying new HSR lines in the near future is justified by the results.