Piet H.L. Bovy – författare

Travel Behaviour is a challenging and original volume, adding to the growing literature focusing on understanding transportation systems. The book capitalises on actual scientific and applied developments in Europe, the importance of EC policies and the resultant trend in studying differences between North American and European research.The authors present non-traditional approaches to four pertinent topics in the field of travel behaviour: mobility and travel, telecommunication and travel, traffic congestion and modelling travel behavioural responses. In contrast to many orthodox studies that propose congestion relief solutions, Travel Behaviour suggests that a certain amount of congestion is good for transportation systems.This unique volume is aimed at a wide variety of complementary disciplines from transportation professionals, to policymakers, transport economists, urban and regional planners, geographers and behavioural scientists.

This book continues the biannual series of conference proceedings, which has become a classical reference in traffic and granular research alike. It addresses new developments at the borderline between physics, engineering and computational science. Complex systems, where many simple agents, be it vehicles or particles, give rise to surprising and fascinating phenomena. Topics include highway, pedestrian and internet traffic, long range interactions, two-phase flow, nonlinear pattern formation, data acquisition and technological applications.

These proceedings are the fifth in the series Traffic and Granular Flow, and we hope they will be as useful a reference as their predecessors. Both the realistic modelling of granular media and traffic flow present important challenges at the borderline between physics and engineering, and enormous progress has been made since 1995, when this series started. Still the research on these topics is thriving, so that this book again contains many new results. Some highlights addressed at this conference were the influence of long range electric and magnetic forces and ambient fluids on granular media, new precise traffic measurements, and experiments on the complex decision making of drivers. No doubt the “hot topics” addressed in granular matter research have diverged from those in traffic since the days when the obvious analogies between traffic jams on highways and dissipative clustering in granular flow intrigued both c- munities alike. However, now just this diversity became a stimulating feature of the conference. Many of us feel that our joint interest in complex systems, where many simple agents, be it vehicles or particles, give rise to surprising and fascin- ing phenomena, is ample justification for bringing these communities together: Traffic and Granular Flow has fostered cooperation and friendship across the scientific disciplines.