scholarly journals Socioeconomic patterning of food and drink advertising at public transport stops in Edinburgh, UK

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Tony Robertson ◽  
Ruth Jepson ◽  
Kyle Lambe ◽  
Jonathan R Olsen ◽  
Lukar E Thornton

Abstract Objective: Outdoor advertisements for food and drink products form a large part of the food environment and they disproportionately promote unhealthy products. However, less is known about the social patterning of such advertisements. The main aim of this study was to explore the socioeconomic patterning of food and drink advertising at bus stops in Scotland’s capital city, Edinburgh. Design: Bus stop advertisements were audited to identify food/drink adverts and classify them by food/drink category (i.e. ‘advert category’). This data was then linked to area-based deprivation and proximity measures. Neighbourhood deprivation was measured using the bus stop x/y co-ordinates, which were converted to postcodes to identify the matching 2012 deprivation level via the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD). Distance to schools and leisure centres were also collected using location data. Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) and linear regression analyses were used to assess associations between the promotion of advert categories and deprivation and proximity to schools/leisure centres, respectively. Setting: Edinburgh city, United Kingdom Results: 561 food/drink advertisements were identified across 349 bus stops, with eight advertisement categories noted and included in the final analysis, including alcohol, fast food outlets and confectionary. The majority of adverts were for ‘unhealthy’ food and drink categories, however there was no evidence for any socioeconomic patterning of these advertisements. There was no evidence of a relationship between advertisements and proximity to schools and leisure centres. Conclusions: While there is no evidence for food and drink advertising being patterned by neighbourhood deprivation, the scale of unhealthy advertising is an area for policy evaluations and interventions on the control of such outdoor advertising.

Author(s):  
Chao Wang ◽  
Weijie Chen ◽  
Yueru Xu ◽  
Zhirui Ye

For bus service quality and line capacity, one critical influencing factor is bus stop capacity. This paper proposes a bus capacity estimation method incorporating diffusion approximation and queuing theory for individual bus stops. A concurrent queuing system between public transportation vehicles and passengers can be used to describe the scenario of a bus stop. For most of the queuing systems, the explicit distributions of basic characteristics (e.g., waiting time, queue length, and busy period) are difficult to obtain. Therefore, the diffusion approximation method was introduced to deal with this theoretical gap in this study. In this method, a continuous diffusion process was applied to estimate the discrete queuing process. The proposed model was validated using relevant data from seven bus stops. As a comparison, two common methods— Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) formula and M/M/S queuing model (i.e., Poisson arrivals, exponential distribution for bus service time, and S number of berths)—were used to estimate the capacity of the bus stop. The mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of the diffusion approximation method is 7.12%, while the MAPEs of the HCM method and M/M/S queuing model are 16.53% and 10.23%, respectively. Therefore, the proposed model is more accurate and reliable than the others. In addition, the influences of traffic intensity, bus arrival rate, coefficient of variation of bus arrival headway, service time, coefficient of variation of service time, and the number of bus berths on the capacity of bus stops are explored by sensitivity analyses.


Nutrients ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 1192
Author(s):  
Donna Huang ◽  
Amanda Brien ◽  
Lima Omari ◽  
Angela Culpin ◽  
Melody Smith ◽  
...  

Children rarely understand the full extent of the persuasive purpose of advertising on their eating behaviours. Addressing the obesogenic environments in which children live, through a quantification of outdoor advertising, is essential in informing policy changes and enforcing stricter regulations. This research explores the proportion of bus stop advertisements promoting non-core food and beverages within walking distance (500 m) from schools in Auckland, New Zealand while using Google Street View. Information was collected on: school type, decile, address, Walk Score®, and Transit Score for all 573 schools in the Auckland region. Ground-truthing was conducted on 10% of schools and showed an alignment of 87.8%. The majority of advertisements on bus shelters were for non-food items or services (n = 541, 64.3%). Of the advertisements that were for food and/or beverages, the majority were for non-core foods (n = 108, 50.2%). There was no statistically significant difference between the variables core and non-core food and beverages and School decile (tertiles), Walk Score (quintiles), and Transit Score (quintiles). 12.8% of all bus stop advertisements in this study promoted non-core dietary options; highlighting an opportunity for implementing stricter regulations and policies preventing advertising unhealthy food and drink to children in New Zealand.


2012 ◽  
Vol 253-255 ◽  
pp. 1776-1781
Author(s):  
Wen Hua Jiang ◽  
Xian Xiang Wang ◽  
Hang Fei Lin

Starting from several aspects of site location, site size and site layout, this document studies the urban bus stop systematically, proposes the setting principles of urban bus stop. Take Yiwu bus stops for example, which focus on the analysis of the reasonable setting of the sites, and has provided guidance for the layout of urban bus stop.


2016 ◽  
pp. 1660-1676 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Galdi ◽  
Paporn Thebpanya

In the current system, school bus stops in Howard County, Maryland are manually placed along the school bus routes based on safety, cost-efficiency, and many other variables. With such liberal placement, bus stops are sometimes placed unnecessarily. This issue is prevalent in many school districts and often results in needlessly close bus stop proximity. In this study, the authors implemented a GIS-based heuristic to assist school officials in optimizing their districts bus stop placement. They also estimated the proportion of county-wide bus stops that could be eliminated by this approach. Following the constraints determined by State and local guidelines, the ArcGIS Network Analyst Extension was used to identify unnecessary bus stops across the study area. The initial output was re-evaluated by school officials in order to determine if those bus stops would be eliminated. The results indicate that approximately 30% of the existing bus stops were marked as “candidates for elimination” by the GIS process. After a review of these candidates, it was determined that at least 15% of the total school bus stops could be eliminated. Statistical estimates lent credence to the benefit of a re-evaluation of these bus stops. The method developed in this study can easily be replicated. Hence, it may inspire other school systems to exercise the same approach. Additionally, the results provide a gateway for future studies in examining more efficient school bus routes with less travel time, as well as investigating how much the carbon footprint of school bus fleets can be reduced.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peixin Dong ◽  
Dongyuan Li ◽  
Jianping Xing ◽  
Haohui Duan ◽  
Yong Wu

Aiming at the problems of poor time performance and accuracy in bus stops network optimization, this paper proposes an algorithm based on complex network and graph theory and Beidou Vehicle Location to measure the importance of bus stops. This method narrows the scope of points and edges to be optimized and is applied to the Jinan bus stop network. In this method, the bus driving efficiency, which can objectively reflect actual road conditions, is taken as the weight of the connecting edges in the network, and the network is optimized through the network efficiency. The experimental results show that, compared with the original network, the optimized network time performance is good and the optimized network bus driving efficiency is improved.


Complexity ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vee-Liem Saw ◽  
Luca Vismara ◽  
Lock Yue Chew

We study how N intelligent buses serving a loop of M bus stops learn a no-boarding strategy and a holding strategy by reinforcement learning. The no-boarding and holding strategies emerge from the actions of stay or leave when a bus is at a bus stop and everyone who wishes to alight has done so. A reward that encourages the buses to strive towards a staggered phase difference amongst them whilst picking up passengers allows the reinforcement learning process to converge to an optimal Q-table within a reasonable amount of simulation time. It is remarkable that this emergent behaviour of intelligent buses turns out to minimise the average waiting time of commuters, in various setups where buses move with the same speed or different speeds, during busy as well as lull periods. Cooperative actions are also observed, e.g., the buses learn to unbunch.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 803 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Corazza ◽  
Nicola Favaretto

Walking and transit are the backbone of sustainable mobility. Bus stops not only represent the connection between the two, but are also central in dictating the attractiveness of the latter. Accessibility of bus stops becomes, then, pivotal in increasing both attractiveness and sustainability of public transport. The paper describes a multi-step methodology to evaluate bus stops’ accessibility starting from a cluster of seven indicators describing objective and subjective features influencing passengers’ choice toward a given bus stop. The indicators are weighed by a questionnaire submitted to experts. Finally, a multicriteria analysis is developed to obtain a final score describing univocally the accessibility of each stop. Outcomes are mapped and a case study in Rome is reported as an example, with 231 bus and tram stops assessed accordingly. Results shows the relevance of the urban network and environment in evaluating the accessibility and in promoting more sustainable mobility patterns. Research innovation relies on the possibility to merge data from different fields into a specific GIS map and easily highlight for each bus stop the relationships between built environment, passengers’ comfort, and accessibility, with the concluding goal to provide advanced knowledge for further applications.


Author(s):  
Saurav Barua

Purpose of Study: The purpose of this study is to investigate the efficiency of bus bay compare to the curbside bus stop in a midblock road segment of Dhaka city. Methodology: Vehicle composition and traffic volume were counted on-peak hours for the midblock of Azimpur road near the existing bus stop. Simulation models were developed in VISSIM, where Model 1 represented the existing road scenario with curbside bus stop, and Model 2 represented the same road segment with a bus bay. Main findings: The simulation result showed that Model 2 outperformed Model 1 due to the presence of bus bay. Comparing Model 1, travel time and delay reduced by varying 1.80% to 12.5% and 6.25% to 100% respectively in Model 2 during the simulation. Similarly, average speed increased by 1.39% and density decreased by 61.29% in model 2. Application of this study: Curbside bus stops result in abrupt halt, disrupt traffic flow, and queuing of the small-sized vehicle behind buses. These bus stops caused traffic congestion and delays in urban roads which can be alleviated by alternatives, such as, bus bay. The novelty of this study: The bus bay is a good alternative to the curbside bus stop, which can improve existing traffic conditions in urban roads.


2007 ◽  
Vol 18 (12) ◽  
pp. 1925-1938 ◽  
Author(s):  
YAO-MING YUAN ◽  
RUI JIANG ◽  
QING-SONG WU ◽  
RUILI WANG

In this paper, a two-lane traffic system consisting of a mixture of buses and cars is studied. The buses stop at each bus stop to pick up passengers and are not allowed to change lane. The cars may change lane when hindered by preceding vehicles. Our simulations show that with a fixed number of buses, four states of the traffic system are identified. The spatial-temporal plots of the four traffic states, and the trajectories of buses at different densities are presented. A gradual transition instead of sharp phase transition from bunching state to homogeneous state of the buses is found. Next, we study the system behavior at different number of bus stops, and an optimal number of stops is suggested. Finally, the influence of bus stops on the fundamental diagram is studied.


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