scholarly journals Pilot project purgatory? Assessing automated vehicle pilot projects in U.S. cities

Author(s):  
Devon McAslan ◽  
Farah Najar Arevalo ◽  
David A. King ◽  
Thaddeus R. Miller

AbstractPilot projects have emerged in cities globally as a way to experiment with the utilization of a suite of smart mobility and emerging transportation technologies. Automated vehicles (AVs) have become central tools for such projects as city governments and industry explore the use and impact of this emerging technology. This paper presents a large-scale assessment of AV pilot projects in U.S. cities to understand how pilot projects are being used to examine the risks and benefits of AVs, how cities integrate these potentially transformative technologies into conventional policy and planning, and how and what they are learning about this technology and its future opportunities and risks. Through interviews with planning practitioners and document analysis, we demonstrate that the approaches cities take for AVs differ significantly, and often lack coherent policy goals. Key findings from this research include: (1) a disconnect between the goals of the pilot projects and a city’s transportation goals; (2) cities generally lack a long-term vision for how AVs fit into future mobility systems and how they might help address transportation goals; (3) an overemphasis of non-transportation benefits of AV pilots projects; (4) AV pilot projects exhibit a lack of policy learning and iteration; and (5) cities are not leveraging pilot projects for public benefits. Overall, urban and transportation planners and decision makers show a clear interest to discover how AVs can be used to address transportation challenges in their communities, but our research shows that while AV pilot projects purport to do this, while having numerous outcomes, they have limited value for informing transportation policy and planning questions around AVs. We also find that AV pilot projects, as presently structured, may constrain planners’ ability to re-think transportation systems within the context of rapid technological change.

Forests ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 701 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Sallustio ◽  
Marco di Cristofaro ◽  
Maaz Hashmi ◽  
Matteo Vizzarri ◽  
Tommaso Sitzia ◽  
...  

Land use by humans strongly alters the landscape mosaic, either by reducing or increasing its heterogeneity. One of the most recent and widespread land use changes in Europe has been the spontaneous reforestation of marginal agricultural lands. These primarily affected small landscape patches, such as trees outside forests (TOF) and small open areas (SOA), often represent the most diversifying features of landscape’ structures. Nevertheless, only small-scale studies can be found in the literature and thus it remains a relatively unexplored issue. Integrating inventory and cartographic approaches, this work assesses changes in abundance, coverage, and average size of small patches in Italy between 1990 and 2013. Main results showed an overall increase in number and coverage of small patches during the reference period. The average patch size remains unaltered for TOF but decreases significantly for SOA, due to trees encroachment and canopy cover increasing in forests. Our findings confirm the important changes in Mediterranean land mosaics and contribute to a better understanding of current conditions and recent trends regarding TOF and SOA. The integrated approach has proven to be helpful for the large-scale assessment of small patches dynamics, representing a viable monitoring tool to encourage the inclusion of small patches in landscape policy and planning.


AI Magazine ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 94-102
Author(s):  
Mikael Berndtsson ◽  
AnnMarie Ericsson ◽  
Thomas Svahn

Conducting pilot projects are a common approach among organizations to test and evaluate new technology. A pilot project is often conducted to remove uncertainties from a large-scale project and should be limited in time and scope. Nowadays, several organizations are testing and evaluating artificial intelligence techniques and more advanced forms of analytics via pilot projects. Unfortunately, many organizations are experiencing problems in scaling-up the findings from pilot projects to the rest of the organization. Hence, results from pilot projects become siloed with limited business value. In this article, we present an overview of barriers for conducting and scaling-up data-driven pilot projects. Lack of senior management support is a frequently mentioned top barrier in the literature. In response to this, we present our recommendations on what type of activities can be performed, to increase the chances of getting a positive response from senior management regarding scaling-up the usage of artificial intelligence and advanced analytics within an organization.


2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-57
Author(s):  
Alex Karner

The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) replaced the state's Division of Highways on 1 July 1973. Consistent with the creation of other state departments of transportation throughout the U.S.A. at the time, the enabling legislation envisioned a multimodal agency that would shift transportation policy and planning away from its highway emphasis. Competing conceptions of multimodalism and regional transportation governance advanced by key actors heavily influenced the policies and plans they proposed. Eventually, public and local government opposition to the implementation of multimodal transportation policies diminished the state's role while elevating the responsibilities of voluntary regional planning agencies. California's contemporary transportation policy goals remain similar to those that prevailed when Caltrans was created – reducing automobile dependency and promoting compact urban forms – but its transportation institutions were designed precisely to oppose their achievement. Supportive public coalitions now offer the best hope for realizing the state's multimodal dreams.


2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura S. Hamilton ◽  
Stephen P. Klein ◽  
William Lorie

Author(s):  
Christina Schindler ◽  
Hannah Baumann ◽  
Andreas Blum ◽  
Dietrich Böse ◽  
Hans-Peter Buchstaller ◽  
...  

Here we present an evaluation of the binding affinity prediction accuracy of the free energy calculation method FEP+ on internal active drug discovery projects and on a large new public benchmark set.<br>


2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-28
Author(s):  
Supriyono Supriyono

This study aims at describing pilot projects to increase teachers’ professionalism in English proficiency.  Pilot project was conducted by Yayasan Pendidikan Jayawijaya, Papua regarding efforts to increase school quality management from national into international qualification.  Reflective analysis using qualitative approach was used for analysis.  This study revealed that strategies to conduct the policy asserted psychological perspectives focusing and maintaining motivation, expectation and andragogy implementation.  Teachers’ problems were approached through constructive relation. The pilot project that initially was administered for English teachers, has been implemented successfully for all teachers at the Yayasan.


Author(s):  
Carl Dalhammar ◽  
Emelie Wihlborg ◽  
Leonidas Milios ◽  
Jessika Luth Richter ◽  
Sahra Svensson-Höglund ◽  
...  

AbstractExtended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes have proliferated across Europe and other parts of the world in recent years and have contributed to increasing material and energy recovery from waste streams. Currently, EPR schemes do not provide sufficient incentives for moving towards the higher levels of the waste hierarchy, e.g. by reducing the amounts of waste through incentivising the design of products with longer lifespans and by enhancing reuse activities through easier collection and repair of end-of-life products. Nevertheless, several municipalities and regional actors around Europe are increasingly promoting reuse activities through a variety of initiatives. Furthermore, even in the absence of legal drivers, many producer responsibility organisations (PROs), who execute their members’ responsibilities in EPR schemes, are considering promoting reuse and have initiated a number of pilot projects. A product group that has been identified as having high commercial potential for reuse is white goods, but the development of large-scale reuse of white goods seems unlikely unless a series of legal and organisational barriers are effectively addressed. Through an empirical investigation with relevant stakeholders, based on interviews, and the analysis of two case studies of PROs that developed criteria for allowing reusers to access their end-of-life white goods, this contribution presents insights on drivers and barriers for the repair and reuse of white goods in EPR schemes and discusses potential interventions that could facilitate the upscale of reuse activities. Concluding, although the reuse potential for white goods is high, the analysis highlights the currently insufficient policy landscape for incentivising reuse and the need for additional interventions to make reuse feasible as a mainstream enterprise.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 544
Author(s):  
Guohao Zhang ◽  
Bing Xu ◽  
Hoi-Fung Ng ◽  
Li-Ta Hsu

Accurate localization of road agents (GNSS receivers) is the basis of intelligent transportation systems, which is still difficult to achieve for GNSS positioning in urban areas due to the signal interferences from buildings. Various collaborative positioning techniques were recently developed to improve the positioning performance by the aid from neighboring agents. However, it is still challenging to study their performances comprehensively. The GNSS measurement error behavior is complicated in urban areas and unable to be represented by naive models. On the other hand, real experiments requiring numbers of devices are difficult to conduct, especially for a large-scale test. Therefore, a GNSS realistic urban measurement simulator is developed to provide measurements for collaborative positioning studies. The proposed simulator employs a ray-tracing technique searching for all possible interferences in the urban area. Then, it categorizes them into direct, reflected, diffracted, and multipath signal to simulate the pseudorange, C/N0, and Doppler shift measurements correspondingly. The performance of the proposed simulator is validated through real experimental comparisons with different scenarios based on commercial-grade receivers. The proposed simulator is also applied with different positioning algorithms, which verifies it is sophisticated enough for the collaborative positioning studies in the urban area.


Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 295
Author(s):  
Yuan Gao ◽  
Anyu Zhang ◽  
Yaojie Yue ◽  
Jing’ai Wang ◽  
Peng Su

Suitable land is an important prerequisite for crop cultivation and, given the prospect of climate change, it is essential to assess such suitability to minimize crop production risks and to ensure food security. Although a variety of methods to assess the suitability are available, a comprehensive, objective, and large-scale screening of environmental variables that influence the results—and therefore their accuracy—of these methods has rarely been explored. An approach to the selection of such variables is proposed and the criteria established for large-scale assessment of land, based on big data, for its suitability to maize (Zea mays L.) cultivation as a case study. The predicted suitability matched the past distribution of maize with an overall accuracy of 79% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.72. The land suitability for maize is likely to decrease markedly at low latitudes and even at mid latitudes. The total area suitable for maize globally and in most major maize-producing countries will decrease, the decrease being particularly steep in those regions optimally suited for maize at present. Compared with earlier research, the method proposed in the present paper is simple yet objective, comprehensive, and reliable for large-scale assessment. The findings of the study highlight the necessity of adopting relevant strategies to cope with the adverse impacts of climate change.


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