PW 1753 Child pedestrian safety: individual and environmental correlates of interactions with vehicles at street crossings around schools and parks

With the development and promotion of driverless technology, researchers are focusing on designing varied types of external interfaces to induce trust in road users towards this new technology. In this paper, we investigated the effectiveness of a multimodal external human–machine interface (eHMI) for driverless vehicles in virtual environment, focusing on a two-way road scenario. Three phases of identifying, decelerating, and parking were taken into account in the driverless vehicles to pedestrian interaction process. Twelve eHMIs are proposed, which consist of three visual features (smile, arrow and none), three audible features (human voice, warning sound and none) and two physical features (yielding and not yielding). We conducted a study to gain a more efficient and safer eHMI for driverless vehicles when they interact with pedestrians. Based on study outcomes, in the case of yielding, the interaction efficiency and pedestrian safety in multimodal eHMI design was satisfactory compared to the single-modal system. The visual modality in the eHMI of driverless vehicles has the greatest impact on pedestrian safety. In addition, the “arrow” was more intuitive to identify than the “smile” in terms of visual modality.

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Social and environmental correlates of rat complaints in Chicago

Journal of Urban Ecology ◽

10.1093/jue/juab006 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 7 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Cecilia A Sánchez ◽

María Jazmín Rios ◽

Maureen H Murray

Keyword(s):

Population Density ◽

Social Factors ◽

Home Ownership ◽

Wealth Inequality ◽

Building Construction ◽

Anthropogenic Factors ◽

Negative Effects ◽

Environmental Correlates ◽

Growing Rat ◽

Commercial Sources

Abstract Urban rats are widely distributed pests that have negative effects on public health and property. It is crucial to understand their distribution to inform control efforts and address drivers of rat presence. Analysing public rat complaints can help assess urban rat distribution and identify factors supporting rat populations. Both social and environmental factors could promote rat complaints and must be integrated to understand rat distributions. We analysed rat complaints made between 2011 and 2017 in Chicago, a city with growing rat problems and stark wealth inequality. We examined whether rat complaints at the census tract level are associated with factors that could influence rat abundance, rats’ visibility to humans, and the likelihood of people making a complaint. Complaints were significantly positively correlated with anthropogenic factors hypothesized to promote rat abundance (restaurants, older buildings, garbage complaints, and dog waste complaints) or rat visibility (building construction/demolition activity), and factors hypothesized to increase the likelihood of complaining (human population density, more owner-occupied homes); we also found that complaints were highest in the summer. Our results suggest that conflicts between residents and rats are mainly driven by seasonal variation in rat abundance and human activity and could be mitigated with strategies such as securing food waste from residential and commercial sources. Accounting for social factors such as population density, construction and demolition activity, and home ownership versus rental can also help cities more accurately predict blocks at higher risk of rat conflicts.

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