scholarly journals Bicycling crashes on streetcar (tram) or train tracks: mixed methods to identify prevention measures

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kay Teschke ◽  
Jessica Dennis ◽  
Conor C. O. Reynolds ◽  
Meghan Winters ◽  
M. Anne Harris
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Prevention Measures ◽  
The Road ◽  
Rail Systems ◽  
Route Design ◽  
Individual Knowledge ◽  
Engineering Information ◽  
Train Tracks ◽  
Width Measurements

Background Streetcar or train tracks in urban areas are difficult for bicyclists to negotiate and are a cause of crashes and injuries. This study used mixed methods to identify measures to prevent such crashes, by examining track-related crashes that resulted in injuries to cyclists, and obtaining information from the local transit agency and bike shops. Methods We compared personal, trip, and route infrastructure characteristics of 87 crashes directly involving streetcar or train tracks to 189 crashes in other circumstances in Toronto, Canada. We complemented this with engineering information about the rail systems, interviews of personnel at seven bike shops about advice they provide to customers, and width measurements of tires on commonly sold bikes. Results In our study, 32 % of injured cyclists had crashes that directly involved tracks. The vast majority resulted from the bike tire being caught in the rail flangeway (gap in the road surface alongside rails), often when cyclists made unplanned maneuvers to avoid a collision. Track crashes were more common on major city streets with parked cars and no bike infrastructure, with left turns at intersections, with hybrid, racing and city bikes, among less experienced and less frequent bicyclists, and among women. Commonly sold bikes typically had tire widths narrower than the smallest track flangeways. There were no track crashes in route sections where streetcars and trains had dedicated rights of way. Conclusions Given our results, prevention efforts might be directed at individual knowledge, bicycle tires, or route design, but their potential for success is likely to differ. Although it may be possible to reach a broader audience with continued advice about how to avoid track crashes, the persistence and frequency of these crashes and their unpredictable circumstances indicates that other solutions are needed. Using tires wider than streetcar or train flangeways could prevent some crashes, though there are other considerations that lead many cyclists to have narrower tires. To prevent the majority of track-involved injuries, route design measures including dedicated rail rights of way, cycle tracks (physically separated bike lanes), and protected intersections would be the best strategy.

scholarly journals Bicycling crashes on streetcar (tram) or train tracks: mixed methods to identify prevention measures

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kay Teschke ◽  
Jessica Dennis ◽  
Conor C. O. Reynolds ◽  
Meghan Winters ◽  
M. Anne Harris
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Prevention Measures ◽  
The Road ◽  
Rail Systems ◽  
Route Design ◽  
Individual Knowledge ◽  
Engineering Information ◽  
Train Tracks ◽  
Width Measurements

Background Streetcar or train tracks in urban areas are difficult for bicyclists to negotiate and are a cause of crashes and injuries. This study used mixed methods to identify measures to prevent such crashes, by examining track-related crashes that resulted in injuries to cyclists, and obtaining information from the local transit agency and bike shops. Methods We compared personal, trip, and route infrastructure characteristics of 87 crashes directly involving streetcar or train tracks to 189 crashes in other circumstances in Toronto, Canada. We complemented this with engineering information about the rail systems, interviews of personnel at seven bike shops about advice they provide to customers, and width measurements of tires on commonly sold bikes. Results In our study, 32 % of injured cyclists had crashes that directly involved tracks. The vast majority resulted from the bike tire being caught in the rail flangeway (gap in the road surface alongside rails), often when cyclists made unplanned maneuvers to avoid a collision. Track crashes were more common on major city streets with parked cars and no bike infrastructure, with left turns at intersections, with hybrid, racing and city bikes, among less experienced and less frequent bicyclists, and among women. Commonly sold bikes typically had tire widths narrower than the smallest track flangeways. There were no track crashes in route sections where streetcars and trains had dedicated rights of way. Conclusions Given our results, prevention efforts might be directed at individual knowledge, bicycle tires, or route design, but their potential for success is likely to differ. Although it may be possible to reach a broader audience with continued advice about how to avoid track crashes, the persistence and frequency of these crashes and their unpredictable circumstances indicates that other solutions are needed. Using tires wider than streetcar or train flangeways could prevent some crashes, though there are other considerations that lead many cyclists to have narrower tires. To prevent the majority of track-involved injuries, route design measures including dedicated rail rights of way, cycle tracks (physically separated bike lanes), and protected intersections would be the best strategy.

scholarly journals Bicycling crashes on streetcar (tram) or train tracks: mixed methods to identify prevention measures

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kay Teschke ◽  
Jessica Dennis ◽  
Conor C. O. Reynolds ◽  
Meghan Winters ◽  
M. Anne Harris
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Prevention Measures ◽  
Train Tracks

Safety at Curves and Road Geometry Standards in Some European Countries

1996 ◽  
Vol 1523 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thierry Brenac
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
National Standards ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Design Standards ◽  
The Road ◽  
Horizontal Curves ◽  
Road Design ◽  
Road Geometry ◽  
Design Speed ◽  
Curve Geometry

This paper deals with safety at horizontal curves on two-lane roads outside urban areas and the way the road design standards of different European countries account for this safety aspect. After a review of some research results, the main aspects of curve geometry and the curve's place in the horizontal alignment are analyzed. The main conclusions are that the traditional design speed approach is insufficient and that formal complementary rules in road design standards, especially to improve compatibility between successive elements of the alignment, must be introduced. If such complementary rules already exist in some national standards, they are neither frequent nor homogeneous throughout the different countries, and it seems that they are not based on sufficiently developed knowledge.

scholarly journals RCVC: RSU-Aided Cluster-Based Vehicular Clouds Architecture for Urban Areas

Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 193
Author(s):  
Mohamed Ben bezziane ◽  
Ahmed Korichi ◽  
Chaker Abdelaziz Kerrache ◽  
Mohamed el Amine Fekair
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
High Speed ◽  
Service Discovery ◽  
Cluster Head ◽  
Experimental Comparison ◽  
The Road ◽  
Road Side Unit ◽  
End To End Delay ◽  
End To End ◽  
On The Road

As a promising topic of research, Vehicular Cloud (VC) incorporates cloud computing and ad-hoc vehicular network (VANET). In VC, supplier vehicles provide their services to consumer vehicles in real-time. These services have a significant impact on the applications of internet access, storage and data. Due to the high-speed mobility of vehicles, users in consumer vehicles need a mechanism to discover services in their vicinity. Besides this, quality of service varies from one supplier vehicle to another; thus, consumer vehicles attempt to pick out the most appropriate services. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol named RSU-aided Cluster-based Vehicular Clouds protocol (RCVC), which constructs the VC using the Road Side Unit (RSU) directory and Cluster Head (CH) directory to make the resources of supplier vehicles more visible. While clusters of vehicles that move on the same road form a mobile cloud, the remaining vehicles form a different cloud on the road side unit. Furthermore, the consumption operation is achieved via the service selection method, which is managed by the CHs and RSUs based on a mathematical model to select the best services. Simulation results prove the effectiveness of our protocol in terms of service discovery and end-to-end delay, where we achieved service discovery and end-to-end delay of 3 × 10−3 s and 13 × 10−2 s, respectively. Moreover, we carried out an experimental comparison, revealing that the proposed method outperformed several states of the art protocols.

scholarly journals Zonation of Landslide Susceptibility in Ruijin, Jiangxi, China

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (11) ◽  
pp. 5906
Author(s):  
Xiaoting Zhou ◽  
Weicheng Wu ◽  
Ziyu Lin ◽  
Guiliang Zhang ◽  
Renxiang Chen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Factors ◽  
Landslide Susceptibility ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Support Vector ◽  
Susceptibility Map ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Learning Approaches ◽  
Prevention Measures ◽  
Landslide Occurrence ◽  
Better Than

Landslides are one of the major geohazards threatening human society. The objective of this study was to conduct a landslide hazard susceptibility assessment for Ruijin, Jiangxi, China, and to provide technical support to the local government for implementing disaster reduction and prevention measures. Machine learning approaches, e.g., random forests (RFs) and support vector machines (SVMs) were employed and multiple geo-environmental factors such as land cover, NDVI, landform, rainfall, lithology, and proximity to faults, roads, and rivers, etc., were utilized to achieve our purposes. For categorical factors, three processing approaches were proposed: simple numerical labeling (SNL), weight assignment (WA)-based and frequency ratio (FR)-based. Then 19 geo-environmental factors were respectively converted into raster to constitute three 19-band datasets, i.e., DS1, DS2, and DS3 from three different processes. Then, 155 observed landslides that occurred in the past decades were vectorized, among which 70% were randomly selected to compose a training set (TS1) and the remaining 30% to form a validation set (VS1). A number of non-landslide (no-risk) samples distributed in the whole study area were identified in low slope (<1–3°) zones such as urban areas and croplands, and also added to the TS1 and VS1 in the same ratio. For comparison, we used the FR approach to identify the no-risk samples in both flat and non-flat areas, and merged them into the field-observed landslides to constitute another pair of training and validation sets (TS2 and VS2) using the same ratio of 7:3. The RF algorithm was applied to model the probability of the landslide occurrence using DS1, DS2, and DS3 as predictive variables and TS1 and TS2 for training to obtain the SNL-based, WA-based, and FR-based RF models, respectively. Verified against VS1 and VS2, the three models have similar overall accuracy (OA) and Kappa coefficient (KC), which are 89.61%, 91.47%, and 94.54%, and 0.7926, 0.8299, and 0.8908, respectively. All of them are much better than the three models obtained by SVM algorithm with OA of 81.79%, 82.86%, and 83%, and KC of 0.6337, 0.655, and 0.660. New case verification with the recent 26 landslide events of 2017–2020 revealed that the landslide susceptibility map from WA-based RF modeling was able to properly identify the high and very high susceptibility zones where 23 new landslides had occurred, and performed better than the SNL-based and FR-based RF modeling, though the latter has a slightly higher OA and KC. Hence, we concluded that all three RF models achieve reasonable risk prediction, but WA-based and FR-based RF modeling deserves a recommendation for application elsewhere. The results of this study may serve as reference for the local authorities in prevention and early warning of landslide hazards.

FPGA and ASIC implementation of the algorithm for traffic monitoring in urban areas

2011 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Szczepański ◽  
M. Wöjcikowski ◽  
B. Pankiewicz ◽  
M. KŁosowski ◽  
R. Żaglewski
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Traffic Monitoring ◽  
Detection Algorithm ◽  
Frame Rate ◽  
Integrated Sensor ◽  
The Road ◽  
Moving Vehicles ◽  
Direction Of Movement ◽  
Account Due ◽  
Selection Of

FPGA and ASIC implementation of the algorithm for traffic monitoring in urban areas This paper describes the idea and the implementation of the image detection algorithm, that can be used in integrated sensor networks for environment and traffic monitoring in urban areas. The algorithm is dedicated to the extraction of moving vehicles from real-time camera images for the evaluation of traffic parameters, such as the number of vehicles, their direction of movement and their approximate speed. The authors, apart from the careful selection of particular steps of the algorithm towards hardware implementation, also proposed novel improvements, resulting in increasing the robustness and the efficiency. A single, stationary, monochrome camera is used, simple shadow and highlight elimination is performed. The occlusions are not taken into account, due to placing the camera at a location high above the road. The algorithm is designed and implemented in pipelined hardware, therefore high frame-rate efficiency has been achieved. The algorithm has been implemented and tested in FPGA and ASIC.

scholarly journals Space-time cluster analysis of American visceral leishmaniasis in Bauru, São Paulo State, Brazil

2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (10) ◽  
pp. 1949-1964 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Aparecida Feijó de Souza ◽  
Luiz Ricardo Paes de Barros Cortez ◽  
Ricardo Augusto Dias ◽  
Marcos Amaku ◽  
José Soares Ferreira Neto ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visceral Leishmaniasis ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
Space Time ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
Prevention Measures ◽  
Paulo State ◽  
Positive Tendency ◽  
São Paulo State ◽  
The City

A space-time analysis of American visceral leishmaniasis (AVL) in humans in the city of Bauru, São Paulo State, Brazil was carried out based on 239 cases diagnosed between June 2003 and October 2008. Spatial analysis of the disease showed that cases occurred especially in the city's urban areas. AVL annual incidence rates were calculated, demonstrating that the highest rate occurred in 2006 (19.55/100,000 inhabitants). This finding was confirmed by the time series analysis, which also showed a positive tendency over the period analyzed. The present study allows us to conclude that the disease was clustered in the Southwest side of the city in 2006, suggesting that this area may require special attention with regard to control and prevention measures.

scholarly journals The road beyond licensing: the impact of a driver licensing support program on employment outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bobby Porykali ◽  
Patricia Cullen ◽  
Kate Hunter ◽  
Kris Rogers ◽  
Melissa Kang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Torres Strait Islander ◽  
Geographical Area ◽  
Employment Outcomes ◽  
Support Program ◽  
The Road ◽  
Regional Area ◽  
Torres Strait ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Driver Licensing

Abstract Background With increasingly tough graduated driver licensing laws in all Australian States and Territories, driver licensing support programs are recognised as being important to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to obtain a driver licence. Such programs appear to improve licensing attainment rates, but few studies have examined the broader impact that these programs can have. This research aims to 1) examine the impact of a New South Wales (NSW) based driver licensing support program (Driving Change) on client employment outcomes; 2) assess the influence of geographical area of program delivery on driver licence attainment. Methods Driving Change was delivered from February 2013 to August 2016 in 4 urban and 7 regional Aboriginal communities of NSW. Clients were followed-up at 6 months or more following contact with the program as part of routine program operations. Descriptive statistics and regression models were used to analyse data. Results From 933 clients contacted 254 agreed to provide feedback, a response rate of 27%. Those that responded were mostly female (57%), aged 24 years and under (72%), unemployed (85%) with secondary education or less (71%) and from a regional area (74%). Adjusted logistic regression indicated that clients who achieved an independent licence were more likely (OR: 2.5, 95% CI: 1.22–5.24, p = 0.011) of reporting a new job or change in job than those who did not attain a licence. Clients from regional areas were more likely (OR: 1.72, 95% CI: 1.27–2.33, p < 0.001) to gain an independent licence than those from urban areas. There was no difference in employment outcomes (OR: 1.2, 95% CI: 0.53–2.52, p = 0.719) for clients from urban compared to regional areas. Conclusion The Driving Change program appears to be effective in improving employment outcomes for those who gained a licence. Clients from regional areas were more likely to gain a licence compared to those in urban settings, and were predominantly young and unemployed, often a hard to reach cohort. Future licensing programs being delivered in regional areas need integrated pathways into employment opportunities to provide holistic services that address the social and economic challenges faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.

scholarly journals A NEW APPROACH TO HIGHWAY LANE DETECTION BY USING HOUGH TRANSFORM TECHNIQUE

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nur Shazwani Aminuddin ◽  
Masrullizam Mat Ibrahim ◽  
Nursabillilah Mohd Ali ◽  
Syafeeza Ahmad Radzi ◽  
Wira Hidayat Mohd Saad ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Hough Transform ◽  
Average Rate ◽  
Lane Detection ◽  
Frame Rate ◽  
Video Frame ◽  
Night Time ◽  
The Road ◽  
Main Technique ◽  
On The Road ◽  
Width Measurements

This paper presents the development of a road lane detection algorithm using image processing techniques. This algorithm is developed based on dynamic videos, which are recorded using on-board cameras installed in vehicles for Malaysian highway conditions. The recorded videos are dynamic scenes of the background and the foreground, in which the detection of the objects, presence on the road area such as vehicles and road signs are more challenging caused by interference from background elements such as buildings, trees, road dividers and other related elements or objects. Thus, this algorithm aims to detect the road lanes for three significant parameter operations; vanishing point detection, road width measurements, and Region of Interest (ROI) of the road area, for detection purposes. The techniques used in the algorithm are image enhancement and edges extraction by Sobel filter, and the main technique for lane detection is a Hough Transform. The performance of the algorithm is tested and validated by using three videos of highway scenes in Malaysia with normal weather conditions, raining and a night-time scene, and an additional scene of a sunny rural road area. The video frame rate is 30fps with dimensions of 720p (1280x720) HD pixels. In the final achievement analysis, the test result shows a true positive rate, a TP lane detection  average rate of 0.925 and the capability to be used in the final application implementation.  

scholarly journals Happiness in Romanian cities on the road from post-communism transition to EU accession

REGION ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camilla Lenzi ◽  
Giovanni Perucca
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Life Satisfaction ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Eu Accession ◽  
The Road ◽  
On The Road ◽  
Post Communism ◽  
The One ◽  
Economic Growth Rates

<p>The literature on life satisfaction in transition countries, and in particular on Romania, demonstrated that life satisfaction significantly differs across rural communities and cities of different size. The question addressed in this paper is whether these imbalances are stable over time or, instead, they become manifest in the presence of strong divergences in the economic growth rates of different kinds of communities. Results point out that in the period of sharp economic growth led by large urban areas, as the one experienced by Romania on the road to EU accession, rural/urban disparities in life satisfaction widened, favoring cities of intermediate size.</p>

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document