Modelling Road User Perceptions towards Safety, Comfort, and Chaos at Shared Space: The via Maqueda Case Study, Italy

This study aims to investigate the impacts of perception of infrastructure, sociodemographic characteristics, frequency of road use, and road user perception on safety, comfort, and chaos with respect to shared spaces. The case study area was the Via Maqueda, a shared street in Palermo, Italy. A face-to-face survey was conducted and the answers of 200 of the participants, who use three active travel modes, namely, walking, cycling, and micromobility, were analysed. The results obtained from the ordered logit models suggest that one-unit higher perception of infrastructure will increase safety and comfort perceptions for both walking and cycling. Females feel less safe while walking and less comfortable while cycling at shared spaces compared to males. Increasing the age group by one unit will decrease the safety and comfort perceptions for walking. The participants who use the shared spaces more frequently perceive that they feel more comfortable with cycling. Participants, particularly males, find the shared spaces less chaotic for walking when the perception of infrastructure is higher. Regarding the micromobility use at shared spaces, females feel less comfortable compared to males while using micromobility.

User Perception on The Waste Utilization in The Upcycled Garden Design at Taman Samudera, Seri Manjung Perak

Many cities becoming unsustainable due to the massive volumes of unrecycled municipal garbage that end up in suburban landfills. Our culture, on the other hand, appears to be generating trash in an almost inevitable manner. However, in the recent years, the merits of using salvaged and upcycled materials are started to be addressed in the landscape design and recently arose in the hardscape construction. This highlights the importance of educating people, raising awareness and promoting a better way of dealing with solid waste. Based on studies conducted in Taman Samudera, Seri Manjung, Perak, this paper attempts to analyze the user perception on the waste utilization for the upcycled garden design. This quantitative research was conducted in two phases; Phase 1; to study the user awareness, user acceptance and user preference on the upcycling hardscape and Phase 2; to propose a landscape master plan of the upcycled garden. The respondent (n=92) involved in this study are the residents of Taman Samudera, Seri Manjung, Perak. It shows that most of the respondents were aware and accepted the use of recycled materials in the upcycled garden. The finding indicates that the highest mean score for preferred recycled material used for hardscape construction were plastic bottles, tyres, and Compact Discs were suitable to be included in the master plan of the upcycled garden. The proposed Upcycled Garden at Taman Samudera, Seri Manjung, Perak will be a valuable recreational area that is environmental friendly while educating the public tackling the serious issues of poor recycling rates and waste management in Malaysia.

espaço livre públivo urbano: percepção do usuário no contexto da pandemia do covid-19 | Ther urban open space: user perception in the context of the covid -19 pandemic

As mudanças impostas pela pandemia do novo coronavírus são desafiadoras. Isolamento social, novas medidas de biossegurança e condições diferentes de viver levantam questões sobre o futuro da forma de habitar e usufruir as cidades e seus espaços. Diante disso, desenvolveu-se uma pesquisa exploratória visando apreender a percepção das pessoas quanto à sua relação, satisfação e expectativas para com o espaço livre público urbano, com o bairro e com asua moradia durante e após a pandemia, dadas as modificações em suas rotinas. O presente trabalho trata-se de um recorte dessa pesquisa, tendo como objetivo compreender o nível de satisfação das pessoas em relação ao bairro em que moravam e aos espaços abertos da cidade durante a quarentena, bem como suas expectativas de futuro. Para isso,foi aplicado um questionário online, divulgado por meio de redes sociais, através do qual foram coletadas 1858 respostas válidas. Entre os resultados obtidos, destaca-se: i. que o impacto do enclausuramento foi menos sentido por quem tinha na própria residência um espaço ao ar livre; ii. que 44,85% dos respondentes sentiam falta de áreas livres em seus bairros; iii. que entre os elementos dos quais os respondentes sentiam falta em seus bairros, a praça foi o mais votado; e iv. que, comparativamente, ao avaliar-se a vontade das pessoas de frequentar espaços ao ar livre durante e após a quarentena,observou-se uma tendência de aumento do uso dos espaços livres públicos após a quarentena acabar. Os aspectos conclusivos incluíram discussões a respeito dos espaços abertos de interação social, como ruas, praças e parques, que ganharam ainda mais importância durante esse período, evidenciando que há um desafio para as cidades quanto àqualidade ambiental desses espaços durante e após a pandemia.

Animation Art Design Online System Based on Mobile Edge Computing and User Perception

Based on mobile edge computing and user perception technology, this paper analyzes and discusses the respective advantages and disadvantages of the important optimization models and mobile models in the animation art design, as well as the wireless block data transmission mechanism and protocol. In order to solve the problem that user mobility cannot be sensed, a content-centric mobile edge animation art design mechanism based on user mobility perception is proposed. This mechanism comprehensively calculates the centrality of users’ perception of nodes, the idle rate of animation design, and the staying time of users in a small area. The mobile edge network controller integrates the information of each edge user’s perception node, calculates the importance of each edge user’s perception node and prioritizes it, and selects the appropriate content animation to design the user perception node according to the ranking result. Finally, various simulation or platform test experiments were carried out for all the design schemes in this paper, and the experimental results were analyzed. The simulation experiment results show that compared with the traditional animation design mechanism, the animation art design system effectively reduces the average number of hops for users to obtain content by up to 15.9%, improves the hit rate of edge user perception node animation design by at least 13.7%, and reduces the traffic entering the core network by up to 32.1%. According to the comparison results, the various designs in this work can successfully use sensor data to preclassify migration tasks in the mobile edge network environment. Compared with the latest block data transmission protocol, it has a significant performance improvement, reducing the data distribution delay by 34.8%, thereby helping to improve the overall efficiency of mobile edge computing.

PUBLIC VS PRIVATE SECTOR OWNED URBAN PUBLIC SPACE PERFORMANCE IN TERMS OF USER PERCEPTION IN CITY OF COLOMBO

Public spaces are considered one of the fundamental elements in the urban context to promote leisure and recreation for urban dwellers. Public spaces contain variations within each other from the physical appearance, activities, and to usage factors. Private sector involvement for public space provision was increased in the recent past where public space ownership and access controls were shifted from solely public to private. This was criticized as privatization of public space and lead to debates on the decline of publicness and privacy of space. In this context, this research studied the public space from the user perception by considering publicly owned and operated versus privately owned and operated public spaces within Colombo, Sri Lanka. It is also explored the balance between ownership and access controls to determine the user preference in terms of the publicness features. User defined public space features were identified using 35 semi-structured interviews and 119 online questionnaire surveys. Qualitative analytic tools were used to evaluate the results including Content analysis and Space-shaper models with the support of NVivo software. The results revealed that publicly owned spaces were preferred by the users due to easy access and freedom for activities while privately owned spaces were preferred due to better infrastructure, safety, and security within. Also, it is identified that urban public space offered users the freedom to experience based on the levels of ownership and access controls. Finally, people preferred ownership by public over private sector as anecdotal evidence and values dominated in the public space attributes. This study provides key insights for planners to consider in the public space planning and the importance of private sector involvement and balance in the provision of optimal urban spaces in cities.

User Perception towards Ride hail Service: A case of Nagpur city, India

In recent times, there is an increase in the utilization of the ride-hail service (viz., mobile application-based shared service) by the younger generation due to tremendous changes in technology, extensive usage of smartphones, and perceived convenience during travelling. For evaluating ride-hail service further, it is necessary to understand the user perception towards the ride-hail service and public transportation system (viz., bus in this case) to efficiently plan the public transportation services. Hence, the present study analyzes user perception while making trips, using ride-hail service and public transport buses. A long stretch of 3.8 km has been selected in the Nagpur city for the study and the stretch attracts a good number of trips by ride-hailing and public transportation. To perform the analysis, a survey has been conducted in the stretch which includes an online survey (viz., based on the Google form) and an offline survey (viz., at selected bus stops on the route between university campus and shopping complex). A binary logit model has been developed to understand the user perception towards ride-hail service and to identify the significant contributing factors towards the preference of the ride-hail service over the public transport bus. From the model results, it has been noted that age, accessibility, waiting time, travel time, income, and travel cost of the trip are the most significant contributing factors that affect user decision for availing the ride-hail service. It has been concluded from the study that the inferences obtained would be useful in the direction of developing warrants for transport planners and policymakers to improve the service quality of public transport buses (viz., frequency and routes) in cities especially in the Indian context.