Search results for "Transport engineering"
showing 10 items of 196 documents
Space syntax analysis applied to urban street lighting: Relations between spatial properties and lighting levels
2019
According to the international technical standards, higher lighting levels (luminance and illuminance levels) are expected in trafficked and central roads (where restrictive minimum lighting requirements are necessary) and lower lighting levels are expected in peripheral and less trafficked roads. Starting from this assumption, in this paper, the authors analyse the correlations between spatial properties (expressed by spatial indicators, for example, the integration index and the choice index) and lighting levels (expressed by lighting parameters, for example luminance and illuminance) upon roads of an urban context. The analysis has been applied to the case study of the medium sized town …
Optimizing the level of service quality of a bike-sharing system
2016
Public bike-sharing programs have been deployed in hundreds of cities worldwide, improving mobility in a socially equitable and environmentally sustainable way. However, the quality of the service is drastically affected by imbalances in the distribution of bicycles among stations. We address this problem in two stages. First, we estimate the unsatisfied demand (lack of free lockers or lack of bicycles) at each station for a given time period in the future and for each possible number of bicycles at the beginning of the period. In a second stage, we use these estimates to guide our redistribution algorithms. Computational results using real data from the bike-sharing system in Palma de Mall…
"Being Flexible": graduates Facing Changes in Their Work Environment
2011
According to the crucial importance of innovation for modern economies, the role of graduates regarding innovation appears to be a major topic when their performances in the labour market at stake. Five main questions are addressed in this chapter: (1) What does innovation mean? (2) Which organisations are likely to be more innovative? (3) What role do Higher Education graduates play regarding innovation? (4) Are they equipped to do develop innovation? (5) Which are the occupations more related to innovation, and are innovative activities rewarded? The results presented in this chapter confirm that higher education graduates are crucial actors in the innovation process. The jobs of innovati…
Issues and Perspectives in the Application of Different Pavement Design Methods to Life Cycle Cost Analysis
2016
Life cycle costs analysis (LCCA) is an economic evaluation tool that can provide valuable guidance to transportation officials in management decision process. The application of LCCA to pavement management is vital because it permits the selection of the best alternative, based on the analysis of agency costs and user costs, taking into account (after selecting pavement type) different maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) strategies within the same pavement type. Additionally, environmental costs can be considered. Issues arise when comparing the expected life of the pavement derived according to different pavement design tools, such as the Mechanistic-Empirical pavement Design Guide (M…
Considerations on oversized transportation in the UE(Community)
2017
The transportation problem is becoming increasingly complex at a national, European and global level. Achieving an efficient and safe transportation system with low environmental pollution, with a quick delivery is a requirement for any carrier in the 21 st century. When talking about oversized transport, the challenge is even greater. Making a low loader go through several European countries has proved to be more complicated than we expected, due to the lack of uniformity of laws in this field. This paper seeks to find these different regularities characteristics from one European country to another and to propose developing procedures leading to the design and implementation of cheaper an…
Trains with a view to sickness
2001
This study was supported by Region Rhone-Alpes (contract ARASSH n°L099552501) and CEC Improving Human Potential: Access to Research Infrastructures HPRI-1999-CT-00025.
Naturalistic study on the usage of smartphone applications among Finnish drivers
2018
We present results from a naturalistic study that tracked how Finnish drivers use their smartphones while on the move. We monitored 30 heavy in-car smartphone users in Finland during June–September 2016, recording the times that they used their phones, the application used at the time of touch (calls excluded), the location and driving speed. Touches per time unit were used as a proxy for estimating visual-manual distraction due to visual-manual tasks. Our data set allows the determining of whether drivers use their phones differently on varying road types (highway, main road, local rural road, urban road). We found that the road type has an effect on phone use but the effect is contrary to…
Editorial: Calculation of Passenger Car Equivalents at Roundabouts
2021
Editorial on the Research Topic: Calculation of Passenger Car Equivalents at Roundabouts About this Research Topic: Calculation of Passenger Car Equivalents (PCEs) for heavy vehicles represents the starting point for the operational analysis of road facilities and other traffic management applications. PCEs are used to consider the presence of heavy vehicles in the traffic stream and are expressed as multiples of the effect of an average passenger car. Moreover, the highly curvilinear nature of the roundabout design, both in urban and rural environment, has significant effects on the paths that heavy vehicles would travel; as a consequence, the interaction between the physical and performan…
Cycling for Home-to-School Travel in Palermo: A Method for Assessing the Optimal Allocation of New Cycling Infrastructure
2019
In order to reduce the number of cars on the road, one of the most incisive actions is to encourage cycling, e.g. through the introduction of bike-sharing systems. In particular, the activation of special bike-sharing programs for school students could lead students to choose this mode of transport to make their own home-school travel. The success of such initiatives is primarily linked to the presence of a continuous and functional cycle network, which can create safe routes to school. It is, therefore, necessary a cycle network design model that allows determining the optimal allocation of new cycle paths, maximizing the number of users and considering technical and economic constraints. …
A DEA-based transport heliports' efficiencies evaluation
2015
Purpose - The purpose of the study is the evaluation of the efficiencies of a group of small Italian airports and the comparison with a set of transport heliports to show the difference in the productivity of the two types of infrastructures. Design/methodology/approach - The methodology used for the evaluation is the data envelopment analysis (DEA). Findings - The better performance of the heliports compared to the small inefficient airports. Research limitations/implications - This research is limited by the field of application and the weaknesses of the DEA methodology. However, it could be the first step for further works that will include more accurate models. Practical implications - …