Bicycling renaissance in North America? An update and re-appraisal of cycling trends and policies

This paper reviews trends in cycling levels, safety, and policies in Canada and the USA over the past two decades. We analyze aggregate data for the two countries as well as city-specific case study data for nine large cities (Chicago, Minneapolis, Montréal, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Toronto, Vancouver, and Washington). Cycling levels have increased in both the USA and Canada, while cyclist fatalities have fallen. There is much spatial variation and socioeconomic inequality in cycling rates. The bike share of work commuters is more than twice as high in Canada as in the USA, and is higher in the western parts of both countries. Cycling is concentrated in central cities, especially near universities and in gentrified neighborhoods near the city center. Almost all the growth in cycling in the USA has been among men between 25-64 years old, while cycling rates have remained steady among women and fallen sharply for children. Cycling rates have risen much faster in the nine case study cities than in their countries as a whole, at least doubling in all the cities since 1990. They have implemented a wide range of infrastructure and programs to promote cycling and increase cycling safety: expanded and improved bike lanes and paths, traffic calming, parking, bike-transit integration, bike sharing, training programs, and promotional events. We describe the specific accomplishments of the nine case study cities, focusing on each city’s innovations and lessons for other cities trying to increase cycling. Portland’s comprehensive package of cycling policies has succeeded in raising cycling levels 6-fold and provides an example that other North American cities can follow.     

Mobility, social exclusion and well-being: Exploring the links

Building on a growing research foundation, transport policy makers have begun to associate the ability to be mobile with having a role in the facilitation of social inclusion. However, the further connection to well-being is not as well understood. This paper explores the association between a person’s travel patterns, their risk of social exclusion and self-assessed well-being. Key influences on social exclusion are discussed, with trip making emerging as a significant influence. Trip making is not a significant direct influence on well-being but does exercise an indirect influence through the impact on risk of social exclusion. The modelling process enables a value for additional trips to be estimated, the value being about four times the values derived from conventional generated traffic approaches. Similar high values are found in separate metropolitan and regional case studies, confirming the significance of the results.     

Interactive stated choice surveys: a study of air travel behaviour

Stated preference (SP) experiments are becoming an increasingly popular survey methodology for investigating travel behaviour. Nevertheless, some evidence suggests that SP experiments do not mirror decisions in real markets. With an increasing number of real world decisions made using the internet, an opportunity exists to improve the realism of the SP counterparts of such choices by aligning the choice environment with such online portals. In this paper, we illustrate the benefits of such an approach in the context of air travel surveys. Our survey is modelled on the interface and functionality of an online travel agent (OTA). As with a real OTA, many ticket options are presented. Sort tools allow the options to be reordered, search tools allow options to be removed from consideration, and a further tool allows attributes to be hidden and shown. Extensive use of these tools is made by the 462 respondents. A traditional SP component was also completed by the respondents. Our exploratory analysis as well as random utility model estimation results confirm not only that respondents seem to engage more actively with the interactive survey, but also that the resulting data allows for better performance in model estimation compared to a more conventional SP experiment. These results have implications for the study of other complex travel choices where interactive surveys may similarly be preferable to standard approaches.     

The interaction of tidal advection, diffusion and mussel filtration in a tidal channel

Time series measurements of flow and pigment concentrations (Chl) in the Menai Strait have revealed that the strong residual flow in a tidal channel ( 500 m³ s^− 1) transports phytoplankton from the open sea into the channel where much of it is consumed by suspension feeders, mainly in commercial beds of Mytilus edulis. The progressive depletion of phytoplankton along the channel results in a strong horizontal gradient of plankton and hence Chl. Tidal displacement of this gradient causes large (± 50% of mean) oscillations of Chl in the vicinity of the mussel beds. Vertical mixing by the strong tidal flows is sufficiently vigorous for most of the tidal cycle to ensure that downward diffusion can resupply the near-bed layer although there are indications of some transient depletion around slack water.This paradigm of the interaction of advection, diffusion and filtration determining the distribution of plankton and its supply to mussels has been encapsulated in a series of simple models forced only by boundary values. In the first, a 1-D model of tidal flow in the channel reproduces the principal features of the observed currents including the unusually large spatial change in phase of the currents and the variation of the residual transport with tidal range. The flow field from this physical model is used to drive a second model based on the advection diffusion equation for Chl with a source at the Irish Sea boundary and a sink over the mussel bed. This model illustrates the formation of a strong Chl gradient along the channel and simulates the amplitude and phase of the M₂ oscillations of Chl and the development of the M₄ variation apparent in the observations. This second model has been extended to 2-D over the mussel beds to allow investigation of the effects of water column mixing. The model indicates that only for a short period ( 30 min), close to slack water, is mixing sufficiently reduced to permit the development of a depletion boundary layer and then only within  1 m from the bottom, a result which is consistent with the observations.     

Sentiment analysis of popular-music references to automobiles, 1950s to 2010s

In recent years, there has been a scholarly debate regarding the decrease in automobile-related mobility indicators (car ownership, driving license holding, VMT, etc.). Broadly speaking, two theories have been put forward to explain this trend: (1) economic factors whose impacts are well-understood in principle, but whose occurrence among young adults as a demographic sub-group had been overlooked, and (2) less well-understood shifts in cultural mores, values and sentiment towards the automobile. This second theory is devilishly difficult to study, due primarily to limitations in standard data resources such as the National Household Travel Survey and international peer datasets. In this study we first compiled a database of lyrics to popular music songs from 1956 to 2015 (defined by inclusion in the annual “top 40”), and subsequently identified references to automobiles within this corpus. We then evaluated whether there is support for theory #2 above within popular music, by looking at changes from the 1950s to the 2010s. We demonstrate that the frequency of references to automobility tended for many years to increase over time, however there has more recently been a decline after the late 2000s (decade). In terms of the sentiment of popular music lyrics that reference automobiles, our results are mixed as to whether the references are becoming increasingly positive or negative (machine analysis suggests increasing negativity, while human analysis did not find a significant association), however a consistent observation is that sentiment of automobile references have over time become more positive relative to sentiment of song lyrics overall. We also show that sentiment towards automobile references differs systematically by genre, e.g. automobile references within ‘Rock’ lyrics are in general more negative than similar references to cars in other music genres). The data generated on this project have been archived and made available open access for use by future researchers; details are in the full paper.

     

Safety Evaluation for Freeway Exit Ramp Based on Speed Consistency

Speed differential has direct relationship with road safety. Conventional speed consistency measures draw sample data from independent population that follows a normal distribution. These methods may fall into ecological fallacy and overestimate the safety level of road elements. After deducing the relationship between the difference in operating speed ΔV₈₅ and85(ΔV), the 85^th percentile value of individual speed reduction, this paper recommends 85(ΔV) and speed reduction rate 85(ΔV)R is used to evaluate ramp safety. Point speeds of individual vehicle at freeway diverge area, upper ramp, and lower ramp are collected by radar guns. Safety performance of 37 exit ramps are appraised using three different measures, namely, ΔV₈₅, 85(ΔV), and 85(ΔV)R. The results show that 85(ΔV) is 1.42 to 2.02 times of ΔV₈₅, and that the evaluation result of 85(ΔV)R is between the other two. The measure 85(ΔV)R considers not only individual speed but also the base speed on upstream element, which avoid the pitfalls of ecological fallacy and overestimation possessed by conventional measures. It is a safer and reasonable measure that should be adopted in practice.     

An algorithm for oceanic front detection in chlorophyll and SST satellite imagery

An algorithm is described for oceanic front detection in chlorophyll (Chl) and sea surface temperature (SST) satellite imagery. The algorithm is based on a gradient approach: the main novelty is a shape-preserving, scale-sensitive, contextual median filter applied selectively and iteratively until convergence. This filter has been developed specifically for Chl since these fields have spatial patterns such as chlorophyll enhancement at thermohaline fronts and small- and meso-scale chlorophyll blooms that are not present in SST fields. Linear Chl enhancements and localized (point-wise) blooms are modeled as ridges and peaks respectively, whereas conventional fronts in Chl and SST fields are modeled as steps or ramps. Examples are presented of the algorithm performance using modeled (synthetic) images as well as synoptic Chl and SST imagery. After testing, the algorithm was used on > 6000 synoptic images, 1999–2007, to produce climatologies of Chl and SST fronts off the U.S. Northeast.     

电气化动力总成——它会带来什么?

<正>德尔福公司与上海汽车集团股份有限公司(上海汽车)达成协议,将为上海汽车开发的中度混合动力车提供混合动力技术。这一协议的签署具有开创性的重要意义,它将目前中国市场最大的整车制造商上海汽车与德尔福公司的