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Data collection for public transport
Published in Peter White, Public Transport, 2017
An alternative method which avoids any need for use of data relating to individual passenger trip records is to automatically count passengers entering and exiting a vehicle at each stop – for example, using the technology manufactured by Dilax. By this means an estimate can be made of the load on the vehicle between each pair of stops, which can be used to notify intending passengers at subsequent stops of capacity available. An alternative is to monitor the gross weight of the vehicle (including passengers), and hence the net payload of passengers. By assuming an average weight per passenger (see Chapter 5) an estimate can then be made of load carried. These data can also be used in aggregate form to estimate loadings on each link in a network by time period, and total passenger-km. However, they do not provide a direct measure of origin-destination pairs by individual passengers.
Standard freeway merge designs support safer driver behaviour compared to taper designs: a driving simulator study
Published in Ergonomics, 2020
Hammad Hussain Awan, Ali Pirdavani, Muhammad Adnan, Ansar-ul-Haque Yasar, Geert Wets, Tom Brijs
Three virtual scenarios with a two-lane 18 km long freeway containing the two aforementioned merging designs in a randomised order with three heavy traffic compositions (0, 15 and 30%) were created using the driving simulator programme STISIM Drive Version 3. Heavy vehicles are classified as vehicles having a gross weight over 3.5 tons. In terms of length, heavy vehicles selected for this study were between 7.62 and 12.8 m long (European Commission 27 September, 2018). In each scenario, merging designs were inserted in such a way that each participant drove through both designs twice in one run. As mentioned in ROA (2017) for these designs, the intensity to capacity ratio on both merging and the main freeway has to be under 0.7. Hence, the intensity to capacity ratio was kept constant at 0.6 on both freeways. According to the traffic volume given in ROA (2017) and the intensity to capacity ratio of 0.6, the total number of vehicles per lane per minute for 0% heavy traffic was 24. For 15 and 30% of heavy vehicles, the total number of vehicles turned out to be 18 and 15 with 4 and 6 heavy vehicles per lane per minute respectively. Drivers were informed of a merging freeway ahead on both designs by means of a merging sign placed 550 and 400 m before the nose point on the standard and taper design respectively. The difference in distance for the sign locations of the two designs is due to their different longitudinal dimensions. In both cases drivers are notified 150 m ahead of the change in geometry. The initial position of the drivers is set in lane 3 (based on Figure 1) in both designs as this initial position has more critical driving conditions compared to setting the initial position in lane 4, which requires a lower number of changes in manoeuvring while merging.