Green Road Research Articles

Cap Rates as a Function of Real Economic Growth

This study investigates the interactive effect of changes in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on US multifamily cap rates. The data from the US and 20 of its metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) was used from 2000 to 2021. The accompanying cap rate data is sourced to Green Street. A binary logistic regression model was specified by reducing the interaction between first-differenced GDP and CPI to a single binary variable and reducing the first-differenced cap rate series to a binary variable. Cap rate changes are forecasted, and the model is evaluated using standard goodness of fit methods, a confusion matrix, and a comparison to a buy-and-hold strategy. Overall, this study provides new evidence to explain and simplify the impact of inflation and economic growth on cap rates. The results show that the method of forecasting cap rates is highly robust in locations where growth is consistent with the national average (established cities), while it is less robust in fast-growing markets. It can be inferred that, in established cities and the US as a whole, cap rate growth can be modeled as a function of only the underlying GDP growth relative to CPI growth.

Atomic Belt and Road: China’s international nuclear market entry

Rapid development of China’s internal nuclear market, together with its rise on the international arena and the declared transition to green economy, gave a crucial impetus to its aspirations to enter the international atomic market as a global exporter of nuclear technology. The aim of this article is to define the political and ideological foundations underpinning such an ambitious endeavor, as well as predict the related development in the short and mid-term perspective. The author utilizes both general scientific methods as well as statistical and comparative analysis to single out the directions of China’s nuclear market outreach, both regionally and globally. Pakistan, widely presented as a flagship example of China’s exporting its know-how in nuclear engineering, remains the only partner of a kind in the broader Asia-Pacific. This article demonstrates that Belt and Road Initiative (specifically, the Green Silk Road), out of all multiple formats, was arguably chosen by the Chinese government as the most suitable framework for expanding its influence in the nuclear domain and filling a certain gap which formed after Westinghouse and Areva (now Orano) got reorganised after encountering financial problems. At the same time, China’s bid for leadership in the sphere of nuclear technology is obstructed by some impediments. Among them are Russia’s dominance in breakthrough areas of nuclear engineering and Rosatom’s large market share, as well as lack of political will in some countries’ elites to build ties with China in this strategic realm, opting for competition instead.

Evergreen Environment in Smart Cities

One hundred cities are proposed to be turned as smart cities across our nation. This paper serves in providing general guidance for planning of smart cities from an environmental perspective with a view to guide the conceptualization of the proposed smart cities towards a cleaner, greener and safer place to live in. A set of environmental criteria such as urban forests, green alleys, constructed wetlands, green roofs, permeable paving, green streets, green parking, green walls and rain gardens were discussed. Implementing the environmental protection measures in the developing smart cities would also add up to the benefits like improving water and air quality, serves as temperature regulator, increases the biodiversity thereby saving energy and creating job opportunities. Thus in this paper, methods of improvising the environmental conditions as evergreen in smart cities and their benefits to the society has been briefed. Index Terms— Smart cities, evergreen environment, air quality, cleaner, greener, safer place

A light in the dark: open access to medical literature and the COVID-19 pandemic

Introduction. This study was designed to evaluate the accessibility of peer-reviewed literature regarding COVID-19 and the ten diseases with the highest death toll worldwide. Method. We conducted extensive searches of studies concerning COVID-19 and other diseases using the Web of Science, and the Google and Google Scholar search engines. Analysis. Open access rates were obtained from the Web of Science database, taking into account different types of publications and research areas. Quantitative analyses based on random samplings were used to estimate the potential increase of open access rates achievable with open archiving of post-prints. Results. The open access rate of COVID-19 papers (89.5%) largely outnumbered that of the ten most deadly human diseases (48.8%, on average). We estimated that most of the gap (70%) could be bridged by making available online, post-print manuscripts. Conclusions. The pandemic represents a real breakthrough, in scientific publishing, towards the goal of health information for all, demonstrating that much greater access to medical literature is possible. The green road may be the best way to bring open access rates of peer review of other major diseases closer to that of COVID-19. However, it needs to be implemented more effectively, combining bottom-up and top-down actions and making the open science culture more widespread.

Influence of Low-Impact Development in Flood Control: A Case Study of the Febres Cordero Stormwater System of Guayaquil (Ecuador)

Urban flooding is a major problem in many coastal cities. The rapidly shifting patterns of land use and demographic increase are making conventional approaches to stormwater management fail. In developing countries such as Ecuador, a lack of monitoring, financial constraints and absence of proper policies exacerbate flooding problems. This work assesses the implementation of two Low Impact Development strategies (LIDs), namely, green streets and rain barrels, as nature-based solutions to mitigate flooding problems. The use of the “Stormwater Management Model” (SWMM) helped to contrast the new approach with the current state of the drainage system, including normal and extreme scenarios. With an implementation of 1.4% (19.5 ha) of the total area with LIDs, the reduction of runoff for short events (200 min) is around 20%, and for extreme events (within 24 h) is around 19% in comparison to the conventional approach. Flooded nodes were reduced to 27% for short events, and to 4% for extreme events. The peak flooding system had a reduction to 22% for short events and 15% for extreme events. These highlights help to increase city resilience, and authorities and stakeholders should engage in climate actions to reduce flood risks complementing drainage operations with nature-based solutions. Moreover, calibrated results in this article serve to increase awareness among municipal authorities regarding the importance of maintaining flooding records to improve modelling results for decision-makings processes.

The Weightage of Environmental Elements for Malaysia State Green Road Index of Rural Area

Green road” is a concept introduced to meet the requirements of economic, societal, and environmental aspects in road construction and its operation. Towards the responsive efforts of sustainable development, many countries had established their environmentally friendly green road assessment tools including for highways and roads. However, the application of the tools is somehow limited to specific project life cycle such for design and planning assessment and/or only for the higher cluster of the road such as toll road or federal highway, but rarely focus on road in rural area. This paper therefore aims to identify the appropriate environmental criteria and elements as proposal for Malaysia State Road Index for the rural area. The weightage of environmental elements for the Malaysia State Road Index for the rural area was established in the discussion of this paper. The environmental criteria and elements were reviewed via critical literature review of content analysis were of ‘green tools’. The confirmation of weightage was conducted via questionnaires development and responded by the focus group discussion (FGD) and validation survey. The FGD were the experts involved in road infrastructure development. The data is analysed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software. This study discovered ten sub-criteria and thirty-three elements under ‘green road’ of significant environmental sustainability elements. The result showcases a fair distribution of weightage for each element within their sub-criteria.

Green Street Landscape Design Based on Sponge City Background

Green Street Landscape Design Based on Sponge City Background

Matt Buckner’s Identity Seeking in Green Street Hooligans Movie (2005): A Semiotic Analysis

This research was conducted to analyze how the identity seeking of the main character, Matt Buckner, in Green Street Hooligans (2005) movie was portrayed semiotically. The term identity can be defined as an expression of the inner self, and the role of ourselves in the world to find the meaning of life and as a guide in life to find happiness. The subject of this research was the Green Street Hooligans (2005) movie directed by Lexi Alexander and the object was the representation of the main character’s identity seeking through images of the scene and dialogues found in the movie. The data were collected through watching and analyzing the movie, reading several related articles, taking notes on the important elements, and classifying the data. In analyzing the data, the researchers used a descriptive qualitative approach and adopted the semiotic analysis technique by Charles Sander Peirce (Hoed, 2007). As A Result, the researchers discovered that Matt Buckner's life before being a Hooligan was just like a normal student’s. Second, Matt Buckner’s identity started to transform when he met Pete and join the GSE firm. The last, and the reasons why Matt Buckner joined the Hooligan was that he felt more appreciated and well-known when he became Hooligan, also he was proud to be a Yankee surrounded by the GSE members. Every sign represented in movie have its meaning, and to comprehend those all signs used a semiotic approach. Based on the result of this research, the researchers able to understand the meaning that represented in the Green Street Hooligans movie.

Laboratory Testing Performance of Hot Mix Asphalt Containing Waste Materials

Abstract. Road conditions are frequently subjected to damage that outlasts the road's design life. One of these is due to the material's mechanical capability, which is insufficient to withstand traffic loads and weather conditions. The incorporation of plastic and tire waste into Hot Mix Asphalt is one of the efforts to improve the material's mechanical quality (HMA). In addition to reducing the asphalt concentration in the mixture, the percentage of plastic and tire debris reduces the environmental impact. The use of plastic and tire waste in HMA can aid in the creation of green roads. The goal of this research is to see how plastic and tire waste affect HMA performance in Marshall testing. The research was conducted by making test samples with variations of waste materials percentage. Then, the Marshall test was carried out. Analysis of test results includes volumetric properties and Marshall characteristics. The test results showed that the addition of plastic and tire waste was able to improve the performance of the HMA mixture. However, the performance of the HMA mixture will decrease due to the influence of water soaking the HMA mixture. The addition of the optimum waste was obtained by 2.5% at the optimum asphalt content of 5.5%.

Taking the Green Road Towards Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

AbstractThe introduction of the Green Chemistry Principles in the late 1990s formed the basis for a transition to a greener environment. These Principles have become an integral part in the work on designing chemical processes, especially for large-scale manufacture. The ultimate target is the achievement of a sustainable production method allowing hundreds of tons of valuable materials to be prepared. For this purpose, a holistic view must be applied to the elements constituting a fully-fledged process encompassing layout of the synthetic route, defining starting materials and their origin, output of product and quality features, quantity of effluent streams and waste, recovery and recycling of chemicals involved, and energy consumption. These parameters form a complex matrix where the individual components are in a complicated relationship with each other. This short review addresses these issues and the benefits of life-cycle assessment and metrics commonly used to measure the performance of chemical manufacturing – all from a pharmaceutical industry perspective as experienced by the author.1 Introduction: Facing Severe Challenges2 The Historical Context: Addressing an Image Problem3 Prospects, Drivers and Roadmap for the Green Future4 Living by the Principles: Industrial Perspectives5 Taking the Green Route – Catalysis Leading the Way: Case Stories6 State of the Art: How Green Are We?7 Sending Signals, Creating Impressions: Focus on Communication8 Conclusions

Assessing the Environmental Performances of Urban Roundabouts Using the VSP Methodology and AIMSUN

In line with globally shared environmental sustainability goals, the shift towards citizen-friendly mobility is changing the way people move through cities and road user behaviour. Building a sustainable road transport requires design knowledge to develop increasingly green road infrastructures and monitoring the environmental impacts from mobile crowdsourced data. In this view, the paper presents an empirically based methodology that integrates the vehicle-specific power (VSP) model and microscopic traffic simulation (AIMSUN) to estimate second-by-second vehicle emissions at urban roundabouts. The distributions of time spent in each VSP mode from instantaneous vehicle trajectory data gathered in the field via smartphone were the starting point of the analysis. The versatility of AIMSUN in calibrating the model parameters to better reflect the field-observed speed-time trajectories and to enhance the estimation accuracy was assessed. The conversion of an existing roundabout within the sample into a turbo counterpart was also made as an attempt to confirm the reproducibility of the proposed procedure. The results shed light on new opportunities in the environmental performance evaluation of road units when changes in design or operation should be considered within traffic management strategies and highlighted the potential of the smart approach in collecting big amounts of data through digital communities.

The effect of farmland on the surface water of the Aral Sea Region using Multi-source Satellite Data.

BackgroundThe improper land utilization has brought tremendous pressure on the surface water of the Aral Sea Region in the past decades. It was seriously hindered for construction of the Green Silk Road Economic Belt by the fragile environment. Therefore, it is of great necessity for environmental protection and social development to monitor the change of surface water in the Aral Sea Region.MethodsIn this study, LandTrendr algorithm was used on Landsat time-series data to characterize the change in farmland on the Google Earth Engine platform. Based on multi-source data, the water area changes of the Aral Sea were extracted based on the Google Earth Engine, and the mean method was utilized to extract the changes in water level and water storage. Finally, a water-farmland coupling degree model was utilized to evaluate the impact of farmland changes on the surface water in the Aral Sea Region.ResultsAs a result, the change of farmland is as follows: the farmland area of the Aral Sea Region has abandoned 3,129 km2 from 1987 to 2019, with overall accuracy of 85.3%. The farmland change had increased the drainage downstream of the Amu Darya River and the Syr Darya River. It has led area of the Aral Sea to decrease each year continuously. The area of the Aral Sea shrank by 1,606.36 km2 per year from 1987 to 2019. Furthermore, Aral Sea’s water level decreased by 0.13 m per year from 2003 to 2009. The amount of water storage in the Aral Sea Region also showed a downward trend from 2002 to 2016. There was a high-quality coupling coordination 0.903 relationship between surface water and farmland. It will increase the burden of water for people’s normal daily life by the water loss resources caused by abandoned farmland. This study emphasized threat of unreasonable farmland management to surface water of the Aral Sea Region. The findings contributed for decision makers to formulating effective reasonable policies to protect surface water and use land of the Aral Sea Region. Meanwhile, the application of coupling degree model can provide a new method for studying the connection of independent systems in the farmland, water, environment and more.

Ageing in Irish Writing: Strangers to Themselves

Ageing in Irish Writing: Strangers to Themselves

Google Street View Images as Predictors of Patient Health Outcomes, 2017-2019.

Collecting neighborhood data can both be time- and resource-intensive, especially across broad geographies. In this study, we leveraged 1.4 million publicly available Google Street View (GSV) images from Utah to construct indicators of the neighborhood built environment and evaluate their associations with 2017–2019 health outcomes of approximately one-third of the population living in Utah. The use of electronic medical records allows for the assessment of associations between neighborhood characteristics and individual-level health outcomes while controlling for predisposing factors, which distinguishes this study from previous GSV studies that were ecological in nature. Among 938,085 adult patients, we found that individuals living in communities in the highest tertiles of green streets and non-single-family homes have 10–27% lower diabetes, uncontrolled diabetes, hypertension, and obesity, but higher substance use disorders—controlling for age, White race, Hispanic ethnicity, religion, marital status, health insurance, and area deprivation index. Conversely, the presence of visible utility wires overhead was associated with 5–10% more diabetes, uncontrolled diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and substance use disorders. Our study found that non-single-family and green streets were related to a lower prevalence of chronic conditions, while visible utility wires and single-lane roads were connected with a higher burden of chronic conditions. These contextual characteristics can better help healthcare organizations understand the drivers of their patients’ health by further considering patients’ residential environments, which present both risks and resources.

A novel hierarchical dynamic group decision-based fuzzy ranking approach to evaluate the green road construction suppliers

A novel hierarchical dynamic group decision-based fuzzy ranking approach to evaluate the green road construction suppliers

An Assessment of Green Rural Road Criteria and Elements for My Green Rural Road Index: A Case Study in Pengerang, Johor

The rural road networks were built to connect the rural people to the town area or to other destination required by the local residents. Normally the rural roads will be developed to connect or increase the socio-economic opportunity in rural area. The green road is one of the key areas that can be look into to create the sustainable concept based on three key aspects namely social, environmental and economic factors. The main focus of the economy aspect is to increase the profits using more efficient resources, especially materials, improving the quality of life by meeting the national needs of social aspects and protecting the environment from the effects of CO2 emissions and efficient use of natural resources for environmental aspects. Therefore, it is important that stakeholders include sustainability criteria in their projects. The application of a sustainable concept on the road can be assessed by the green road evaluation tool. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to build tools to evaluate and declare green rural roads in Malaysia. The data for this study were gathered through group discussions with road construction experts and distributed questionnaires to identify sustainability factors. Then the data were analysed by factor analysis method using SPSS software. Based on the result, there are five main sustainable criteria: Sustainable Design and Construction, Social and Safety, Energy Efficiency, Environmental and Water Management and Materials and Technology that are included in the development of the green road qualification system. The analysis indicates that the social and safety become the prime criteria among other criteria.

Stages of the development of Chinese “Green Silk Road” initiative

Stages of the development of Chinese “Green Silk Road” initiative

Green Road Intersections Via Efficient Traffic Light Scheduling Algorithms

Green Road Intersections Via Efficient Traffic Light Scheduling Algorithms

Green road\u2013rail intermodal routing problem with improved pickup and delivery services integrating truck departure time planning under uncertainty: an interactive fuzzy programming approach

This paper addresses the multi-objective optimization for the road–rail intermodal routing problem that aims to minimize the total costs and carbon dioxide emissions of the routes. To achieve high timeliness of the entire transportation process, pickup and delivery services are simultaneously improved based on the employment of fuzzy soft time windows to measure their service levels. The modeling of road–rail intermodal routing considers fixed schedules of rail and time flexibility of road to match the real-world transportation scenario, in which travel times and carbon dioxide emission factors of road services are considered to be time-varying. To improve the feasibility of the routing, uncertainty of travel times and carbon dioxide emission factors of road services and capacities of rail services are incorporated into the problem. By applying trapezoidal fuzzy numbers to formulate the uncertainty, we propose a fuzzy multi-objective nonlinear optimization model for the routing problem that integrates the truck departure time planning for road services. After processing the model with fuzzy chance-constrained programming and linearization, we obtain an auxiliary equivalent crisp linear model and solve it by designing an interactive fuzzy programming approach with the Bounded Objective Function method. Based on an empirical case study, we demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach and discuss the effects of improving the confidence levels and service levels on the optimization results. The case analysis reveals several managerial insights that help to realize an efficient transportation organization by making effective trade-offs among lowering costs, reducing emissions, improving service levels, and enhancing feasibility.

Economic perspectives on the future of academic publishing: Introduction to the special issue

Economic perspectives on the future of academic publishing: Introduction to the special issue