Street Maintenance Research Articles

Public values and sector service delivery preferences: Public preferences on contracting from simple to complex human services

AbstractNonprofit and for‐profit providers play an increasing role in public service delivery, but we know little about what shapes public service delivery preferences. Responding to calls to put the “public” back in public values theory, we examine the influence of public values on sector service delivery preferences for government, nonprofit, or for‐profit delivery across six service areas ranging from simple services such as trash collection to complex services such as child welfare. We find equity predicts a preference for government service delivery across areas, while efficiency corresponds to a preference for for‐profit service delivery. Nonprofit sector preferences varied across service areas; equity corresponds to simple services such as street maintenance, whereas effectiveness corresponds to complex human services such as elder care. Public administrators should be cognizant of the public value trade‐offs that underlie sector preferences for public services to design and implement service arrangements in line with the preferences of the public they serve.

A Study on Street Tree Maintenance: Focusing on Suseong-gu, Daegu in South Korea

Purpose: In urban society, street trees are closely related to our lives. However, many people do not recognize the existence and necessity of street trees on ordinary days. This study investigated the changes in the growth of street trees exposed to environmental damage and artificial management due to street maintenance. This paper aims to provide necessary data for street tree management by analyzing changes in the growth of street trees according to the road size in terms of temporal change and management of street trees.
 Method: Field surveys were conducted from June to September 2021 to identify the direction of maintenance for street trees by road size. The researchers collected and analyzed data on street tree roads and basic plan data on street trees in Suseong-gu in 1997. This paper conducted One-way ANOVA by six items(tree height, root-collar diameter, crown width, diameter at breast height, degree of tree health, and degree of environmental damage). Microsoft Office Excel 2007 program and Spss Statistics 21 statistical program were used for statistical analysis.
 Results: As a result of analyzing the current state of street trees in 2021 and the change amount by road size in 1997 data, on average, the tree height increased by 5.4m, the root-collar diameter increased by 22.3cm, the crown width increased by 2.1m, and the diameter at breast height increased by 12.8cm. The degree of tree health decreased by 0.2 points, and the degree of environmental damage decreased by 1.1 points.
 Conclusion: The tree form of street trees did not have a natural tree shape due to artificial management, and street trees were damaged due to lack of management and damage from surrounding shops. The analysis results show that the appearance of street trees has grown, but street trees' growth aspects(tree health, environmental damage) have regressed due to incorrect pruning work with tall trees according to laws and ordinances. This paper suggests that street trees' species selection and improvement supplement work should be done through continuous research in the future, and systematic and efficient management should be continuously carried out for satisfaction with street trees and pedestrians.

Municipal street maintenance challenges and management practices in Sweden

The municipal street network acts as a multifunctional asset by providing people, vehicles and public services with a well-functioning infrastructure. To keep it in good condition, optimal maintenance measures are required which would result in an efficient use of taxpayers’ money. This paper investigates the street network deterioration processes and the management practices that the municipal administrations have applied in Sweden. The study is based on a survey with Swedish municipalities using questionnaires and complementary interviews. The answers provide insight into a wide range of common pavement distresses and deterioration factors, along with pavement management practices. The study identifies that potholes, surface unevenness and alligator cracking are the most cited challenges, while pavement ageing, heavy traffic and patches are the most noted causes. Similarly, the cold climate and population density are influential factors in pavement deterioration. Allocation of the maintenance and rehabilitation and reconstruction budget is higher in the northern part of the country as well as in densely populated municipalities. Condition data collection and use of commercial Pavement Management Systems (PMS) are limited. Addressing the challenges effectively may be possible through the enhancement of the budget, feasible/clear guidelines from municipal councils/politicians, and reducing the gap between street network administrations and utility service providers.

These Boots Are Made for Walking: A Qualitative Study on the Perceived Barriers to Pedestrian Mobility in Madrid

As an active mode of transportation, walking has proven to be an effective strategy to tackle environmental problems while improving health. The current paper highlights the main factors that either encourage or deter pedestrians in their daily trips by analyzing the arisen discussions in three different Focus Groups (FGs), which were later synthesized into factors ranking according to their positive or negative outcomes. The results help identify these factors and show how a variety of target groups (seniors, young adults, middle-aged adults, divided by male and female perspective) perceive the city in different ways: younger adults prioritize accessibility and quality of the infrastructure, females highlighted the insecurity suffered during nighttime trips, and older adults emphasized the relevance of street maintenance. Finally, the benefits of walking on physical and mental health are viewed positively amongst all target groups, considering walking as a means to help people reduce stress.

Never Enough (Until You Earn It)

Does basic income encourage laziness? What obligations does a country that willingly accepts a refugee has to the person they accept? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, Sbongo is an African refugee who escaped to Turkey and was granted asylum in Germany. His life immediately improves as Germany offers him “basic income,” more money than he has ever received in his life. Initially, he spends his days walking the streets, enjoying a simple life. However, over time, he becomes jealous of the wealth of those around him. First, he gets a job at a Kebob store and loses his basic income stipend. Later, he is fired and ends up homeless. After hitting rock bottom he gets into a job training program, gets a job doing street maintenance, and starts to feel the pride of the money he earned.

Street environments and crime around low-income and minority schools: Adopting an environmental audit tool to assess crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED)

Crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) suggests an association between micro-scale environmental conditions and crime, but little empirical research exists on the detailed street-level environmental features associated with crime near low-income and minority schools. This study focuses on the neighborhoods around 14 elementary schools serving lower income populations in Seattle, WA to assess if the distribution of crime incidences (2013–2017) is linked with the street-level environmental features that reflect CPTED principles. We used a total of 40 audit variables that were included in the four domains derived from the broken windows theory and CPTED principles: natural surveillance (e.g., number of windows, balconies, and a sense of surveillance), territoriality (e.g., crime watch signs, trees), image/maintenance (e.g., graffiti and a sense of maintenance/cleanness), and geographical juxtaposition (e.g., bus stops, presence of arterial). We found that multiple crime types had significant associations with CPTED components at the street level. Among the CPTED domains, two image/maintenance features (i.e., maintenance of streets and visual quality of buildings) and two geographical juxtaposition features (i.e., being adjacent to multi-family housing and bus stops) were consistently associated with both violent and property crime. The findings suggest that local efforts to improve maintenance of streets and visual quality of buildings and broader planning efforts to control specific land uses near schools are important to improve safety in marginalized neighborhoods near schools that tend to be more vulnerable to crime. Our research on micro-scale environmental determinants of crime can also serve as promising targets for CPTED research and initiatives.

A Study on the Improvement Task of the Old Low-Rise Residential House Repair Project through the Urban Regeneration Project

Among the detailed projects of urban regeneration projects, the house repair project is the most responsive to residents. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to derive improvement measures for housing repair public support projects in old low-rise residential areas when promoting urban regeneration projects in declining areas and to present implications. Until now, public support for housing repair has been providing housing repair benefits to low-income families, but detailed guidelines were ambiguous because it was the first project, and the connection was not smooth due to the discovery and development of local housing repair operators. The purpose of this study is to systematically examine the improvements of the current urban regeneration housing repair public support project through expert interviews by group by dividing it into housing repair guidelines, intermediate support organizations, and sustainable business models. Through this study analysis, improvements such as diversification of budget execution methods and expansion of support scope, operation of business information and registration system, provision of standard quality standards, and enhancement of residents’ participation through connection with street maintenance were derived.

Deviation Point Curriculum Learning for Trajectory Outlier Detection in Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems

Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) are emerging in the field of transportation systems, which can be used to provide safety, sustainability, efficiency, communication and cooperation between vehicles, roadside units, and traffic command centres. With improved network structure and traffic mobility, a large amount of trajectory-based data is generated. Trajectory-based knowledge graphs help to give semantic and interconnection capabilities for intelligent transport systems. Prior works consider trajectory as the single point of deviation for the individual outliers. However, in real-world transportation systems, trajectory outliers can be seen in the groups, e.g., a group of vehicles that deviates from a single point based on the maintenance of streets in the vicinity of the intelligent transportation system. In this paper, we propose a trajectory deviation point embedding and deep clustering method for outlier detection. We first initiate network structure and nodes’ neighbours to construct a structural embedding by preserving nodes relationships. We then implement a method to learn the latent representation of deviation points in road network structures. A hierarchy multilayer graph is designed with a biased random walk to generate a set of sequences. This sequence is implemented to tune the node embeddings. After that, embedding values of the node were averaged to get the trip embedding. Finally, LSTM-based pairwise classification method is initiated to cluster the embedding with similarity-based measures. The results obtained from the experiments indicate that the proposed learning trajectory embedding captured structural identity and increased <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">F-measure</i> by 5.06% and 2.4% while compared with generic <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Node2Vec</i> and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Struct2Vec</i> methods.

Sustainable Architecture in the Urban Studies on Walkability in Public Housing

This research aims to observe the existing streetscapes feature related to walkability in the area of The People’s Housing Program in Kerinchi which serves as part of the Government Program for the resettlement of squatters and to fulfill the shelter needs of the low-income group (bottom 40%) in Malaysia. The stakeholder’s perception of the effectiveness of the existing streetscape feature will be collected and analyzed.The study employs a quantitative approach, data collection is done via on-site study and survey questionnaires. Streetscape features were analyzed from four criteria – enjoyment, safety, comfort, and accessibility. This study identified most of the respondents will spend less time walking due to lacking enjoyment (55.33%), exposed physical safety (42.30%), poor sanitation and street maintenance (54.36%),and poor walkability design for special-needs people (53.60%). The outcome of the research findings suggests several methods in improving walkability by enhancing the walking environment and facilities, implementation of the pedestrian-only zone, congestion pricing, and more active participation by governing bodies.

전주시 원도심 공간의 의미 변화

This study examines the process in which a specific space in the Old downtown of Jeonju City is called differently and meaningfully by local residents according to the changes of the times. The area of Jungang-dong, Jeonju City, Called0 ‘Wedding Street’, was a commercial and administrative center from the 1950s to the 1990s. Administrative agencies were concentrated near ‘Wedding Street’, so public officials, teachers, and the wealthy used to purchase and repair watches and precious metals. In addition, the street was called “Jewelry Street” because gold and silver shops were concentrated, and it was signified as a women-centered consumption space due to its connection with nearby markets and changes in consumption culture. In “Jewelry Street,” hanbok, brand clothing, precious metals, and expensive luxury goods were mainly traded, and these were linked to the ritual of marriage. So it made the marriage-related industries concentrated on this street. In the 2000s, urban revitalization policies were implemented amid the stagnation of old downtown, and local governments named the street area “Wedding Street” and implemented street maintenance projects. Since then, space reorganization has intensified around marriage-related industries, Accordingly, the consumption and semanticization process of local residents in this street has also been centered on marriage. Wedding Street fell into recession again amid changes in the consumer culture related to marriage. However, with the recent popularity of “-ridan-gil,” it has been called “Weridan-gil,” and the composition of the space has changed into that composed of the restaurants, bars, and cafes aimed to the consumption culture of young merchants and Consumers, and the process of meaning is emerging through SNS. As such, this study reveals the interaction between the subject that makes meaning according to the change of the times and the factors that influence the change of meaning. In addition, This study also showed the dynamics of space composition and practice from the socio-cultural perspective. In addition, it will provide implications for the implementation of various policies to revitalize the original city center nationwide by revealing that administrative-led policy implementation cannot take precedence over voluntary interaction of local people.

MAPPING STREET OBSTRUCTIONS IN AN URBAN STREET ENVIRONMENT USING MLS DATA

Abstract. It is crucial to ensure no obstruction above urban streets for drivers. If street obstructions limit the sight of drivers, it may reduce the ability of drivers to perceive the surrounding road conditions. Street obstructions are usually caused by a variety of different factors. It includes street trees overgrowing into the space above the road or the wrong placement of the infrastructure. To ensure road traffic safety, transportation agencies are required to obtain the existence of street obstructions. To address the issue, this paper proposes a novel method to detect street obstructions. The method consists of two main steps: non-obstruction space construction by the Alpha-Smooth method and street obstruction analysis. The proposed approach is able to map the thematic map of street obstructions in the urban environment. The algorithm was tested on urban streets in Shanghai, China, and successfully obtained obstructions information. The results indicated that street trees are the main components of road obstructions. The proposed approach can make contribution to street maintenance and obstructions monitoring that aim to develop safer urban street environments.

Macro and trace elements in the black pine needles as inorganic indicators of urban traffic emissions

Urban activities intensify air pollution by increasing the amount of particulate matter (PM). The trees collect PM by adsorption on the leaf surface and simultaneously absorb inorganic components. In this research, we investigated the potential of the black pine as bioindicator of road traffic emissions in Cluj-Napoca (Romania). We defined three sites types with different exposure to the road traffic (streets, outskirts, parks) and a control site far from the city. We quantified 17 inorganic components (Al, B, Ba, Ca, Cr, Cu, Fe, K, Li, Mg, Mn, Na, Ni, P, Pb, Sr, Zn) by MP-AES (microwave-plasma atomic emission spectroscopy) technique in the one-year-old needles and we identified the best candidates for biomonitoring purposes.The concentration of Ba, Cr, Cu and Fe showed the most sensitive variations with the road traffic intensity. While in the streets the Ba, Cu and Fe increased by 2.8–3.5 times in relation to the control site, the Cr varied in the highest degree exhibiting ratios of 2.2 (parks), 3.3 (outskirts) and 6.3 (streets). The success of these elements lies in several characteristics: they are closely related to non-exhaust emissions, they are readily absorbed through the leaves rather than the roots, and they tend to accumulate in the needles instead of being relocated to other organs. The street maintenance activities caused considerable accumulation of Na in the trees from the roadsides, but had no impact over the trees from the parks. The elements originating mainly in the re-suspended urban dust (Ni, Pb, Sr) equally affected the pines from the streets and parks.

ACCIDENT ANALYSIS – THE WAY TO EFFECTIVE TRAFFIC SAFETY MANAGEMENT ON ROADS

Road safety management begins with a detailed analysis of accidents, which is reflected in Article 24 of the Law of Ukraine “On Road Traffic” which states that when performing repairs and maintenance of roads, streets and railway crossings road maintenance organizations in the first place should take measures for road safety on the basis of accounting and analysis of road accidents, results of inspections and surveys of roads, streets and railway crossings, and especially in emergency and dangerous areas and in places of concentration of road accidents. The problem of reducing the accident rate and reducing the number of victims of road accidents during the maintenance of roads has so far been solved mainly by identifying areas (places) of concentration of accidents with the development of measures to improve road conditions and improve the organization of traffic on them and conducting annual commission spring and autumn inspections of the road network by representatives of road organizations and the police. However, the areas of concentration of road accidents were not fully covered on the road network of local significance due to the lack of accurate reference of the places of accident in the accident registration cards, as well as they were not identified on the streets and roads of cities and other settlements due to the absence of any criteria for their identification and therefore the maximum efficiency from introduction of management of sites (places) of concentration of road accident isn’t reached. The article analyzes the criteria for determining the areas of concentration of accidents on public roads in different periods, examines the dynamics of the number of areas of concentration of accidents and considers other modern opportunities for effective traffic safety management, in particular, inspection (inspection) of existing roads.

Variability of sense of place in Nigerian coastal communities

AbstractThis study gathered residents' perceptual data to explore the variability of sense of place in coastal communities in Lagos, Nigeria. A questionnaire was administered to respondents from one in every 10 buildings using a systematic random sampling technique. Each respondent (preferably the oldest family member) was surveyed in the chosen residential buildings. In total, 265 questionnaires were completed and submitted for analysis. The findings revealed that residents' satisfaction levels with living in a coastal community were directly and positively proportional to the coastline's distance. In addition to this insight, the residents' satisfaction levels during the dry season differed significantly from that shown during the wet season. The results indicated a significant spatiotemporal relationship between satisfaction with safety, maintenance of streets, vehicular circulation, traffic density, and recreational facilities, altogether with a sense of place. It was established that sense of place was, at times, spatially heterogeneous and showed seasonal variability in coastal communities of Nigeria.

Machine Learning for Identifying Group Trajectory Outliers

Prior works on the trajectory outlier detection problem solely consider individual outliers. However, in real-world scenarios, trajectory outliers can often appear in groups, e.g., a group of bikes that deviates to the usual trajectory due to the maintenance of streets in the context of intelligent transportation. The current paper considers the Group Trajectory Outlier (GTO) problem and proposes three algorithms. The first and the second algorithms are extensions of the well-known DBSCAN and k NN algorithms, while the third one models the GTO problem as a feature selection problem. Furthermore, two different enhancements for the proposed algorithms are proposed. The first one is based on ensemble learning and computational intelligence, which allows for merging algorithms’ outputs to possibly improve the final result. The second is a general high-performance computing framework that deals with big trajectory databases, which we used for a GPU-based implementation. Experimental results on different real trajectory databases show the scalability of the proposed approaches.

Пропозиції щодо розробки єдиних підходів оцінювання функціональних властивостей підмітально-прибиральних машин вітчизняного виробництва

Maintenance of city streets and roads is an integral part of the road infrastructure operation. The main task of summer roads cleaning is to remove all types of pollution that accumulate on a roadway surface, sidewalks, public transport stops, which are a source of dusty air and littering urban areas. Regulatory documents are introduced in different countries with the roads maintenance requirements. First of all, the mechanized sweeping quality depends on the machines sweeping efficiency indicators level. Analysis of information resources showed the lack of a unified approach to determining the quality indicators of mechanized street sweeping. This makes it impossible for consumers to compare and choose new street sweepers. This paper proposes a methodology for testing street sweepers. To simulate the most common types of garbage on the road, it was proposed to use sand, crushed stone and sawdust from wood production as a typical test material. The developed technique was tested during testing of a new sweeping machine КВСЗ-4002 produced by “Kryukovsky Railway Car Building Works”. The carried out tests have shown the possibility of using this technique to determine the cleaning efficiency coefficient (cleaning efficiency) and other indicators of a sweeping machines work quality. The proposed sweepers testing method can be considered as a solution of the problem of typing different street pollution types.

Residents’ Resentment of Neighbourhood Choice in Port Harcourt Municipality

This study examined residents’ resentment of neighborhood choice in Port Harcourt municipality, Nigeria. The study utilized both secondary and primary data sources. Primary data were collected using face-to-face administration of a largely pre-coded household questionnaire, to a probability sample of 396 respondents, drawn from the neighbourhoods. Data analysis was based on responses from 193 questionnaires retrieved and the univariate analytical method was adopted. The study found that large percentage of residents reported a negative rating of neighbourhood choice indicators such as waste collection and disposal, safety of lives and property, fire stations, cleanliness of the neighbourhood, residential planning, and government provision of housing for the poor, hospitals/clinics, recreational areas, maintenance of streets, aesthetic condition, noise level and the neighbourhood condition. Residents rated markets adequate and fire hazards low. The study concluded that majority of the residents rated neighbourhood quality indicators inadequate. The study recommended that government should intervene in these areas to improve the neighbourhood quality to achieve sustainability.

Growth patterns of roadside Tilia spp. affected by climate and street maintenance in Helsinki

Urban trees growing in roadside locations encounter stressful impacts in terms of atmospheric and soil conditions and mechanical damage. Here, a set of lime trees from a roadside location in Helsinki was analysed for their radial growth and tree-ring width variability in relation to climate records, effects from salt injury and mechanical damage the trees have experienced during their lifetime. Cross sections of the stems were found to be eccentric in shape, the maximum radius being commonly between NW and NE (the direction of the street), whereas the minimum radius was typically found towards W or E. The level of mechanical damage corresponded with the level of eccentricity expressed as the ratio between the longest and shortest radii. Growth rates approximated those of lime trees from parks in Tallinn (Estonia) but were markedly lower than those recorded previously from London (UK). The tree-ring chronology was correlated positively with the late-winter (February through March) temperature and early-summer (June) precipitation. The summer moisture signal was found to enhance over the recent decades, which likely indicates increased vulnerability to droughts and water scarcity. In addition to climatic events, the yearly amounts of road salting were negatively correlated with tree-ring anomalies. This evidence demonstrates the multiple stressors to the trees in urban roadside locations guiding their management options and shows the potential of Tilia to become a major tree genus for urban dendrochronological studies.

Access to bike lanes and childhood obesity: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

SummaryThe lack of bike lane access has been a proven risk factor for childhood obesity due to its role in discouraging healthy lifestyles. However, there has not been a systematic review of this important association in the existing literature. This study aims to fill this gap. A literature search was conducted in the Cochrane Library, PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science for studies published from 1 January 2019 onwards that examined the association between bike lane access and weight‐related behaviours and outcomes among children aged <18 years. A total of 21 studies were included in this systematic review. Among them, most of the studies showed that bike lane access was significantly associated with children and adolescents' physical activity (PA), whereas only two studies showed a negative association. Meta‐analysis also supported these findings and showed that bike lane access was significantly associated with children and adolescents' PA (odds ratio [OR] = 1.57, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.37–1.81). Additionally, we reviewed how bike lane characteristics and microenvironment variables such as children and adolescents' choice of bicycle travel mode, the degree of separation of cycle path, cycle path unevenness, and street maintenance were associated with adolescents' preferences and intention to cycle. This systematic review and meta‐analysis strongly suggests that bike lane access is associated with children and adolescents' PA. Nonetheless, it was difficult to draw a conclusion on the association between bike lane access and weight‐related outcomes.

A STEEP-cum-SWOT approach for maintenance strategy evaluation for an off-grid PV-powered street lighting system

Recently, the installation of street light systems in remote communities has experienced significant improvement. This improvement has a direct relationship with the innovations in off-grid standalone energy sources. However, there exists sparse information on standalone PV-powered street light system maintenance. This is because existing models consider mainly the technical aspects of this system maintenance. The current study, therefore, presents a robust perspective on this system maintenance. It presents a framework that evaluates maintenance strategies for off-grid PV-powered street light systems; the framework considered STEEP (social, technical, economic, environmental and policy) requirements during maintenance activities. These requirements were used to design a SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunity and threats) framework that analyzes maintenance strategies for this system using a standard TOPS IS (Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) and a fuzzy TOPSIS (F-TOPSIS) methods. Data from a community in Nigeria were used to test the proposed STEEP-cum-SWOT framework performance. It was observed that risk-based and condition-based maintenance strategies are the least and most suitable strategies for a standalone off-grid PV-powered street light system in the community.