Motor Buses Research Articles

Driving adaptability of highway steel-concrete composite beam bridge with multiple damages: theory, technology and practice

ABSTRACT To enhance the post-disaster highway driving speed evaluation system for steel-concrete composite beam bridge (SCCBB), a human-vehicle-bridge coupled driving adaptability analysis method is proposed. This method integrates considerations of both driving safety and comfort. Numerical simulation is employed to utilize a damaged SCCBB as the engineering context for studying vehicle rollover safety, vibration acceleration limits, and driving comfort. The analysis considers various vehicle types, including sedan cars, mini vans, motor buses, and trucks, resulting in recommended speed limits for each category. The study reveals that trucks demonstrate lower susceptibility to rollover accidents compared to sedan cars, mini vans, and motor buses under constant damage grade and vehicle speed conditions. However, increased damage grade and road surface roughness elevate rollover risks and diminish driver comfort. To ensure smooth post-disaster traffic flow on SCCBB and maintain acceptable driving comfort and speed levels, it is recommended to enforce speed limits: below 60 km/h for sedan cars, below 40 km/h for mini vans and motor buses, and below 80 km/h for trucks. The primary aim of this study is to provide technical guidance for the safe operation and maintenance of post-disaster SCCBB.

Powered modernity, contested space: literary modernism and the London tram

ABSTRACT A literary history of London’s tramways spans the period between late-Victorian and High Modernism, encompassing naturalist fiction, reportage, creative non-fiction, modernist poetry, and the psychological novel. The same timespan saw the horse tram give way to the electric tram, which itself faced replacement by motor buses and trolleybuses during the 1930s. This essay intersects these two narratives, of literary history and of transport history, as a contribution to mobility humanities focused on the city. Trams and tramways had a peculiarly in-between identity as vehicles and environments emerging from powered modernity but associated with the proletariat, as well as the urban districts where they lived. Reading literary texts by Arthur Morrison, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf, spotlighted here as part of a broader corpus extending from the 1880s to the 1980s, brings the tramways’ interstitiality to life. Trams, the literary readings demonstrate, were a contact zone that threatened to overturn separations of class and gender, as well as presaging an expanded future in which the city would be built around the industrial working class. The curtailment of tram operations in 1930s London meant that such a future never came to pass, but literary texts are windows onto its possibility.

Wooshing London

Ji Eun Lee, “Wooshing London: Unsettling Acceleration in H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay” (pp. 455–490) This essay reads H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909) in the context of “wooshing” London—I take the word from the story—to see how the unsettling effect of this rapid urban mobility translates into the generic form of the novel. At the turn of the twentieth century, London was wooshing—that is to say, people and things in the city were moving by being displaced into a rushing flow, unprepared and unconnected, as the city was taken by revolutionary forms of urban transportation such as pneumatic and electric tubes, trams, elevators, escalators, motor buses, and cars. The word “woosh,” which was first used around the time that this mobility came into being, denotes a quick rushing movement based on hydraulic flow, and linguistically it functions as an interjection or a void in the semantic and syntactic flow of a sentence. Tono-Bungay shows different modes of unsettlement pervading London such as the whirlpool, passing stream, and flood. Yet it presents “woosh”—the way in which the patent medicine Tono-Bungay works and moves in commerce—as the ultimate mode of unsettlement that disconnects and displaces the locus of movement. Likewise, in Tono-Bungay, there is no locus of agency in the process of urban walking or in the reading process disrupting the narrative syntax. By emptying out the individual locus in the disconnecting, accelerating flow of his narrative—as London does in its urban mobility—Wells revises the genre into a form that embodies the city’s unsettling power.

Fast online decision tree-based scheme for predicting transient and short-term voltage stability status and determining driving force of instability

This paper presents a novel fast machine learning-based scheme for predicting the transient and short-term voltage (STV) stability status and determining the driving force of instability, without any need to measure post-fault-clearance data. In the proposed scheme, by employing decision tree (DT) classifier and using the measurements of the installed phasor measurement unit (PMU) at the generator and the induction motor (IM) buses, first, the stability status of either transient or STV (including the sustained low voltage without recovery and the voltage collapse) is predicted just after disturbance in Wide Area Measurement System (WAMS) framework. Then, for unstable cases, based on transient and STV stability mechanisms, the driving force of the instability is determined between transient and STV instability. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, the method has been tested on IEEE 39-bus test system and IEEE Nordic test system. The simulation results show the proposed scheme is highly accurate and timely.

Environmental safety diagnosis and maintenance specific of heavy vehicles and buses engines functioning with compressed natural gas

The results of a statistical survey of the content of toxic components CO, CH and NOX in the exhaust gases of 38 “LiAZ” buses (4th and 5th ecological classes with foreign-made engines) at the nominal and increased engine crankshaft rotation speeds in idle running at compressed (compressed) natural gas in Moscow and adjacent areas of the region. It has been established that, as a first approximation, these modes provide information on the deterioration of environmental safety, primarily in relation to nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions, the control of which in ordinary operation by the existing technical regulations for all types of vehicles, including heavy-duty gas vehicles are not provided. Statistical processing, with an assessment of the maximum permissible value of this diagnostic parameter in two idle modes (no more than 50 M-1 for the best attainable states of buses of the 5th ecological class), showed that the absence of such a simple control leads to approximately 75% of faulty states. These indicators can be significantly improved with the introduction of monitoring of operational monitoring of NOx and the development of more complex maintenance technologies. Herewith there is a significant environmental safety improvement of gas motor buses in comparison with diesel versions (approx. 6-8 times) and the technological and economic feasibility of their use for many regions of the country. Preliminary studies of the structure of such a technology have been carried out on a “KAMAZ” gas vehicle, which has an engine control different from “LiAZ” buses. At the same time, the higher NOX emissions level could be considered as allowable for intercity bus transportation and for activities outside the city, however, they can be reduced by about 3…5 times due to the use of the latest versions of pre-chamber devices “Ball Lightning”.

Binary Logistic Model for Estimation of Mode Shift into Delhi Metro

This paper aims to study the public transport mode choice behaviour of commuters in Delhi so that appropriate strategies to incentivize the use of public transport can be developed. We examine the efficacy of a multivariate statistical modelling approach to predict the probability of non-metro commuters to shift to the Delhi metro. We also analyse the reasons for this shift from private motor vehicles (PMVs) and buses. Data is collected through a survey of the metro commuters over various metro lines. A binomial logistic regression model is formulated to predict whether existing metro users have shifted from buses or are new additions to public transport shifting from PMVs. The model is validated well through several methods. The model analysis reveals that 57% of the metro users have shifted from buses and 28.8% from PMVs. The shift is more amongst females than males.

“Even Our 2nd Class Cars are More Comfortable Than Motor Buses!”: An Analysis of Victorian Railway Posters Between the Wars

ABSTRACTRailway posters from the 1920s and 1930s are now regarded as one of the high points of twentieth-century graphic art. While their iconographies have been the subject of considerable scholarly analysis, the contexts in which they operated and functioned have received much less attention. This paper, which focuses on posters produced by Victorian Railways for a range of purposes not necessarily travel related, redresses this. It is argued that railways posters, which operated in conjunction with other forms of railway propaganda, provided a convenient and attractive way for the state to operate on its population, at a distance. Hence, they were used as rhetorical devices to exhort Victorians to travel by rail, to eat more fruit and thereby assist the state’s primary producers. As competition from motorisation became more intense during the Depression, resulting in pronounced and unsustainable rail deficits, the need to diversify the sources of railway revenue, as the analysed posters reveal, became more exigent.

Coordination or Competition: State Regulation of Motor Buses under Private Ownership and the Decline of Mass Transit in Pittsburgh

Coordination or Competition: State Regulation of Motor Buses under Private Ownership and the Decline of Mass Transit in Pittsburgh

Coordination or Competition: State Regulation of Motor Buses under Private Ownership and the Decline of Mass Transit in Pittsburgh

Coordination or Competition: State Regulation of Motor Buses under Private Ownership and the Decline of Mass Transit in Pittsburgh

Challenges and Approaches for Developing Ultrafine Particle Emission Inventories for Motor Vehicle and Bus Fleets

Motor vehicles in urban areas are the main source of ultrafine particles (diameters < 0.1 µm). Ultrafine particles are generally measured in terms of particle number because they have little mass and are prolific in terms of their numbers. These sized particles are of particular interest because of their ability to enter deep into the human respiratory system and contribute to negative health effects. Currently ultrafine particles are neither regularly monitored nor regulated by ambient air quality standards. Motor vehicle and bus fleet inventories, epidemiological studies and studies of the chemical composition of ultrafine particles are urgently needed to inform scientific debate and guide development of air quality standards and regulation to control this important pollution source. This article discusses some of the many challenges associated with modelling and quantifying ultrafine particle concentrations and emission rates for developing inventories and microscale modelling of motor vehicles and buses, including the challenge of understanding and quantifying secondary particle formation. Recommendations are made concerning the application of particle emission factors in developing ultrafine particle inventories for motor vehicle fleets. The article presents a précis of the first published inventory of ultrafine particles (particle number) developed for the urban South-East Queensland motor vehicle and bus fleet in Australia, and comments on the applicability of the comprehensive set of average particle emission factors used in this inventory, for developing ultrafine particle (particle number) and particle mass inventories in other developed countries.

Motor bus transfer: considerations and methods

This paper addresses the types of motor bus transfer (MBT) available, explores its technical challenges, and analyzes the creation of proper settings when implementing an MBT system for power plant spinning motor auxiliary buses or industrial plant spinning motor buses. Classic approaches are described and conditions are explored that make these transfers proper or improper. Advanced implementations of MBT methodology that use high-speed sensing, decision making, and breaker control to account for the dynamic conditions in and about the plant, such as motor dispatch and loading, new source conditions, and faults are explored.

Trams, Trials and Tribulations: the development of Cathedral Square, Christchurch 1900-18

Cathedral Square Christchurch is the city's premier urban space. Yet it is without doubt the most debated and controversial two and half hectares of urban design space in the city. Set out in the shape of cross rather than a square, the last five decades of the nineteenth century saw just as much controversy over its design and use as did the entire twentieth century and on into the beginnings of the twenty-first century. Over this time its design has been the butt of jokes, the subject of constant political debate and subject of many learned articles, seminars and conference papers.
 The period 1900 to 1918 was one of intensive design change as Christchurch moved into the era of electric trams, motor buses and motor cars. While handsome buildings grew on the square's perimeter during this period, in 1907 a less than attractive architecturally-designed transport shelter appeared in its centre causing architect Samuel Hurst Seager, a member of the Christchurch Beautifying Society, to describe it as a public building of "… appalling ugliness."
 Inspired by the title "Tramway Trials and Tribulations - the saga of the tramway shelter" this paper will examine the design issues surrounding Cathedral Square during the period 1900-1918 – a period that saw the first competition to improve the aesthetic reading of this space.

Development of VRLA battery for hybrid bus

Abstract Valve regulated lead–acid (VRLA) batteries named SEH65 series for hybrid vehicles have long been used in hybrid inverter-controlled motor and retarder system (HIMR) buses developed by Hino Motors Ltd. In order to elucidate the points for improving the battery performance, the battery performance, which were obtained during field use and by bench test, was analyzed in details. As the result, a new VRLA battery, with which longer life performance can be expected, has been developed by improving the positive grid corrosion resistance and adopting a new additive for the negative plates. In addition, it was found that estimation of residual life of the battery is possible by measuring the battery voltage in high-rate discharging during bus use and by adjusting it with the field use conditions.

Exposure to emissions of 1,3-butadiene and benzene in the cabins of moving motor vehicles and buses in sydney, australia

Concentrations of 1,3-butadiene and benzene have been measured inside the cabins of both pre-1986 (non-catalyst-equipped) and post-1986 (catalyst-equipped) vehicles on freeway and urban driving routes around Sydney, Australia. Mean in-vehicle concentrations of 1,3-butadiene and benzene observed for the newer cars during the morning peak-hour were 5.5 ± 2.l and 22.1 ± 4.1 ppb respectively. Corresponding values for the older, poorly maintained vehicle were 11.5 ± 3.0 and 48.1 ± 6.9 ppb, respectively, about double those of newer vehicles. 1,3-Butadiene was only observed at significant concentrations inside the cabins of moving vehicles during peak-hour traffic. Concentrations of this species both in the ambient air, and in the vehicle cabins during freeway trips in non-peak periods, were near or below the detection limit of 0.1 ppb. Therefore, commuter trips are likely to be the major source of exposure to this compound. Both using the airconditioner and driving with the vents closed were the most effective ventilation conditions for minimising the exposure to fresh exhaust. For both conditions, trip average in-vehicle concentrations were about 70% of those in the air directly outside the vehicle. For vehicles left in a parking station during the day, exposures to 1,3-butadiene during evening commuter trips were observed to be about 1.2 times those in the morning peak-hour. Concentrations of volatile organic compounds measured inside buses were about 50% of those observed for newer cars.

The Motorization and Decline of Urban Public Transit, 1935–1950

Were intracity motor buses economically inferior to electric streetcars and electric buses in the late 1930s and l940s? The contention that they were has recently served as the basis for allegations that the decline of urban public transit was attributable, in large part, to an organized campaign intent on eliminating viable public transit. Aggregate data from trade sources allows a comparative cost and profit analysis of motor buses, electric buses, and electric streetcars for the years 1935–1950. The analysis supports the contention that motor buses were inferior. Questions regarding the applicability of criticisms of market foreclosure theory are also considered.

Product Diversification in Aircraft Manufacturing Industry

THE AIRCRAFT MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY, ever since it attained the production peaks of World War II, has been concerned with the problem of diversifying into new markets and new types of production in aodes to maintain and expand the over-all scope of its operations. This subject is of particular relevance at the present time when the current and prospective military procurement programs are increasingly geared toward missiles and away from manned aircraft. The efforts of the aircraft manufacturing companies in penetrating the civilian markets after World War II took a tremendous number of forms and developments and met with varying degrees of success and permanency. Some of these efforts were frankly designed to take immediate advantage of a temporary demand for consumer items which had been missing from the economy during World War II. Other efforts were designed to utilize the substantial cash reserves accumulated during the war, and to help tide the companies over during the reconversion period. Many aircraft companies attempted to use their know how and to concentrate on lines where their capabilities would be particularly needed, such as producing aluminum canoes and sport boats-items which required their skills in fabricating aluminum products. Some of the related products were a bit far afield from their customary product lines, including artificial hands, other prosthetic devices, and stainless steel caskets. A number of aircraft companies became subcontractors for established firms in civilian markets, building heater cases, parts for musical instruments, automobile parts, plumbing, and cabinets for radios. In some instances, aircraft firms joined with other companies to form new subsidiaries. More usually, aircraft companies-using their war-accumulated earnings and relying on tax provisions permitting the carryback of losses to offset against previously paid taxes-acquired going concerns in other industries. Typical acquisitions included a producer of motion picture equipment, a manufacturer of precision parts in the automobile field, a designer of prefabricated houses, and a maker of motor buses, trolley coaches, and marine and industrial engines.' A number of channels of distribution were used by the aircraft companies in marketing the products on which they were prime producers. Subcontracting work obviously did not present such problems. Some produced for exclusive distribution by wholesalers and jobbers. Some adopted the attitude, We make 'em-you sell 'em. The early postwar period was an era of shortages and hardly typical of the current situation or the experience to be expected in the future.

Centralized systems for motor vehicles

PREVIOUS articles in this series have dealt with centralized systems of automobile chassis lubrication that are available to motor vehicle manufacturers for fitting to private motor cars, buses and commercial vehicles. We have covered systems whose operation depends upon air and vacuum, variations in manifold temperature, pedal operated, and also a mechanical unit that is driven by cable.

Levels and Spectra of Transportation Vehicle Noise

In the recent past a program was initiated to survey vehicle, traffic, and industrial noise in the Chicago area. The phase on noise of vehicles has been completed. The investigation included street, elevated, and subway cars; diesel, steam, and electric trains; and motor buses, trucks, and automobiles. Measurements were made of over-all and octave band levels. Inside of the vehicles, flat network over-all levels ranged from 85 db in a new “L” car to 95 db in subway cars. The readings in the 400–800 c.p.s. band ranged from 68 db in an automobile to 91 db in subway cars. Outside of and close to vehicles, the flat network over-all levels ranged from 78 db for automobiles to 94 db for subway trains. Observations in the 400–800 c.p.s. band ranged from 66 db for automobiles to 87 db for subway trains. Variations in the over-all levels inside of vehicles ranged from ±1 to ±5 db. Variations the 400–800 c.p.s. band ranged from ±2 to ±5 db. Outside of the vehicles, variations ranged from ±2 to ±6 db in both the over-all and 400–800 c.p.s. band levels.

Air conditioning for motor buses : Heating, Piping and Air Conditioning, Vol. 7, No. II

We firstly show the prototype of an ohmic contact Single-Pole Double-Throw Radio Frequency Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (SPDT RF MEMS) switch operating at 50–100 GHz. The fabricated ohmic contact SPDT RF MEMS silicon switch moves both laterally and vertically, to improve the isolation at high frequencies by initially misaligning the contact part of the switch over a Coplanar Waveguide (CPW) transmission line. The lateral and vertical movement of the switch is operated by using comb and parallel plate actuators, respectively. The proposed switch was fabricated using Silicon-On-Glass (SiOG) bonding process. The insertion loss of the fabricated switch is measured according to the different operation states of the switch, in the range from 50 to 100 GHz. The fabricated length of the transmission line is 4.6 mm and the measured insertion loss and isolation are 9.13 dB and 24.37 dB at 70 GHz, respectively.

Societies and Academies

LONDON. Institute of Metpds (Derby, annual meeting), Sept. 6.—L. Aitchison: Motals in modern transport (Lecture). In general the properties that lead to the greatest employment of the non - ferrous metals and alloys are: (1) A high resistance to corrosion. (2) High valnes of thermal or electrical conductivity. (3) A low value of specific gravity. In addition, the properties of ease of machining, ease of cold working, and simplicity of casting contribute to the wider usefulness of the materials. A high resistance to corrosion is a conspicuous feature of nickel and its alloys; this property is of service in oupro-nickel condenser tubes. The alloys of copper are for this reason also used in condenser tubes and turbine blading, and gun metal and phosphor bronze castings. Metals having a much lower specific gravity than iron and steel and mechanical properties comparable with those of the ferroxis metals are of great importance in transport systems. The alloys that are actually employed are those based upon aluminium and magnesium. The alloys of aluminium at the present time are much more extensively employed than the alloys of magnesium. A variety of aluminium casting alloys can be employed, and are more or loss interchangeable, but the majority of the wrought parts are made in duralumin. They are user) in rail coaches and food containers, in constructing panels and structural sections in tramcars, motor-cars, and motor buses, in automobile engines and in aircraft. Various kinds of non-ferrous metals having tin, or lead, or copper as their basis are used as antifriction materials.