Physical Transport Infrastructure Research Articles

Understanding the Role of Public Transportation in Supporting the Care Economy in Washington, DC, USA

Women’s empowerment is a powerful engine for personal and societal economic development and well-being. Nevertheless, gender biases in physical infrastructure investments lead to negative consequences for women and children that reduce their empowerment and limit their economic benefits. Public fixed-route buses, such as those in Washington, DC, illustrate how physical transportation infrastructure has innate gender biases. These young residents likely depend on strollers to travel longer than a few blocks. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) runs the public transportation system in Washington, DC. In 2021, 7% of DC’s 720,000 residents were under five. WMATA maintains a fleet of approximately 1595 buses, 95% of which banned the onboarding of open strollers until recently. This ban directly limited the use of Metro buses for the caregivers of young children, primarily women. It also reduced the opportunities for these caregivers to participate in DC’s economic life. In neighborhoods dependent on buses for essential mobility, the stroller ban reduces employment, healthcare, social service, educational, and recreational offerings beyond walkable distances. This paper examines the publicly available discussions and actions that led to the updated stroller policy and offers opportunities for improving caregiver transit access in Washington, DC, and, by extension, other cities worldwide.

Soils as Carbon Stores and Sinks: Expectations, Patterns, Processes, and Prospects of Transitions

The few percent of soil organic carbon (SOC) among mineral components form the interface of climate, plant growth, soil biological processes, physical transport infrastructure, and chemical transformations. We explore maps, models, myths, motivation, means of implementation, and modalities for transformation. Theories of place relate geographic variation in SOC to climate, soil types, land cover, and profile depth. Process-level theories of biophysical change and socioeconomic theories of induced change explain SOC transitions that follow from land use change when a declining curve is bent and recovery toward SOC saturation starts. While the desirability of recovering from SOC deficits has been mainstreamed into climate policy, the effectiveness of proposed measures taken remains contested. Process-level requirements for transitions at plot and landscape scales remain uncertain. Expectations of policy-induced SOC transitions have to align with national cross-sectoral C accounting and be managed realistically with land users (farmers) and commodity supply chains (private sector, consumers).

Mechanism System to Reduce the Pendulum Effect of a Load for Delivery Drone

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also referred to as "drones," are becoming more widely accepted as a typical form of transportation for a range of purposes in the logistics sector. Drones are anticipated to outperform traditional vehicles in a number of ways, including with a constant, quick speed, travel is straightforward, there is no exposure to traffic, and there is no requirement for physical transportation infrastructure. When an aircraftis in a sideslip, these surfaces generate sideward lift forces, which is known as the pendulum effect. The keel effect, also known as the "Pendulum Effect," occurs when the effect of sideways forces above the center of gravity in producing a rolling moment is increased by having a lower center of gravity. The load shift, also known as the pendulum effect, reduces flight efficiency and may unbalance the UAV, resulting in catastrophic failure. The purpose of this project is to construct a mechanism system toreduce the pendulum effect of a load for the delivery drone and to investigate the numbers of pendulum sway with the different types of loads. The mechanism for this project was constructed by using a 3D printer. The experiment process was used to carry out this project. This project's variables included various types of loads, string length, and the number of sways. The data obtained in this project are important to determine which design is the best for the delivery drone. Unfortunately, the data from the experiment gave the same result for all designs. For future studies try to come up with new concepts for how to construct the mechanism system to reduce the pendulum effect of a load for delivery drone and compare all the concepts.

How does physical transport infrastructure impact on logistics transport development: Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam case

How does physical transport infrastructure impact on logistics transport development: Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam case

The Successes and Challenges of Kenya’s Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway Transport Operations: A Special Reference to the Users

This article examined the successes and challenges of Kenya’s standard gauge railway for users in transport operations. The constrained operations in Kenya’s existing colonial railway system have contributed to connectivity barriers and inefficiencies in the transport sector. Standard Gauge Railway’s construction aimed to address these gaps and facilitate cargo and passenger transport operations in Kenya and across borders. This study used a descriptive research design in the form of a survey and adopted a mixed research method of qualitative and quantitative data with primary data collected through questionnaires and interviews. The population of interest was the train users (passengers and cargo transporters). The findings suggested that the railway has generally enhanced transport operations for passengers and freight through reduced travelling time, improved transport safety and security, and improved mobility and accessibility. While the SGR has led to reduced travel costs for passengers, the cost of freight transport remains relatively high.The SGR has provided an alternative for freight and passenger transport, but there are challenges such as logistical and administrative challenges in cargo clearance, ticketing issues, and passengers' “First mile and Last mile” challenges. While the improvement of physical transport infrastructure and connectivity is significant, these challenges should be transformed into enablers to realize the railway’s full potential. This research, therefore, recommends for; effective transfer of the cargo clearance and forwarding paperwork from Mombasa to Nairobi; development of a transport link between the railway and the two major cities to solve the “first mile” and “last mile” transport challenges for passengers, and to audit the ticketing system to identify and sanction cartels involved in ticketing malpractices. The overall conclusion is that generally, the railway has added value in Kenya’s transport sector; passengers now have a cheaper, reliable and safer mode of transport while cargo is transported in a more reliable and safer way. The SGR is thus a transformative infrastructural project for Kenya; it symbolizes a country on a pressing need to transform herself into a middle-income economy supported by modern infrastructure.

Exploring the Potential of Twitter to Understand Traffic Events and Their Locations in Greater Mumbai, India

Detecting traffic events and their locations is important for an effective transportation management system and better urban policy making. Traffic events are related to traffic accidents, congestion, parking issues, to name a few. Currently, traffic events are detected through static sensors e.g., CCTV camera, loop detectors. However they have limited spatial coverage and high maintenance cost, especially in developing regions. On the other hand, with Web 2.0 and ubiquitous mobile platforms, people can act as social sensors sharing different traffic events along with their locations. We investigated whether Twitter – a social media platform can be useful to understand urban traffic events from tweets in India. However, such tweets are informal and noisy and containing vernacular geographical information making the location retrieval task challenging. So far most authors have used geotagged tweets to identify traffic events which accounted for only 0.1%-3% or sometimes less than that. Recently Twitter has removed precise geotagging, further decreasing the utility of such approaches. To address these issues, this research explored how ungeotagged tweets could be used to understand traffic events in India. We developed a novel framework that does not only categorize traffic related tweets but also extracts the locations of the traffic events from the tweet content in Greater Mumbai. The results show that an SVM based model performs best detecting traffic related tweets. While extracting location information, a hybrid georeferencing model consists of a supervised learning algorithm and a number of spatial rules outperforms other models. The results suggest people in India, especially in Greater Mumbai often share traffic information along with location mentions, which can be used to complement existing physical transport infrastructure in a cost-effective manner to manage transport services in the urban environment.

Modelling uncertainty in the sustainability of Intelligent Transport Systems for highways using probabilistic data fusion

The implementation of ITS to increase the efficiency of saturated highways has become increasingly prevalent. It is a high level objective for many international governments and operators that highways should be managed in a way that is both sustainable i.e. environmental, social and economically sound and supportive of a Low-Carbon-Energy Future. Some clarity is therefore needed to understand how Intelligent Transport Systems perform within the constraints of that objective. The paper describes the development of performance criteria that reflect the contributions of Information Communication Technology (ICT) emissions, vehicle emissions and the embedded carbon within the physical transport infrastructure that typically comprises one type of Intelligent Transport System i.e. Active Traffic Management – a scheme that is used to reduce inter-urban congestion. The performance criteria form part of a new framework methodology ‘EnvFUSION’ (Environmental Fusion for ITS) outlined here. This is illustrated using a case study where environmental performance and pollution baselines (collected from independent experts, academic, governmental sources and suppliers) are processed using an attributional Lifecycle Assessment tool. The tool assesses the production and operational processes of the physical infrastructure of Active Traffic Management using inputs from the ‘Ecoinvent’ database. The ICT component (responsible for data links) is assessed using direct observation, whilst vehicle emissions are estimated using data from a National Atmospheric Emissions Laboratory. Analytical Hierarchy Process and Dempster–Shafer theory are used to create a prioritised performance hierarchy: the Intelligent Transport Sustainability Index, which includes weighted criteria based on stakeholder expertise. A synthesis of the individual criteria is then used to reflect the overall performance of the Active Traffic Management scheme in terms of sustainability (low-carbon-energy and socio-economic) objectives.

Identifying FDOT’s Physical Transportation Infrastructure Vulnerable to Sea Level Rise

The objective of this research was to integrate current data sources to develop a methodology for assessing and mitigating the potential impacts of sea level rise (SLR) on Florida’s transportation infrastructure to assist transportation planning. The proposed approach integrates the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) information system with existing topographical and geological data to facilitate (1) the evaluation of current and projected SLR impacts on Florida’s coastline and low-lying terrain areas, and (2) the identification of the physical transportation infrastructure that is most likely to be affected by frequent to continuous flooding because of SLR so that solutions could be sought. The projection of SLR, and the timing for the same, was outlined using a benchmark approach that brackets time intervals as opposed to specific timing for improvements. Further research to evaluate the impact of sea level rise on ponding and storm surge is a future, more difficult area of investigation.

Identification of Physical Transportation Infrastructure Vulnerable to Sea Level Rise

The objective of this research was developing a methodology for assessing the potential impacts of sea level rise (SLR) on Florida’s state transportation infrastructure to assist the state with transportation planning. The proposed approach integrates the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) information system, satellite imagery, local roadway and hydrologic data with existing topographical and geographical data to generate SLR projections to facilitate i) the evaluation of current and projected SLR impacts on transportation infrastructure located along Florida’s coastline and low-lying terrain areas, and ii) the identification of the physical transportation infrastructure components that are vulnerable given the United States Army Corps of Engineers’ scenario-based methodology to project the timing of future low, intermediate and high rates of sea level change. A detailed case study in Dania Beach, Florida and a comparative example in Punta Gorda, Florida were used to evaluate the soundness of the methodology. Further research was performed to develop a preliminary evaluation of the impact of groundwater levels as an exacerbating factor with respect to sea level rise. Storm surge with SLR is a future, more difficult area of investigation.