In recent years in Japan, there have been many debates of setting highway toll charges as a part of policy discussions. However, although these debates should be analyzed objectively based on quantitative analysis, it cannot be denied that the psychological impact of the proposals is being given more priority. Considering that highways are a type of public infrastructure, it is appropriate that...

This paper reports the findings from a study aimed at examining the effectiveness of shoulder rumble strips in reducing run-off-the-road (ROR) crashes on two-lane rural highways using the empirical Bayes (EB) before-and-after analysis method. Specifically, the study analyzed the effects of traffic volume, roadway geometry and paved right shoulder width on the effectiveness of shoulder rumble st...

there are more than 750 counties in 13 provinces and autonomous regionsconstituting 30% of china lands which are facing serious problem of desertification. theseareas are mainly distributed in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas in the western part ofnortheast china, north central china and most of northwest china. biological methods are theultimate way for drift sand stabilization and a fu...

BACKGROUND Air pollution from road traffic has been associated to an increased risk of lung cancer. Herein, we investigated the association between lung cancer mortality and residence near Italian highways or national major roads. METHODS Information on deaths for lung cancer registered from 1990 to 2010 and stratified by age, gender, and urban or rural municipality of residence at death were...

Many rural roads lack sharp, smoothly curving edges and a homogeneous surface appearance, hampering traditional vision-based road-following methods. However, they often have strong texture cues parallel to the road direction in the form of ruts and tracks left by other vehicles. This paper describes an unsupervised algorithm for following ill-structured roads in which dominant texture orientati...

We present a procedural method for generating hierarchical road networks connecting cities, towns and villages over large terrains. Our approach relies on an original geometric graph generation algorithm based on a nonEuclidean metric combined with a path merging algorithm that creates junctions between the different types of roads. Unlike previous work, our method allows high level user contro...

As a global phenomenon, farmland abandonment continues to challenge the sustainability of agri-food supply and rural development. Investigating heterogeneous effects multilevel location on is great importance understand spatial disparity mechanism abandonment, which has significant policy implications for food security revitalization. Taking Tai’an City as case, this study aims explore impact a...

On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk—times neither day nor night—the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and it’s that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open...