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...

Purpose The study sought to estimate the effects of centreline milled rumble strips on rural two-lane roads in Sweden in a wide perspective. Traffic safety effects (i.e., fewer crashes and injuries), driver experience, and driver opinions of centreline milled rumble strip usage on rural roads are investigated. Methods To evaluate the traffic safety effects, an Empirical Bayes study comparing th...

INTRODUCTION The aim of this article was to learn from women in rural New South Wales (NSW) Australia, their experiences of labouring en route to birth in a centralised maternity unit. METHODS This qualitative study was exploratory and descriptive. It was part of a larger project that explored women's experiences when they birthed away from their rural communities. Participants were recruited...

OBJECTIVE To define the geographical distribution of HIV infection and the community characteristics associated with HIV prevalence in a rural population of Uganda. DESIGN Seroprevalence survey and interviews of the population aged 13 years and older in 21 randomly selected clusters. SETTING Rural population of Rakai district, south west Uganda. SUBJECTS 1292 adults, of whom 594 men and 6...

Ecotourism is widely promoted as a conservation tool and actively practiced in protected areas worldwide. Theoretically, support for conservation from the various types of stakeholder inside and outside protected areas is maximized if stakeholders benefit proportionally to the opportunity costs they bear. The disproportional benefit distribution among stakeholders can erode their support for or...

Year-round reliable rural roads are a critical component of social and economic development, particularly in developing countries. Currently, road planning and the prioritization of investment decisions are based upon cost-benefit analysis (CBA) which is highly dependent on technical and economic analysis, but largely excludes social considerations. In rural areas, this frequently omits the mos...

Traffic data from a 4-mile long congested rural road in Orinda, California, are used to show that traffic delays and vehicle accumulations between any two generic observers located inside a road section can be predicted from the traffic counts measured at the extremes of the section. The traffic model does not require “recalibration” on the day of the experiment, and works well despite what app...

Transport infrastructure plays a central role in rural development, yet little is known about the size and especially the distribution of benefits from road investments. This paper develops and implements a method for nonparametrically estimating the benefits from road projects at the household level using the relationship between the value of farmland and its distance to agricultural markets. ...

Effect of Migration on Children’s Educational Performance in Rural China XINXIN CHEN, QIUQIONG HUANG, SCOTT ROZELLE, YAOJIANG SHI & LINXIU ZHANG College of Economics, Zhejiang Gongshang University, 149 Jiaogong Road, Hangzhou 310035, China. Department of Applied Economics, University of Minnesota, 1994 Buford Avenue, St Paul, MN 55108, USA. Freeman Spogli Institute, Stanford University, Encina ...