This paper aims at analyzing three different solutions suggested for traffic congestion relief in Port Louis, the busiest city of Mauritius. It evaluates the impact of the three alternatives which are the use of Light Rail Transit LRT as an alternative mode of transport, the construction of a Ring road around Port Louis, and the upgrading of the current bus network into a Bus Rapid Transit BRT ...

Designing control for rail infrastructures is a challenging task. Many aspects influence the system performance and have to be taken into account, such as physical layout of the network, vehicle types, expected passenger movements, control system characteristics and safety measures. Control designers have to test different combination of these aspects, by varying the configuration possibilities...

Rail transit is developing rapidly in major cities of China and has become a key component of urban transport. Nevertheless, the security and reliability in operation are significant issues that cannot be neglected. In this paper, the network and station vulnerabilities of the urban rail transit system were analyzed based on complex network and graph theories. A vulnerability evaluation model w...

Exposure to airborne pollution has substantial adverse health consequences. A recent World Health Organization (WHO) study has estimated that urban air pollution accounts for 6.4 million years of life lost worldwide annually (Cohen et al. 2004). Many harmful pollutants are emitted by automobiles. For example, Currie and Walker (2011) estimate that prenatal exposure to traffic congestion alone r...

In the United States there is an emerging trend to ship goods by rail directly from ports to inland intermodal traffic terminals. However, for this trend to succeed shippers must have “visibility” into rail shipments. In this research we seek to provide visibility into shipments through optimal placement of sensor and communication technology. We formally define the notion of visibility and the...

Particle emissions are a drawback of rail transport. This work is a comprehensive presentation of recent research into particle emissions from rail vehicles. Both exhaust and non-exhaust particle emissions are considered when examining particle characteristics such as PM10, and PM2.5 concentration levels, size, morphology, composition, as well as adverse health effects, current legislation, and...

Analysis of accidents in socio-technical systems frequently reveals unnoticed obstacles, which have grown to become the main cause of incubation and surprise at failure (Dekker, 2011). Thus far, it has proven to be a challenge to identify those unnoticed obstacles upfront among the tremendous number of events occurring during normal operations. In this article, we describe the usage of weak res...

Reallocating roadspace from general traffic, to improve conditions for pedestrians or cyclists or buses or on-street light rail or other high-occupancy vehicles, is often predicted to cause major traffic problems on neighbouring streets. This paper reports on two phases of research, resulting in the examination of over 70 case studies of roadspace reallocation from eleven countries, and the col...

Noise events are well established in the measurement and management of aircraft noise. While there have been attempts to apply similar noise-event concepts to road and rail traffic noise signals for many decades, the idea has remained largely peripheral to the current paradigm of surface traffic noise measurement, assessment and management. The latter is based, almost exclusively, on metrics th...

In preparation of the revised edition of the Air Traffic Noise Act the Federal Environmental Agency formulated targets for aircraft noise control. They were prepared oriented to the Federal Immission Control Act. The assessment periods were chosen analogously to the regulations on other traffic noise sources (rail traffic, road traffic). The control targets cover the following affected areas * ...