On the road: travelling salesmen and experiences of mobility in Britain before 1939

Mobility has been a significant influence in the formation of identities for individuals and for certain occupations. Recent studies emphasises the associations of mobility with a sense of autonomy and personal freedom. This article explores the implications of mobility for a particular occupation, commercial travellers or travelling salesmen during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It assess the changing duration and life on the road and the impact of new forms of transport, from horseback to motor car. Mobility fundamentally shaped travellers' daily experiences, the ways in which they perceived themselves and their public image

Eras of electric vehicles: electric mobility on the Verge. Focus Attention Scale

Daily or casual passenger vehicles in cities have negative burden on our finite world. Transport sector has been one of the main contributors to air pollution and energy depletion. Providing alternative means of transport is a promising strategy perceived by motor manufacturers and researchers. The paper presents the battery electric vehicles-BEVs bibliography that starts with the early eras of invention up till 2015 outlook. It gives a broad overview of BEV market and its technology in a chronological classification while sheds light on the stakeholders’ focus attentions in each stage, the so called, Focus-Attention-Scale-FAS. The attention given in each era is projected and parsed in a scale graph, which varies between micro, meso, and macro-scale. BEV-system is on the verge of experiencing massive growth; however, the system entails a variety of substantial challenges. Observations show the main issues of BEVsystem that require more attention followed by the authors’ recommendations towards an emerging market

Transports and Consumers’ Ecological Behaviour

Transports certainly have positive economic and social effects. However, transports in general, and motor transports in particular play a significant role in environmental pollution, with a negative impact on the quality of life. In this article, we make a diagnosis on the contribution of transports to environmental pollution, especially through CO2 and green house gases emissions, on international and national levels, highlighting trends in transports evolution. Based on an ample research the article presents policies (commandand- control and incentive-based policies, physical, soft or knowledge policies etc.) meant to diminish the negative impact of auto transports on the quality of life. The last part of the article investigates, based on the direct market research, the current and future behaviours of transport services consumers in Bucharest, the way transport services are perceived, as well as the way different modalities of protection against the pollution caused by transport are assessed. Market research has generally revealed a pro-environmental behaviour, most of the subjects investigated agreeing with the measures focused on reducing pollution caused by transports. However, the survey results have shown that factors related to the environment and its protection are not very important when deciding to purchase a car.transport services, environmental pollution, consumer behaviour, survey

A new view on grasping

Reaching out for an object is often described as consisting of two components that are based on different visual information. Information about the object’s position and orientation guides the hand to the object, while information about the object’s shape and size determines how the fingers move relative to the thumb to grasp it. We propose an alternative description, which consists of determining suitable positions on the object — on the basis of its shape, surface roughness, and so on — and then moving one’s thumb and fingers more or less independently to these positions. We modelled this description using a minimum jerk approach, whereby the finger and thumb approach their respective target positions approximately orthogonally to the surface. Our model predicts how experimental variables such as object size, movement speed, fragility, and required accuracy will influence the timing and size of the maximum aperture of the hand. An extensive review of experimental studies on grasping showed that the predicted influences correspond to human behaviour

On the relationships between self-reported bicycling injuries and perceived risk among cyclists in Queensland, Australia

The focus of governments on increasing active travel has motivated renewed interest in cycling safety. Bicyclists are up to 20 times more likely to be involved in serious injury crashes than drivers so understanding the relationship among factors in bicyclist crash risk is critically important for identifying effective policy tools, for informing bicycle infrastructure investments, and for identifying high risk bicycling contexts. This study aims to better understand the complex relationships between bicyclist self reported injuries resulting from crashes (e.g. hitting a car) and non-crashes (e.g. spraining an ankle) and perceived risk of cycling as a function of cyclist exposure, rider conspicuity, riding environment, rider risk aversion, and rider ability. Self reported data from 2,500 Queensland cyclists are used to estimate a series of seemingly unrelated regressions to examine the relationships among factors. The major findings suggest that perceived risk does not appear to influence injury rates, nor do injury rates influence perceived risks of cycling. Riders who perceive cycling as risky tend not to be commuters, do not engage in group riding, tend to always wear mandatory helmets and front lights, and lower their perception of risk by increasing days per week of riding and by increasing riding proportion on bicycle paths. Riders who always wear helmets have lower crash injury risk. Increasing the number of days per week riding tends to decrease both crash injury and non crash injury risk (e.g. a sprain). Further work is needed to replicate some of the findings in this study

Campus Mobility for the Future: The Electric Bicycle

Sustainable and practical personal mobility solutions for campus environments have traditionally revolved around the use of bicycles, or provision of pedestrian facilities. However many campus environments also experience traffic congestion, parking difficulties and pollution from fossil-fuelled vehicles. It appears that pedal power alone has not been sufficient to supplant the use of petrol and diesel vehicles to date, and therefore it is opportune to investigate both the reasons behind the continual use of environmentally unfriendly transport, and consider potential solutions. This paper presents the results from a year-long study into electric bicycle effectiveness for a large tropical campus, identifying barriers to bicycle use that can be overcome through the availability of public use electric bicycles

Barriers and facilitators to public bicycle scheme use: A qualitative approach

The purpose of this study was to explore barriers and facilitators to using CityCycle, a public bicycle share scheme in Brisbane, Australia. Focus groups were conducted with participants belonging to one of three categories. Group one consisted of infrequent and noncyclists (no bicycle riding over the past month), group two were regular bicycle riders (ridden a bicycle at least once in the past month) and group three was composed of CityCycle members. A thematic analytic method was used to analyse the data. Three main themes were found: Accessibility/spontaneity, safety and weather/topography. The lengthy sign-up process was thought to stifle the spontaneity typically thought to attract people to public bike share. Mandatory helmet legislation was thought to reduce spontaneous use. Safety was a major concern for all groups and this included a perceived lack of suitable bicycle infrastructure, as well as regular riders describing a negative attitude of some car drivers. Interestingly, CityCycle riders unanimously perceived car driver attitudes to improve when on CityCycle bicycles relative to riding on personal bicycles. Conclusions: In order to increase the popularity of the CityCycle scheme, the results of this study suggest that a more accessible, spontaneous sign-up process is required, 24/7 opening hours, and greater incentives to sign up new members and casual users, as seeing people using CityCycle appears critical to further take up

A Neural Circuit for Coordinating Reaching with Grasping: Autocompensating Variable Initial Apertures, Perturbations to Target Size, and Perturbations to Target Orientation

A neural network model is presented, that extends principles of the VITE (vector integration to end-point) model [1, 2, 3, 4] of primate reaching to the more complex case of reach-grasp coordination. The main new planning problem addressed by the model is how to simulate human data on temporal coordination between reaching and grasping, while at the same time remaining stable and compensating for altered initial apertures and perturbations of object size and object location/ orientation. Simulations of the model replicate key features of four different experimental protocols with a single set of parameters. The proposed circuit computes reaching to grasp trajectories in real-time, by continuously updating vector positioning commands, and with no precomputation of total or component movement times. The model consists of three generator channels: transport, which generates a reaching trajectory; aperture, which controls distance between thumb and index finger; and orientation, which controls hand orientation vis-a-vis target's orientation.CONACYT of Mexico; Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0409

A Neural Circuit for Coordinating Reaching with Grasping: Autocompensating Variable Initial Apertures, Perturbations to Target Size, and Perturbations to Target Orientation

A neural network model is presented, that extends principles of the VITE (vector integration to end-point) model [1, 2, 3, 4] of primate reaching to the more complex case of reach-grasp coordination. The main new planning problem addressed by the model is how to simulate human data on temporal coordination between reaching and grasping, while at the same time remaining stable and compensating for altered initial apertures and perturbations of object size and object location/ orientation. Simulations of the model replicate key features of four different experimental protocols with a single set of parameters. The proposed circuit computes reaching to grasp trajectories in real-time, by continuously updating vector positioning commands, and with no precomputation of total or component movement times. The model consists of three generator channels: transport, which generates a reaching trajectory; aperture, which controls distance between thumb and index finger; and orientation, which controls hand orientation vis-a-vis target's orientation.CONACYT of Mexico; Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0409