The importance of design characteristics in walking from student's perspective: a case study in Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

Walking is a common form of physical activity, which has a lot of both social and recreational impacts. It is studied as a way of achieving sustainability. Many researchers recommend that walking can increase mental and physical health. Spectators of new urbanism recommend that the good design will encourage walking. There are several characteristics for designing walkable communities, which were frequently described in researches by many authors. In this paper, the four criteria noticed for making walkable university campus include connectivity, accessibility, safety/security and comfort. These criteria have been assessed by gathering survey in the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia to find out if these criteria can cause or affect walkability in university campus and it has been supported by previous studies. The result of the survey shows that these criteria are important from students’ perspective as high numbers of the students consider these characters as important for walking activity. The conclusion is to achieve walkable university campus as it will be necessary to evaluate present walking conditions, research walking behavior in different settings and consider these four criteria in designing campus for improving walking condition

CBPRS: A City Based Parking and Routing System

Navigational systems assist drivers in finding a route between two locations that is time optimal in theory but seldom in practice due to delaying circumstances the system is unaware of, such as traffic jams. Upon arrival at the destination the service of the system ends and the driver is forced to locate a parking place without further assistance. We propose a City Based Parking Routing System (CBPRS) that monitors and reserves parking places for CBPRS participants within a city. The CBPRS guides vehicles using an ant based distributed hierarchical routing algorithm to their reserved parking place. Through means of experiments in a simulation environment we found that reductions of travel times for participants were significant in comparison to a situation where vehicles relied on static routing information generated by the well known Dijkstra’s algorithm. Furthermore, we found that the CBPRS was able to increase city wide traffic flows and decrease the number and duration of traffic jams throughout the city once the number of participants increased.information systems;computer simulation;dynamic routing

Evacuation plan evaluation: Assessment of vehicular evacuation schemes by means of an analytical dynamic traffic model

An evacuation model is posed, combining a dynamic travel demand component, an adaptive travel choice behaviour component, and a dynamic network loading component. The travel demand component considers the primary choice facing the endangered residents, whether to participate in the evacuation, and if so, when to depart. The travel choice behaviour component considers the secondary choice facing the evacuees, where to seek refuge and by which route to travel towards this safe destination. The network loading component considers both the dynamic traffic and hazard conditions, and propagates the evacuees through the infrastructure network. The proposed model can act on a broad spectrum of hazards, as it uses general features to compute the effects of the hazard on the evacuation. Furthermore, the model structure enables the assessment of various categories of evacuation, ranging from voluntary over recommended to mandatory. And, the behavioural responses of the evacuees towards evacuation instructions are modelled, such that instructions can be followed fully, followed in part, or rejected completely. An illustrative example of a hypothetical evacuation shows the principles and possibilities of the posed evacuation model

Persistent Localized Broadcasting in VANETs

We present a communication protocol, called LINGER, for persistent dissemination of delay-tolerant information to vehicular users, within a geographical area of interest. The goal of LINGER is to dispatch and confine information in localized areas of a mobile network with minimal protocol overhead and without requiring knowledge of the vehicles' routes or destinations. LINGER does not require roadside infrastructure support: it selects mobile nodes in a distributed, cooperative way and lets them act as "information bearers", providing uninterrupted information availability within a desired region. We analyze the performance of our dissemination mechanism through extensive simulations, in complex vehicular scenarios with realistic node mobility. The results demonstrate that LINGER represents a viable, appealing alternative to infrastructure-based solutions, as it can successfully drive the information toward a region of interest from a far away source and keep it local with negligible overhead. We show the effectiveness of such an approach in the support of localized broadcasting, in terms of both percentage of informed vehicles and information delivery delay, and we compare its performance to that of a dedicated, state-of-the-art protoco

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThe interest in multimodal transportation improvements is increasing in cities across the U.S. Investing in multimodal infrastructure benefits the portion of urban population that is unable to drive due to a variety of reasons such as personal preference, age, and affordability. It is also well known that active transportation such as walking, biking, and taking transit, can improve public health due to increased physical activity, and reduce traffic congestion by reducing the average person's delay. While improved multimodal infrastructure and accessibility attracts new users, it can possibly increase their exposure to risk from crashes. In urban areas where the "safety in numbers phenomenon" does not exist, nonmotorized user vulnerability becomes a predominant risk factor when they are involved in a crash, even at lower vehicle speeds. This dissertation aims to explore the factors that are associated with safety outcomes in urban multimodal transportation systems, and develop methods that can be used to estimate safety effects of multimodal infrastructure and accessibility improvements. Using Chicago as a case study, a comprehensive dataset is developed that significantly contributes to the existing literature by including socio-economic, land use, road network, travel demand, and crash data. Area-wide analysis on the census tract level provides a broader perspective about safety issues that multimodal users encounter in cities. The characteristics of a multimodal transportation system are expressed through the presence of multimodal infrastructure, street connectivity and network completeness, and accessibility to destinations for multimodal users. A set of statistical areal safety models (SASM) based on both frequentist and Bayesian statistical inference is applied to estimate the factors that are associated with total and severe vehicular, pedestrian, and bicyclist crashes in urban multimodal transportation systems. The results show that the current safety evaluation methods need to acknowledge the complexity of multimodal transportation systems through the inclusion of diverse factors that may influence safety outcomes, particularly for more vulnerable users. The methods developed in this research can further be used to expand the current practice of evaluating multimodal transportation safety, and planning for city-wide investments in multimodal infrastructure and improved accessibility, while being able to estimate the expected safety outcomes

Adoption of vehicular ad hoc networking protocols by networked robots

This paper focuses on the utilization of wireless networking in the robotics domain. Many researchers have already equipped their robots with wireless communication capabilities, stimulated by the observation that multi-robot systems tend to have several advantages over their single-robot counterparts. Typically, this integration of wireless communication is tackled in a quite pragmatic manner, only a few authors presented novel Robotic Ad Hoc Network (RANET) protocols that were designed specifically with robotic use cases in mind. This is in sharp contrast with the domain of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET). This observation is the starting point of this paper. If the results of previous efforts focusing on VANET protocols could be reused in the RANET domain, this could lead to rapid progress in the field of networked robots. To investigate this possibility, this paper provides a thorough overview of the related work in the domain of robotic and vehicular ad hoc networks. Based on this information, an exhaustive list of requirements is defined for both types. It is concluded that the most significant difference lies in the fact that VANET protocols are oriented towards low throughput messaging, while RANET protocols have to support high throughput media streaming as well. Although not always with equal importance, all other defined requirements are valid for both protocols. This leads to the conclusion that cross-fertilization between them is an appealing approach for future RANET research. To support such developments, this paper concludes with the definition of an appropriate working plan

City planning using integrated urban modeling Jeddah structure plan

This paper explores the use of weighted space syntax models to contribute to the process of integrated urban planning for Jeddah as part of a major planning project in the Saudi Arabia. The Municipality of Jeddah commissioned the production of an integrated suite of planning documents. These plans coordinate Strategic, Sub-Regional, Structural and Local plans across a citywide region and aim to provide a framework for sustainable urban growth and development over the next 20 years. This paper focuses on the space syntax methodologies used to aid urban planners to develop the Structure Plan and builds on the research used to develop the Sub-Regional Plan (Karimi et al, 2015). The Structure Plan studied how the urban structure of the city could accommodate the growth of population by about three million over the next 20 years. This included developing and testing a centres strategy to distribute population, employment and supporting facilities along with a public transport strategy for the city. For analysing the potential and requirements of the city, an Integrated Urban Model (IUM) was constructed to combine the spatial network with land use, population, employment and public transport. The aim of this model was to test the impact of changes in the distribution of population and employment. It also allowed the assessment of public transport alignments. The IUM is a key design tool for planning and optimising the relationships between population, employment and public transport. It was also used to provide a benchmarking methodology to compare options. Because the model links people to employment using the spatial network and public transport, the performance of options can be expressed in terms of benefits to the city's population

Urban Spine: A Pedestrian-oriented Multi-modal Transportation Infrastructure for Improving Health and Well-being in the Urban Environment

With finite land resources and ever increasing population, urbanization continues to edge natural environments off our maps. The quality of life and well-being is deteriorated with continuous exposure to the urban environment due to the heavy saturation of stress and anxiety that comes with urban living. Stress is associated with the inherent flight-or-fight reaction that humans have developed through evolution in the natural environment. The contamination of stress inducing stimuli in the urban environment has driving people into sedentary lifestyles, remain indoors within the safe confines of building. Mitigating the magnitude of stressful interactions in the urban landscape, many which are caused by automobiles, will encourage a return to the outdoor environment. The re-integration of naturalistic experiences into the environment will improve the quality of urban life. A shift of the urban landscape toward a pedestrian-orientation, through the promotion of walkability, can ameliorate the adverse impacts caused by automobile centric behavior and cultivate the streetscape as a canvas for experiencing naturalistic features and characteristics that support the health and well-being of the urban dweller – not only ensuring survival but granting the opportunity to flourish

CBPRS: A City Based Parking and Routing System

Navigational systems assist drivers in finding a route between two locations that is time optimal in theory but seldom in practice due to delaying circumstances the system is unaware of, such as traffic jams. Upon arrival at the destination the service of the system ends and the driver is forced to locate a parking place without further assistance. We propose a City Based Parking Routing System (CBPRS) that monitors and reserves parking places for CBPRS participants within a city. The CBPRS guides vehicles using an ant based distributed hierarchical routing algorithm to their reserved parking place. Through means of experiments in a simulation environment we found that reductions of travel times for participants were significant in comparison to a situation where vehicles relied on static routing information generated by the well known Dijkstra’s algorithm. Furthermore, we found that the CBPRS was able to increase city wide traffic flows and decrease the number and duration of traffic jams throughout the city once the number of participants increased