The Yamanote Loop: Unifying Rail Transportation and Disaster Resilience in Tokyo

As climate change and population growth persist, and as the world rapidly urbanizes, major cities across the globe will face unprecedented strains. The risk of devastating impact from natural disasters increases in areas with a growing concentration of people. Megacities in Asia are the most at-risk of natural disasters, given their geographic location and high population density. With the highest projected population growth in the world, Asian cities must quickly expand and adapt their existing infrastructure to accommodate the transforming global conditions. A remarkable anomaly amongst Asian megacities, Tokyo, Japan is effectively adapting to its earthquake-prone environment. Within the last century, Japan has implemented seismically reinforced buildings and educational resources for earthquake preparedness. Amongst other technological innovations, investments in railway transportation have permitted major cities like Tokyo to expand and adjust according to its changing needs. The Yamanote Line is the primary commuter rail line in Tokyo. Its antecedent originated in 1885 and has since undergone significant changes to evolve into the highly sophisticated system it is today. By examining the evolvement of the Yamanote line from its conception and into the 21st century, this study explores the correlation between local rail transportation networks and their city’s resilience to natural disasters. A descriptive analysis aligned with four constructs of transportation resilience—robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, and rapidity—observes instances in which the Yamanote line potentially strengthens Tokyo’s comprehensive disaster preparedness. The following study intentionally circumvents normative-prescriptive conclusions and focuses primarily on the impact of transformations of railway transportation on its broader urban context over time respective to disaster resilience and with consideration of other relative factors

Appropriate Economic Space for Transnational Infrastructural Projects: Gateways, Multimodal Corridors, and Special Economic Zones

This study addresses three questions that arise in Asia when formulating, financing, implementing, and maintaining transnational linkages versus purely domestic connections. Firstly, how is optimal economic space to be defined as a useful starting point? Secondly, how can relevant criteria be developed to define the emerging spatial economy and identify efficient transnational transport networks? Thirdly, what are the main investment opportunities in physical infrastructure that would result in more efficient and effective regional cooperation and integration (making special reference to the potential role of cross-border special economic zones (SEZs) or their equivalents)?asia transnational infrastructure; asia regional cooperation

MOBILESAT: Australia's own

Australia will be introducing a dedicated Mobile Satellite Communications System following the launch of the AUSSAT-B satellites late in 1991. The Mobile Satellite System, MOBILESAT, will provide circuit switched voice/data services and packet-switched data services for land, aeronautical and maritime users. Here, an overview is given of the development program being undertaken within Australia to enable a fully commercial service to be introduced in 1992

Issues and concerns of microscopic calibration process at different network levels : case study of Pacific Motorway

Calibration process in micro-simulation is an extremely complicated phenomenon. The difficulties are more prevalent if the process encompasses fitting aggregate and disaggregate parameters e.g. travel time and headway. The current practice in calibration is more at aggregate level, for example travel time comparison. Such practices are popular to assess network performance. Though these applications are significant there is another stream of micro-simulated calibration, at disaggregate level. This study will focus on such microcalibration exercise-key to better comprehend motorway traffic risk level, management of variable speed limit (VSL) and ramp metering (RM) techniques. Selected section of Pacific Motorway in Brisbane will be used as a case study. The discussion will primarily incorporate the critical issues encountered during parameter adjustment exercise (e.g. vehicular, driving behaviour) with reference to key traffic performance indicators like speed, lane distribution and headway; at specific motorway points. The endeavour is to highlight the utility and implications of such disaggregate level simulation for improved traffic prediction studies. The aspects of calibrating for points in comparison to that for whole of the network will also be briefly addressed to examine the critical issues such as the suitability of local calibration at global scale. The paper will be of interest to transport professionals in Australia/New Zealand where micro-simulation in particular at point level, is still comparatively a less explored territory in motorway management

Experimental Evaluation of Wireless Mesh Networks: A Case Study and Comparison

Price of WiFi devices has decreased dramatically in recent years, while new standards, as 802.11n, have multiplied its performance. This has fostered the deployment of Wireless Mesh networks (WMN), putting into practice concepts evolved from more than a decade of research in Ad Hoc networks. Nevertheless, evolution of WMN it is in its infancy, as shows the growing and diverse number of scenarios where WMN are being deployed. In these paper we analyze a particular case study of a Wireless Community Mesh Network, and we compare it with a selected experimental WMN studies found in the literature