Influencing driver behaviour through road marking

This paper will describe how road marking can be used to influence driver behaviour in order to improve road safety and traffic flows. Extensive use will be made of examples from recent research undertaken by the authors on overtaking lane design, speed change management, managing speed around curves and improving the safety of high risk sections of roads. This research included both on-road and driving simulator-based measurements. The concept of self explaining roads and what is required to implement it will also be described

Road User Interactions: Patterns of Road Use and Perception of Driving Risk

The goal of the Road User Interactions research programme is a better understanding of the human factors of our road transport system: road user demographics, risk perceptions of road users, and the driving attitudes of various road user groups. Our analysis of the 1989 and 1999 New Zealand Household Travel Surveys identified several fundamental road user differences and consistent demographic trends over the past 10 years. The driver characteristics of gender, age, and area of residence (urban, secondary urban, and rural) are the demographic factors which most clearly differentiate New Zealand road user groups. Analysis of the patterns of road use suggests that, although these road user groups do drive at distinctly different times, there are periods of conflict which are also associated with the greatest crash risk for these drivers. Our analysis of a sample of road user groups in Hamilton, Auckland, Gisborne, New Plymouth, and Palmerston North found significant differences in their perceptions of risk and driving behaviours. Rural drivers and women drivers rated a range of driving situations as having greater risk than did the other road user groups, and they rated the high risk scenarios as being much riskier. Men indicated the greatest willingness to accept the risk in driving situations and rated their own driving skill as higher. Older drivers also rated driving situations as having higher risk, and young drivers generally rated low risk situations much lower than other drivers. In the survey of driving behaviour, young men in our sample reported very high levels of violations and aggressive violations. The male drivers’ rates of violations and aggressive violations were significantly higher than the women drivers’ and the number of both decreased significantly with age. Finally, inspection of crash data show that young drivers’ and older drivers’ crashes have some characteristics in common; both groups have a disproportionate number of crossing, turning, and manoeuvring crashes at intersections in the mid-afternoon

The effectiveness of delineation treatments

A literature review undertaken for Transit NZ has found that delineation has a significant effect on driver behaviour with, for example, shoulder rumble strips reducing run-off-theroad crashes by between 22% and 80% (average of 32% for all crashes and 44% for fatal run-of-the-road crashes). The concern that enhancing roadway delineation may sometimes be accompanied by an unwanted increase in drivers’ speeds (known as behavioural adaptation) is not borne out by the research and appears to be a phenomenon associated with a few restricted situations (e.g. where a centre line is added to an otherwise unmarked road). The preponderance of the evidence supports the conclusion that profiled edge lines and centre lines provide drivers with positive guidance and produce significant reductions in crashes as a result of improving drivers’ lateral position. Further, unlike other safety measures that show decreased effectiveness over time due to a novelty effect, profiled lane delineation continues to work regardless of driver familiarity. There is no published research to suggest that profiled edge lines will decrease the effectiveness of a profiled centre line or will result in an increase in crash rates or an increase in the severity of crashes. However it has also been noted that local conditions have a major influence on the level of benefits that can be achieved through improved delineation

Does haste make waste? The human factors of overtaking land design

The aim of this research was to improve overtaking safety and efficiency through improvements in road signage, markings, geometry and speed control associated with the placement and layout of passing lanes. The approach of the research was to explore the effects of several types of overtaking lane treatments in the safety and controlled environment of a state-of-the-art driving simulator. It was found that under the most benign conditions there were no differential effects of the three treatments. With poorer visibility or more taxing road geometry, the drivers relied more heavily on the road markings and signage and the effects of the treatments become more pronounced. The sensitivity to the more "challenging" situations was borne out by the greater speed differential between merge area sections at these sites

Mixed sand–mud bedforms produced by transient turbulent flows in the fringe of submarine fans: Indicators of flow transformation

The fringe of fine‐grained deep‐marine systems often exhibits complex sedimentary facies and facies associations, because the presence of clay promotes the development of transient turbulent flows with complex depositional properties. Relatively little is known about the variation of current‐induced sedimentary structures found within these facies. This study provides the first comprehensive description and interpretation of mixed sandstone–mudstone bedforms observed in the fringe of the mud‐rich submarine fan that makes up the Aberystwyth Grits Group and Borth Mudstone Formation (Wales, United Kingdom). Using textural and structural descriptions, 158 bedforms in sediment gravity flow deposits were characterized into three main types: ‘classic’ sandy current ripples, large current ripples and low‐amplitude bed‐waves. The sandy current ripples comprise clean sandstone, with average heights and lengths of 11 mm and 141 mm, respectively. The large current ripples are composed of mixed sandstone–mudstone and possess greater dimensions than the sandy current ripples, with an average height of 19 mm and an average length of 274 mm. The low‐amplitude bed‐waves are long thin bedforms composed commonly of mixed sandstone–mudstone, with an average height and length of 10 mm and 354 mm, respectively. The large current ripples and low‐amplitude bed‐waves are strikingly similar to experimental bedforms produced under decelerating mixed sand–mud flows and are interpreted to form beneath transitional flows with enhanced and attenuated near‐bed turbulence, respectively. From the fringe to the distal fringe of the fan, the dominant bedform type changed from sandy current ripples, via large current ripples, to low‐amplitude bed‐waves, suggesting that the flows changed from turbulent to increasingly turbulence‐modulated. It is proposed that the flow Reynolds number reduced, reflecting this flow transformation, from a combination of constant or decreasing flow height, flow deceleration from sediment deposition, and increasing flow viscosity due to the shear‐thinning nature of clay‐rich suspensions. Large current ripples and low‐amplitude bed‐waves are likely to be common in the fringe of other submarine fans. The presence and spatial trends in mixed sand–mud bedform types may be an important tool in interpreting fan fringe environments

Прогнозирование геологической среды земной коры по материалам ГСЗ и петрофизического термобарического исследования минерального вещества

Some features of methodical means of petrovelocity thermobaric modeling have been considered. An example of the construction of a deep petrovelocity model of a crust part of the Ukrainian Shield is given and analysed

Polariton Squeezing in Semiconductor Microcavities

We report squeezed polariton generation using parametric polariton four-wave mixing in semiconductor microcavities in the strong coupling regime. The geometry of the experiment corresponds to degenerate four-wave mixing, which gives rise to a bistability threshold. Spatial effects in the nonlinear regime are evidenced, and spatial filtering is required in order to optimize the measured squeezing. By measuring the noise of the outgoing light, we infer a 9 percent squeezing on the polariton field close to the bistability turning point

A Minimal Theory of Creative Ability

Despite decades of extensive research on creativity, the field still combats psychometric problems when measuring individual differences in creative ability. We think these seemingly technical issues have a conceptual origin. We therefore propose a minimal theory of creative ability (MTCA) to create a consistent conceptual theory to guide investigations of individual differences in creative ability. Our theory argues that creative ability, at a minimum, must include two facets: intelligence and expertise. So, the MTCA simply claims that whenever we do something creative, we use most of our cognitive abilities combined with relevant expertise to be creative. MTCA has important implications for creativity theory, measurement, and practice. But, the MTCA isn’t necessarily true, it is a minimal theory. We discuss and reject several objections to the MTCA and conclude with a falsification challenge