Public transport use in Australia’s capital cities: Modelling and forecasting

From the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the late 1970s, Australian urban public transport (UPT) suffered a large decline in absolute terms, and much more in mode share terms, as car ownership and suburban development boomed. This report models UPT in the period from the late 1970s - when the decline in UPT mode share started to bottom out. The aim has been to be able to develop models of UPT that would allow long-term forecasting of UPT demand to be made. These would then be available to inform policy decisions regarding UPT infrastructure planning, urban transport reform, urban form, congestion and road safety. The basic finding of the modelling was that UPT’s share of total passenger travel has been basically flat at about 10 per cent from the late 1970s to 2004. But from 2005 to 2010 the UPT share rose, due to lower UPT fares and constraints on household disposable income. Forecasting using the models reveals that the rapid growth in UPT in the late 2000s is likely to slow. Nevertheless, even with lower growth rates, UPT demand should increase by about one third between 2010 and 2030, with implications for infrastructure provision and other policy issues associated with public transport in our cities

Impact & Energy Absorption of Road Safety Barriers by Coupled SPH/FEM

Gudimetla, PV ORCiD: 0000-0002-9402-1763Road safety barriers are used to minimise the severity of road accidents and protect lives and property. There are several types of barrier in use today. This paper reports the initial phase of research carried out to study the impact response of portable water-filled barrier (PWFB) which has the potential to absorb impact energy and hence provide crash mitigation under low to moderate speeds. Current research on the impact and energy absorption capacity of water-filled road safety barriers is limited due to the complexity of fluid-structure interaction under dynamic impact. In this paper, a novel fluid-structure interaction method is developed based on the combination of Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) and Finite Element Method (FEM). The sloshing phenomenon of water inside a PWFB is investigated to explore the energy absorption capacity of water under dynamic impact. It was found that water plays an important role in energy absorption. The coupling analysis developed in this paper will provide a platform to further the research in optimising the behaviour of the PWFB. The effect of the amount of water on its energy absorption capacity is investigated and the results have practical applications in the design of PWFBs