Influence of soundscape in the experience of an urban area: a case study in Rome

Over the last years several studies have demonstrated how the same environment can lead to different perceptual outcomes if the surrounding sounds change. Soundscape studies promote a user-centred approach for the characterization and management of acoustic environments in cities. There are several available protocols to gather perceptual data about how people experience the soundscapes in urban areas, and the most common tool is the “soundwalk”, a procedure where a group of people walks and stops at given locations in order to assess the acoustic environment, using some sound-related attributes (e.g., calm, pleasant, vibrant, chaotic, etc.). This research aims at evaluating the influence that different acoustic conditions together with specific environmental ones can induce on the pedestrians’ perception. In particular, the analysis was carried out within an artistically significant and culturally relevant urban district characterized by different traffic conditions, such as the archaeological area of the Colosseum in Rome. For this purpose, a soundwalk combined with a sound levels measurement campaign was organised in the archaeological area outside the Colosseum, during daytime and night time conditions, with a group of students applying the Method A of the ISO/TS 12913-2:2018, which addresses soundscape data collection. The results show how the correlations between the subjective responses and the measured data are significant and they can vary if the surrounding changes, both in terms of acoustical characteristics and environmental ones

international transferability of macro level safety performance functions a case study of the united states and italy

Abstract Safety performance functions (SPFs), or crash-prediction models, have played an important role in identifying the factors contributing to crashes, predicting crash counts and identifying hotspots. Since a great deal of time and effort is needed to estimate an SPF, previous studies have sought to determine the transferability of particular SPFs; that is, the extent to which they can be applied to data from other regions. Although many efforts have been made to examine micro-level SPF transferability, few studies have focused on macro-level SPF transferability. There has been little transferability analysis of macro-level SPFs in the international context, especially between western countries. This study therefore evaluates the transferability of SPFs for several states in the USA (Illinois, Florida and Colorado) and for Italy. The SPFs were developed using data from counties in the United States and provincias in Italy, and the results revealed multiple common significant variables between the two countries. Transferability indexes were then calculated between the SPFs. These showed that the Italy SPFs for total crashes and bicycle crashes were transferable to US data after calibration factors were applied, whereas the US SPFs for total and bicycle crashes, with the exception of the Colorado SPF, could not be transferred to the Italian data. On the other hand, none of the pedestrian SPFs developed was transferable to other countries. This paper provides insights into the applicability of macro-level SPFs between the USA and Italy, and shows a good potential for international SPF transferability. Nevertheless, further investigation is needed of SPF transferability between a wider range of countries

Assessing of the Road Pavement Roughness by Means of LiDAR Technology

The assessment of the road roughness conditions plays an important role to ensure the required performances related to road safety and ride comfort, furthermore providing a tool for pavement maintenance and rehabilitation planning. In this work, the authors compared the roughness index (International Roughness Index, IRI) derived from high speed inertial profilometer with two other roughness indices, one dynamic and one geometric computed on a digital elevation model (DEM) built by using mobile laser scanner (MLS) data. The MLS data were acquired on an extra-urban road section and interpolated on the nodes of a DEM with a curvilinear abscissa, coinciding with the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) track of the profilometer. To estimate the grid cell elevation, we applied two interpolation methods, ordinary kriging (OK) and inverse distance weighting (IDW), over the same data. The roughness values computed on the surface of the DEM showed a similar trend and a high correlation with those acquired by the profilometer, higher for the dynamic index than for the geometric index. The differences between the IRI values by profilometer and those computed on the DEM were small enough not to significantly affect the judgments on the analyzed sections. Moreover, the road sub-sections derived from profilometer measure that were classified as critical coincided with those derived from light detection and ranging (LiDAR) surveys. The proposed method can be used to perform a network-level analysis. In addition, to evaluate the effects of vibrations on human comfort, we input the DEMs into a dynamic simulation software in order to compute the vertical accelerations, as specified in the UNI ISO 2631 standard. The values obtained were in line and correlated with those inferred from the standard methodology for profilometer measures