Increasing Inter-Modal Access to Transit: Phase II

Phase II of the two part study assess pedestrian and bicycle accessibility in the areas surrounding Ardmore Junction, Avondale park and Ride, and Lindenwold Station using PLOS and BLOS software. Field views were conducted to collect data and assess non-motorized mobility enhancements supporting station access. The analysis revealed that even where pedestrian access within a quarter mile radius was acceptable, bicycle access within a mile radius may be unacceptable. The Absence of road buffers along sidewalks, visible striping at intersections, and appropriate bicycle racks at stations all degrade the non-motorized travel environment. Improvements in the buffering, striping, and bicycle racks at stations and their surrounding areas would do a lot to improve the non-motorized access and use of transit stations

Impingement of Droplets in 60 Deg Elbows with Potential Flow

Trajectories were determined for water droplets or other aerosol particles in air flowing through 600 elbows especially designed for two-dimensional potential motion. The elbows were established by selecting as walls of each elbow two streamlines of a flow field produced by a complex potential function that establishes a two-dimensional flow around. a 600 bend. An unlimited number of elbows with slightly different shapes can be established by selecting different pairs of streamlines as walls. Some of these have a pocket on the outside wall. The elbows produced by the complex potential function are suitable for use in aircraft air-inlet ducts and have the following characteristics: (1) The resultant velocity at any point inside the elbow is always greater than zero but never exceeds the velocity at the entrance. (2) The air flow field at the entrance and exit is almost uniform and rectilinear. (3) The elbows are symmetrical with respect to the bisector of the angle of bend. These elbows should have lower pressure losses than bends of constant cross-sectional area. The droplet impingement data derived from the trajectories are presented along with equations so that collection efficiency, area, rate, and distribution of droplet impingement can be determined for any elbow defined by any pair of streamlines within a portion of the flow field established by the complex potential function. Coordinates for some typical streamlines of the flow field and velocity components for several points along these streamlines are presented in tabular form. A comparison of the 600 elbow with previous calculations for a comparable 90 elbow indicated that the impingement characteristics of the two elbows were very similar

Chester Riverfront and Community Rail Access Study

This study examined connecting SEPTA's Wilmington-Newark regional rail line with existing and planned development along the Chester City Riverfront. Three alternatives were considered for connecting the regional rail service and the Chester City Riverfront: retain, replace, or relocate the Highland Avenue Station. Construction costs ranged from $17 to$27 million, depending on the strategy. It was determined that the current Highland Avenue Station would necessitate closure in 3 to 5 years based on structural safety concerns. Based on the factors outlined, it is suggested that Townsend/Engle or a new station at Highland Avenue appear to be the best choices, with the possibility of keeping Flower Street as another option. The details of land acquisition, design, and construction still need to be worked out between land owners, Chester City and SEPTA. The report informs the policy conversation and narrows possible locations for further engineering study

An evaluation resource for geographic information retrieval

In this paper we present an evaluation resource for geographic information retrieval developed within the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The GeoCLEF track is dedicated to the evaluation of geographic information retrieval systems. The resource encompasses more than 600,000 documents, 75 topics so far, and more than 100,000 relevance judgments for these topics. Geographic information retrieval requires an evaluation resource which represents realistic information needs and which is geographically challenging. Some experimental results and analysis are reported

GeoCLEF 2007: the CLEF 2007 cross-language geographic information retrieval track overview

GeoCLEF ran as a regular track for the second time within the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2007. The purpose of GeoCLEF is to test and evaluate cross-language geographic information retrieval (GIR): retrieval for topics with a geographic specification. GeoCLEF 2007 consisted of two sub tasks. A search task ran for the third time and a query classification task was organized for the first. For the GeoCLEF 2007 search task, twenty-five search topics were defined by the organizing groups for searching English, German, Portuguese and Spanish document collections. All topics were translated into English, Indonesian, Portuguese, Spanish and German. Several topics in 2007 were geographically challenging. Thirteen groups submitted 108 runs. The groups used a variety of approaches. For the classification task, a query log from a search engine was provided and the groups needed to identify the queries with a geographic scope and the geographic components within the local queries

GeoCLEF 2006: the CLEF 2006 Ccross-language geographic information retrieval track overview

After being a pilot track in 2005, GeoCLEF advanced to be a regular track within CLEF 2006. The purpose of GeoCLEF is to test and evaluate cross-language geographic information retrieval (GIR): retrieval for topics with a geographic specification. For GeoCLEF 2006, twenty-five search topics were defined by the organizing groups for searching English, German, Portuguese and Spanish document collections. Topics were translated into English, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Japanese. Several topics in 2006 were significantly more geographically challenging than in 2005. Seventeen groups submitted 149 runs (up from eleven groups and 117 runs in GeoCLEF 2005). The groups used a variety of approaches, including geographic bounding boxes, named entity extraction and external knowledge bases (geographic thesauri and ontologies and gazetteers)