Shared automated mobility : the legal and governance considerations

Automated vehicle technology is a fast-growing phenomenon which has, in recent years, found itself at the forefront of research projects being carried out in jurisdictions all over the world, and is a vital component to the modern revolution of the transport sector in the race against climate change. However, attaining a world with driverless cars and digital infrastructure, which eliminates the role of the driver, requires a detailed study from multiple aspects, including from a legal and governance perspective. A holistic, proportionate, and harmonised approach towards a dedicated body of legislation, which strikes the right balance between safeguarding consumers and a free market, is crucial to reaping the full potential of this technology, as the demand for alternative mobility solutions increases. This paper considers the legal impacts, which automated vehicles are expected to have on mobility, analysing in particular the challenges posed, the adequacy of existing legal systems, and the improvements that need to be made, on the basis of international research, with a particular focus on Malta. Project MISAM (Malta’s Introduction of Shared Autonomous Mobility) was launched specifically for the purpose of assessing the viability of enabling the use of automated vehicles in Malta, including from a legal and governance perspective.Project MISAM (REP-2020-017) is financed by Malta Council for Science & Technology, for and on behalf of the Foundation for Science and Technology, through the FUSION: R&I Research Excellence Programme.peer-reviewe

Traffic data analysis from social media

Social networking sites serve a very important role in our daily lives, providing us with a platform where thoughts can be easily shared and expressed. As a result, these networking sites generate endless amount of information about extensive range of topics. Nowadays, through software development, analysing the content of social media is made possible through Application Program Interfaces (APIs). One particular application of content analysis of social networking sites is traffic. Traffic events can be determined from these sites. Thus, social networking sites have the potential to be utilised as a very cost-effective social sensor, whereby social media posts serve as the sensor information. Advancements in the field of machine learning have provided ways and techniques in which social media posts can be exploited/harvested to detect small-scale events, particularly traffic events in a timely manner. This work aims to develop a traffic-based information system that relies on analysing the content of social media data. Social media content is classified as either ‘traffic-related’ or ‘non-traffic-related’. ‘Traffic-related’ events are further classified into various ‘traffic-related’ sub-categories, such as: ‘accidents’, ‘incidents’, ‘traffic jams’, and ‘construction/road works’. The date, time, and the geographical information of each associated traffic event are also determined. To reach these aims, several algorithms are developed: i) An adaptive data acquisition algorithm is developed to make it possible to gather events from social media; ii) Several supervised binary classification algorithms are developed to analyse the content of social media and classify the results as either ‘traffic-related’ events or ‘non-traffic-related’ events; iii) A topic classification algorithm is developed to further analyse the ‘traffic-related’ events and classify them into the sub-categories previously mentioned; iv) A geoparser algorithm is further developed to obtain the date, time and the geographical information of the traffic event. A fully functional, real-time, automated system is developed by interconnecting all the algorithms together. This developed system produces very promising results when applied to Twitter data as a source of information. The results show that social networking sites have the potential to serve as a very efficient method to detect not only small-scale events, such as traffic events, but can also be scaled up to detect large-scale events.peer-reviewe

Intelligent transport systems harmonisation assessment: use case of some Spanish intelligent transport systems services

From the 1980s, new telematic technologies have meant a great evolution in several areas. In the transportation domain, their use has implied the development and implementation of several intelligent transport systems (ITS). However, these deployments were done in an isolated way. Traffic managers, public and private organisations, stakeholders and others have implemented ITS without much perspective, that is, without providing ITS as services for end users. In the last few years, several European Union (EU) funded projects have been dealing with the development of harmonised ITS services. For example, the EasyWay Project is involving most of the European countries (EU member states and others) to deploy harmonised ITS services taking into account the European citizen as the final target. In this study, an introduction of the EasyWay project is made, including the ITS concept services and the deployment guidelines for harmonisation. In November 2012, EasyWay presented a new version of DGs, which were approved with minor editorial changes. An overview on these DGs for the ITS services is presented and two real Spanish road traffic ITS services are analysed

Narrative of the annotated Space–Time Cube – revisiting a historical event

The Space–Time Cube (STC) is a suitable representation to display multiple characteristics of movement data and will especially reveal temporal patterns in the data. By adding annotations to the cube’s paths and stations, the narrative of the display is enhanced. To illustrate the STC’s storytelling capabilities, a historical event, Napoleon’s crossing of the Berezina River during his Russian campaign in 1812 is presented and linked to an event in 2012 when the authors made a similar trip. Also, a set of different visual queries and their results are presented, emphasizing the STC as an alternative addition to a more extended visualization environment