Bus accident severity and passenger injury: evidence from Denmark

Purpose Bus safety is a concern not only in developing countries, but also in the U.S. and Europe. In Denmark, disentangling risk factors that are positively or negatively related to bus accident severity and injury occurrence to bus passengers can contribute to promote safety as an essential principle of sustainable transit and advance the vision “every accident is one too many”. Methods Bus accident data were retrieved from the national accident database for the period 2002–2011. A generalized ordered logit model allows analyzing bus accident severity and a logistic regression enables examining occurrence of injury to bus passengers. Results Bus accident severity is positively related to (i) the involvement of vulnerable road users, (ii) high speed limits, (iii) night hours, (iv) elderly drivers of the third party involved, and (v) bus drivers and other drivers crossing in yellow or red light. Occurrence of injury to bus passengers is positively related to (i) the involvement of heavy vehicles, (ii) crossing intersections in yellow or red light, (iii) open areas, (iv) high speed limits, and (v) slippery road surface. Conclusions The findings of the current study provide a comprehensive picture of the bus safety situation in Denmark and suggest the necessity of further research into bus drivers’ attitudes and perceptions of risks and road users’ perceptions of bus operations. Moreover, these findings suggest the need for further training into bus drivers’ hazard recognition skills and infrastructural solutions to forgive possible driving errors

Seamless handover for LTE macro-femto networks based on reactive data bicasting

Seamless mobility support is a key technical requirement to motivate the market acceptance of the femtocells. The current 3GPP handover procedure may cause large downlink service interruption time when users move from a macrocell to a femtocell or vice versa due to the data forwarding operation. In this letter, a practical scheme is proposed to enable seamless handover by reactively bicasting the data to both the source cell and the target cell after the handover is actually initiated. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the downlink service interruption time while still avoiding the packet loss with only limited extra resource requirements compared to the standard 3GPP scheme. © 2012 IEEE