Advanced Toll Information System and Toll Lane Configuration to Reduce Collision Risk

This study assessed the impacts of presence and location of the toll information system on the traffic performance and safety at toll plaza on the Gordie Howe International Bridge. The toll information displays the information on toll payment methods (manual toll collection (MTC), automatic toll collection (ATC) and electronic toll collection (ETC)) for cars or heavy vehicles (HV) via variable message signs (VMS) upstream of toll booth. The study also assessed the impacts of the toll information system with different toll lane configuration for current traffic demand and different percentages of heavy vehicles (HV) to reduce the collision risk at toll plaza. To evaluate the impacts, three scenarios (no VMS, VMS 140 m from the entry gate, and separate VMS for car and HV 75 m before the merge point) were developed and compared using the VISSM microscopic traffic simulation model. Results show that VMS before the merge point had marginal benefit of reducing average delay and reduced rear-end and lane-change collision risk compared to the no VMS scenario. Results also show that converting the toll lanes with multiple toll payment methods to ETC-only lanes with the VMS before the merge point reduced the delay and rear-end and lane-change collision risk compared to the current configuration. Moreover, increasing the number of HV-only lanes from 3 to 4 for higher percentage of HVs with the VMS before the merge point marginally reduced the delay but increased lane-change collision risk compared to the current configuration. This indicates that the installation of ETC-only lanes can potentially improve traffic performance and safety for the current traffic demand but increasing the number of HV-only lanes for higher percentage of HVs can degrade the safety benefit of the system. This study demonstrates that toll lane configuration must be controlled to accommodate varying traffic demand to enhance the effectiveness the toll information system in improving traffic performance and safety

Nueva Francia y Nueva Inglaterra en el contexto de los Tratados de Utrecht (1713). Lucha por el Imperio e Historia Transatlántica

After establishing the spatiotemporal coordinates of the work, along with an interpretive perspective of political history, the metropolitan powers of France and England in their American expansion, autochthonous-Amerindian powers and colonial powers of New France and New England between 1661 and 1713 have been analysed.Después de fijar las coordenadas espacio temporales del trabajo, así como la óptica interpretativa de la historia política, se analizan los poderes metropolitanos de Francia e Inglaterra en su expansión americana, los poderes autóctonos-amerindios y los poderes coloniales de Nueva Francia y Nueva Inglaterra entre 1661 y 1713

A world of copper: globalizing the Industrial Revolution, 1830-70

For most of human history the smelting of metallic ores has been performed immediately adjacent to the ore body. In the 1830s the copper industry that was centred on Swansea in the UK departed abruptly from that ancient pattern: Swansea smelters shipped in ores from very distant locations, including sites in Australasia, Latin America, and southern Africa. Swansea became the hub of a globally integrated heavy industry, one that deployed capital on a very large scale, implanted British industrial technologies in some very diverse settings, and mobilized a transnational workforce that included British-born ‘labour aristocrats’, Chinese indentured servants, and African slaves. This paper explores the World of Copper between its inception c.1830 and its demise in the aftermath of the American Civil War. It asks what the experience of this precociously globalized industry can contribute to some current concerns in global history

Intoxicants and the invention of 'consumption'

In 1600 the word ‘consumption’ was a term of medical pathology describing the ‘wasting, petrification of things’. By 1700 it was also a term of economic discourse: ‘In commodities, the value rises as its quantity is less and vent greater, which depends upon it being preferred in its consumption’. The article traces the emergence of this key category of economic analysis to debates over the economy in the 1620s and subsequent disputes over the excise tax, showing how ‘consumption’ was an early term in the developing lexicon of political economy. In so doing the article demonstrates the important role of ‘intoxicants’ – i.e. addictive and intoxicating commodities like alcohols and tobaccos – in shaping these early meanings and uses of ‘consumption’. It outlines the discursive importance of intoxicants, both as the foci for discussions of ‘superfluous’ and ‘necessary’ consumption and the target of legislation on consumption. And it argues that while these discussions had an ideological dimension, or dimensions, they were also responses to material increases in the volume and diversity of intoxicants in early seventeenth-century England. By way of conclusion the article suggests the significance of the Low Countries as a point of reference for English writers, as well as a more capacious and semantically sensitive approach to changes in early-modern consumption practices

From the Caribbean to Craignish : imperial authority and piratical voyages in the early eighteenth-century Atlantic commons

Whereas seventeenth-century piracy has been recognised as an integrated component of the developing European Atlantic world, eighteenth-century pirates have been marginalised as an isolated group with few ties to landed communities. Such evaluations have stressed the heightened extension of state authority to the colonial theatre in the eighteenth century and, by doing so, have overlooked how pirates continued to interact with colonial actors operating in contested and unclaimed regions throughout the Atlantic commons. It is imperative that the Atlantic commons is given full consideration in any discussion of Atlantic maritime activity as it was within these expanses that inter-imperial, inter-colonial, and cross-border colonial actors converged. This article utilises the piratical voyage captained by Howell Davies (and later Bartholomew Roberts) to demonstrate that it was within this commons that eighteenth-century piratical voyages were sustained and facilitated through the forced acquisition of supplies, through markets for plundered goods, and through the opportunities available for dispersing amongst landed communities at the end of expeditions. Continued connections between colonial denizens and pirates in the eighteenth century compels a reassessment of pirates’ isolation to instead place them within the wider population of coastal traders, sojourning mariners, and marginal colonial settlers who existed both within and outside of the imperial framework espoused by state and colonial centres. Ultimately, this questions the overall ability of European states to regulate maritime traffic when vessels sailed out of sight of established colonial ports, and beyond the practical reach of imperial authority

Catholic Interests and the Politics of English Overseas Expansion 1660–1689

AbstractThroughout the reign of Charles II, a growing number of Catholics entered into the civil and military infrastructure of the overseas colonies. While Maryland was consolidated as a center of settlement, a new crop of English and Irish officeholders shaped the political development of Tangier, New York and the Leeward Islands. Their careers highlighted the opportunities of overseas expansion as a route into the public domain: a chance for Catholics to sidestep the penal restrictions of the three kingdoms and construct an alternative relationship with the crown. This article examines the emergence of Catholic authority within the plantations, and situates the experiment within larger shifts in strategic and ideological debate over English colonization. I suggest that experiences in the colonies invigorated economic and political strategies that became central to the advancement of Catholic interests in the domestic realm. While colonial trade bolstered Catholic estates against penal pressures, the new settlements provided the training ground for attempts to demonstrate the compatibility of confessional pluralism with commercial flourishing and civil allegiance. The effect, however, was to raise conflict in colonial politics and heighten anxieties in the domestic realm over the effects of overseas plantation. I argue that by uncovering a neglected sphere of “recusant history” we gain new insights into the ideological fragilities that disrupted the pursuit of territories overseas. Catholic promotions exposed a growing tension between the “Protestant interest” and the principles and practices that informed the expansion of the Stuart realm.This is the author accepted manuscript. It is currently under an indefinite embargo pending publication by Cambridge University Press