Urban Goods Movement and Local Climate Action Plans: Assessing Strategies to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Urban Freight Transportation

This report examines how freight transport/goods movement has been addressed in U.S. city climate action planning. Transportation generally is a major contributor of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and freight transport represents a growing component of transportation’s share. Almost all climate action plans (CAPs) address transportation generally, but we wished to focus on efforts to reduce GHG emissions from freight transport specifically. We analyzed 27 advanced local CAPs to determine the degree to which freight transport was targeted in goals and strategies to reduce GHG emissions. We found only six CAPs that included direct measures or programs to reduce freight emissions. Many of the CAPs mentioned general transportation objectives such as lowering vehicle miles traveled or reducing emissions from city-owned vehicle fleets, but most did not include strategies or actions that explicitly targeted freight transport. We identified the specific strategies and actions that cities are taking to address GHG emissions from freight transport, such as working with the freight community to promote anti-idling and encourage transitions to electric and alternative fuel delivery vehicles. We also analyzed freight transport plans relevant for the same cities, and found that most do not explicitly mention reducing GHG emissions. Most of the freight plans are focused on improving reliability and efficiency of freight movement, which would likely have the ancillary benefit of reducing GHG emissions, but that goal was not explicitly targeted in most of these plans. Based on our findings, we recommend that cities specifically target freight transport goals and strategies in their CAPs and better coordinate with planners developing freight transport plans to identify GHG emission reduction approaches

City-regionalism as a politics of collective provision : regional transport infrastructure in Denver, USA

The rise of the city-region concept has focused attention on the nature of territorial politics underpinning city-regionalism. This paper investigates the relationship between territorial politics, city-regionalism and the collective provision of mass transport infrastructure in the USA. It deploys a case study of the Denver region, examining the state and governance structures driving forward FasTracks, a long-term project to expand the Denver Regional Transportation District’s light and commuter rail system. FasTracks represents a programme to retrofit the Denver city-region for integrated mass transit but its funding has fostered tensions around new regionalist governance arrangements. The paper uses the findings of the case study to reflect upon the balance of bottom–up versus top–down geopolitical forces shaping the landscape of city-regionalism in the USA. It emphasises the variety of ways in which struggles around infrastructure provision shape the emergence of new city-regionalist structures inside the competition state

The global infrastructure public-private partnership and the extra-territorial politics of collective provision: The case of regional rail transit in Denver, USA

Drawing upon a case study of regional transit in Denver, Colorado, this article describes and accounts for the emergence of the global infrastructure public-private partnership (GIP3) as a novel extra-territorial mechanism for financing and delivering transportation infrastructure projects across large metropolitan regions in the United States (US). Unlike traditional locally-funded public-private partnerships, a GIP3 involves a global (i.e. extra-territorial) consortium of private sector construction firms and investors which enters into a long-term contract with a regional public agency to finance, operate, maintain and deliver strategic investments in transportation infrastructure. In 2004, Denver region voters approved a sales tax increase to fund the Denver Regional Transportation District (RTD)’s US$4.7 billion FasTracks programme, a 122-mile extension of light and commuter rail along six corridors. Faced with a shortfall in regional funding, the Denver RTD subsequently entered into a contract with a GIP3 consortium to finance and deliver the Eagle P3 project, a major component of the FasTracks system to Denver International Airport. The article argues that future research on GIP3 contractual agreements needs to consider the local control of infrastructure assets and the integrity of supporting regional collaborative governance arrangements

Psychometric properties of the revised children’s anxiety and depression scale (RCADS) for autistic youth without co-occurring intellectual disability

Autistic youth often present with comorbid anxiety and depression yet there is a dearth of validated assessment tools. The Revised Children’s Anxiety and Depression Scale (RCADS) assesses internalizing symptoms but there is little psychometric data in autistic youth. Treatment-seeking autistic youth with anxiety or obsessive-compulsive symptoms (N = 74; age 6–14 years), and caregivers, were administered the RCADS-Parent, RCADS-Child, and assessments of internalizing, externalizing symptoms and social impairment indicative of autism. RCADS-Parent and RCADS-Child total anxiety scores demonstrated excellent internal consistency, and the six subscales demonstrated acceptable-to-good internal consistency. The RCADS-Child and Parent total anxiety scores were weakly correlated, and neither child age nor gender altered the strength of this association. Convergent validity was supported by moderate-to-strong correlations with clinician and parent-reported anxiety symptoms. Support for divergent validity was mixed. Results provide support for the RCADS-Parent and RCADS-Child as reliable, valid measures of internalizing symptoms in autistic youth

A New Evolutionary Algorithm-Based Home Monitoring Device for Parkinson’s Dyskinesia

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative movement disorder. Although there is no cure, symptomatic treatments are available and can significantly improve quality of life. The motor, or movement, features of PD are caused by reduced production of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine deficiency is most often treated using dopamine replacement therapy. However, this therapy can itself lead to further motor abnormalities referred to as dyskinesia. Dyskinesia consists of involuntary jerking movements and muscle spasms, which can often be violent. To minimise dyskinesia, it is necessary to accurately titrate the amount of medication given and monitor a patient’s movements. In this paper, we describe a new home monitoring device that allows dyskinesia to be measured as a patient goes about their daily activities, providing information that can assist clinicians when making changes to medication regimens. The device uses a predictive model of dyskinesia that was trained by an evolutionary algorithm, and achieves AUC>0.9 when discriminating clinically significant dyskinesia

Large-scale ordering of nanoparticles using viscoelastic shear processing

This is the author accepted manuscript. It is currently under an indefinite embargo pending publication by Nature Publishing Group.Despite the availability of elaborate varieties of nanoparticles, their assembly into regular superstructures and photonic materials remains challenging. Here we show how flexible films of stacked polymer nanoparticles can be directly assembled in a roll-to-roll process using a bending-induced oscillatory shear (BIOS) technique. For sub-micron spherical nanoparticles, this gives elastomeric photonic crystals termed polymer opals showing extremely strong structural colour. With oscillatory strain amplitudes of 300%, crystallisation initiates at the wall and develops quickly across the bulk within only 5 oscillations yielding sharp intense reflectance peaks of tunable colour. The resulting structure of randomly stacked hexagonal close-packed layers parallel to the shear plane, is improved by shearing bidirectionally, alternating between two in-plane directions. Our theoretical framework indicates how the reduction in shear viscosity with increasing order of each layer accounts for these results, even when diffusion is totally absent. This general principle of shear ordering in viscoelastic media opens the way to manufacturable photonics materials, and forms a generic tool for ordering nanoparticles.We acknowledge EPSRC grants EP/G060649/1, EP/H027130/1, EP/E040241, EP/L027151/1 and EU ERC grants LINASS 320503 and FP7 291522-3DIMAGE

A Novel Mouse Fgfr2 Mutant, Hobbyhorse (hob), Exhibits Complete XY Gonadal Sex Reversal

The secreted molecule fibroblast growth factor 9 (FGF9) plays a critical role in testis determination in the mouse. In embryonic gonadal somatic cells it is required for maintenance of SOX9 expression, a key determinant of Sertoli cell fate. Conditional gene targeting studies have identified FGFR2 as the main gonadal receptor for FGF9 during sex determination. However, such studies can be complicated by inefficient and variable deletion of floxed alleles, depending on the choice of Cre deleter strain. Here, we report a novel, constitutive allele of Fgfr2, hobbyhorse (hob), which was identified in an ENU-based forward genetic screen for novel testis-determining loci. Fgr2hob is caused by a C to T mutation in the invariant exon 7, resulting in a polypeptide with a mis-sense mutation at position 263 (Pro263Ser) in the third extracellular immunoglobulin-like domain of FGFR2. Mutant homozygous embryos show severe limb and lung defects and, when on the sensitised C57BL/6J (B6) genetic background, undergo complete XY gonadal sex reversal associated with failure to maintain expression of Sox9. Genetic crosses employing a null mutant of Fgfr2 suggest that Fgr2hob is a hypomorphic allele, affecting both the FGFR2b and FGFR2c splice isoforms of the receptor. We exploited the consistent phenotype of this constitutive mutant by analysing MAPK signalling at the sex-determining stage of gonad development, but no significant abnormalities in mutant embryos were detected

Caveolin-1-Enhanced Motility and Focal Adhesion Turnover Require Tyrosine-14 but Not Accumulation to the Rear in Metastatic Cancer Cells

Caveolin-1 is known to promote cell migration, and increased caveolin-1 expression is associated with tumor progression and metastasis. In fibroblasts, caveolin-1 polarization and phosphorylation of tyrosine-14 are essential to promote migration. However, the role of caveolin-1 in migration of metastatic cells remains poorly defined. Here, caveolin-1 participation in metastatic cell migration was evaluated by shRNA targeting of endogenous caveolin-1 in MDA-MB-231 human breast cancer cells and ectopic expression in B16-F10 mouse melanoma cells. Depletion of caveolin-1 in MDA-MB-231 cells reduced, while expression in B16-F10 cells promoted migration, polarization and focal adhesion turnover in a sequence of events that involved phosphorylation of tyrosine-14 and Rac-1 activation. In B16-F10 cells, expression of a non-phosphorylatable tyrosine-14 to phenylalanine mutant failed to recapitulate the effects observed with wild-type caveolin-1. Alternatively, treatment of MDA-MB-231 cells with the Src family kinase inhibitor PP2 reduced caveolin-1 phosphorylation on tyrosine-14 and cell migration. Surprisingly, unlike for fibroblasts, caveolin-1 polarization and re-localization to the trailing edge were not observed in migrating metastatic cells. Thus, expression and phosphorylation, but not polarization of caveolin-1 favor the highly mobile phenotype of metastatic cells