Travel patterns in ?smart? townsshow potential for traffic reduction

Residents in Darlington,Peterborough and Worcester have a realistic alternative forabout 40-50% of their local car trips, according to recent research.With DfTfunding, these towns are now introducing extensive packages of ?soft? measures toencourage people to choose more sustainable travel options

Achieving safer school travel in the UK

This paper summarises the current UK approach to improving child road safety, focusing particularly on measures to enhance the safety of the school journey. It highlights the importance of a safe road environment, and a number of different ways in which this can be achieved, including engineering measures, often introduced via partnership work between local authorities, schools, the police, the local community, parents and children. It also reports on supporting measures, such as on-road child pedestrian and cycle training, which are becoming an increasingly common part of school activity

Smarter choices and telecoms – the evidence

In May 2004, a research report entitled ‘Smarter Choices’ was published in conjunction with the new White Paper on the ‘The Future of Transport’. The study looked at ten transport measures, including telework, teleconferencing and home shopping. The study suggested that, within ten years, and within a supportive context, a ‘high-intensity scenario’ of implementing these measures could reduce national traffic levels by 11%, with greater effects in certain circumstances, including, for example, a 21% reduction in urban peak traffic. This paper concentrates on telework and teleconferencing. Taken together, these represented about 37% of the potential national traffic reduction identified. The study also showed that telework and teleconferencing were often associated with other benefits, including financial savings for employers and a better work–life balance for employees. Hence, increasing their use could have a range of positive effects. Some critics have argued that encouraging organisations to adopt telework or teleconferencing leads to more dispersed lifestyles and business activities, thereby increasing travel not reducing it. Whilst this is logically possible, current evidence does not support this. Moreover, a key issue is the context in which these activities are encouraged. For example, the effect of promoting them in a context where road and air travel are priced to reflect environmental impacts is likely to be significantly different to the effect of promoting them in a context of an expansion of cheap, long-distance travel. The Smarter Choices research suggests that, where employers are encouraged to promote telework or teleconferencing as part of a package with explicit objectives to reduce travel, significant traffic reductions can be achieved

Adolf Reinach: An Intellectual Biography

The essay provides an account of the development of Reinach’s philosophy of “Sachverhalte” (states of affairs) and on problems in the philosophy of law, leading up to his discovery of the theory of speech acts in 1913. Reinach’s relations to Edmund Husserl and to the Munich phenomenologists are also dealt with

Haptic Experience and the Design of Drawing Interfaces

Haptic feedback has the potential to enhance users’ sense of being engaged and creative in their artwork. Current work on providing haptic feedback in computer-based drawing applications has focused mainly on the realism of the haptic sensation rather than the users’ experience of that sensation in the context of their creative work. We present a study that focuses on user experience of three haptic drawing interfaces. These interfaces were based on two different haptic metaphors, one of which mimicked familiar drawing tools (such as pen, pencil or crayon on smooth or rough paper) and the other of which drew on abstract descriptors of haptic experience (roughness, stickiness, scratchiness and smoothness). It was found that users valued having control over the haptic sensation; that each metaphor was preferred by approximately half of the participants; and that the real world metaphor interface was considered more helpful than the abstract one, whereas the abstract interface was considered to better support creativity. This suggests that future interfaces for artistic work should have user-modifiable interaction styles for controlling the haptic sensation