The stability of a vehicle (especially if operating off-road, such as a farm tractor, possibly with an im- plement attached) can be statically investigated by means of a test installation such as the one described here. It consists of a platform (dimensions: 6.42 × 4.46 m) having two degrees of freedom (inclination, rotation) and on which the vehicle is positioned motionless. By acting on these degrees of freedom, it is possible to precisely and simultaneously control all the characteristic angles of a vehicle (roll, pitch, yaw), thus discovering, in complete safety, its operational limits (i.e. its incipient rollover conditions). Furthermore, the ability to misalign up to two of the four quadrants composing the platform allows the testing of further critical situations for the vehicle, in which the front-axle pivot joint and the tyres elasticity are involved, potentially up to a scenario in which the vehicle rests on only three of its four supports and its support polygon degenerates into a triangle. The basic test scenarios that can be investigated with this installation allow the study of many aspects of a vehicle, pertaining both to the general chassis performance of the vehicle (therefore related to its balance) and to the load state of some spe- cific components (internal or interfacing the vehicle with the outside, e.g. the wheels). The obtained data, referred to reference test scenarios, allow the experimenters to: (1) interpret sensors readings in real operating situations, thus including also the contribution of the tyres vertical flattening and lateral deflection, (2) complete the safety documentation at the users’ disposal with some specific graphs, the vehicle ‘equilibrium maps’ (or ‘stability charts’), possibly referred also to the vehicle with some accessories/implements connected to it. By demonstrating the undeniable usefulness of such an installation, the authors hope to propose new testing paradigms with the ultimate aim of increasing the overall safety of vehicles and, particularly, of agricultural and work machinery.

Cities are suffering because of the rapid urbanization and population boom, which lead to increasing the load on the current traffic systems. Current traffic systems also suffer from several problems such as traffic congestion. meanwhile, transportation engineering has rapidly evolved into a technical field, considerably induced by new technologies and algorithms to address today’s challenges. The rise of connected and automated vehicle (CAV) emerging technology has brought new prospects to the auto- mobile industry and transportation system during the past decade. This paper develops and evaluates a framework for CAVs to create additional suitable gaps to the minor road vehicles to reduce the interruption of the continuous flow on semi-actuated signalized intersections. A simulation platform was developed using VISSIM software to validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm improves the intersection performance where the major road delay decreases, and the intersection’s capacity increases. The throughput of the targeted intersection increased up to 34% when the cAvs penetration reaches 70%.

The interlock equipment has supported the safe train operations of today as a device for controlling the operation in the safe station premises. This paper surveys interlock device’s transition from mechanical signals to today’s electronic signaling devices and analyzes how security mechanisms have evolved. It shows that safety has been supported by the notion of fixed block system, in which only one train is allowed to travel in one route. In addition, this paper discusses the realization of moving block suitable for communication based train control era and proposes a new interlock table. Unified Train Control System (UTCS) is introduced as an implementation example, and it is shown that the UTCS is an IoT-era train control, which realizes simplification of the interlock function itself and flexible and safe control by exchanging information between the central processing unit and the point machine, the level crossing device and the train.

Many cities suffer from a lack of walkability. Besides physical preconditions like safe sidewalks and pedestrianized areas the density of the pedestrian network and the planar distribution of routes opening up the area of a quarter or the city. The fractal dimension (FD) is a measure that describes how far a pattern or grid spans and covers a two dimensional area. For areas in the field of view (like paintings) literature reports that values between 1.3 and 1.9 are perceived as most agreeable and stress reducing. This paper investigates if the FD can also be applied to assess the walkability of pedestrian networks. That is not trivial because, for a walking person, the network is not in direct field of view but only perceived with all senses. The research question is, if pedestrian networks behave fractal in the range where they are delivering best preconditions for walkability. For real networks, the loop-wise calculation of FD is best appropriate; here a box-counting method is used. The box edge length corresponds to the distance that a pedestrian must walk ahead until the next possibility where a decision to turn or not appears. So more such junctions exist, so more walkable is the quarter. Typical preferred distances are few meters to about 50m. The results show well, that for as walkable perceived quarters, the network behaves in fact fractal with FD in the preferred range 1.3–1.9 and at box edge length’ of 5–50m – and vice versa. Objects of investigation were pedestrian networks out of the city of Hamburg, Germany, one car-oriented, one that is perceived as walkable and one of the newly constructed quarter HafenCity. The car-oriented quarter is widely out of the described range, the walkable one widely in. Finally, historical cities (Salamanca, Spain and the Islamic town Harar Jugol, Ethiopia) were analysed to find out if their networks (out of times without cars) are walkable and behave fractal. As to be expected, both could be confirmed. It can be concluded, that FD can well be used as an indicator for the walkability of pedestrian route networks.

Public transportation in rural areas faces increasing challenges with increasingly aging populations. The elderly and disabled people who cannot drive by themselves highly rely on public transport for traveling. Therefore, to ensure the mobility needs for individual door-to-door services in depopulated areas with dispersed populations, several local authorities in Japan are implementing the taxi subsidy scheme (TSS) for the elderly. However, during the implementation, many issues relating to this policy, such as subsidy amount, usage time and number of distributed tickets, settings for target persons, and target area have been encountered. Based on this fact, we examined TSS from three perspectives: the local government that supports the policy with subsidy; small- and medium-sized taxi operators whose business management is influenced by TSS; and the elderly people with their outing status and TSS us- age status. Furthermore, based on the trends of national policies, we examined the effective utilization of TSS as a public mobility service for the elderly in rural areas. As a result, for local governments, the TSS was found to be widely known as a support for vulnerable groups and for those who have returned their licenses, and the burden on residents is often not a large expense. From the viewpoint of taxi operators, TSS has considerably contributed to business management. Additionally, many business op- erators want to increase the usage time and number of people eligible for subsidies. The elderly survey showed that TSS users use taxi for various purposes and are less likely to be influenced by high prices compared with non-TSS users. In other words, it is suggested that the TSS should be the “ideal public transportation” by narrowing down the target users and improving the service.

Private vehicles have dominated personal transportation for the past 50 years. They provide positive externalities such as accessibility and independence. However, their widespread use in urban areas has resulted in negative externalities such as traffic congestion, air pollution, human health problems and damage to the ecosystem. Therefore, understanding the underlying factors affecting car ownership has become an important research theme. This study focuses on assessing the main socio-economic factors that affect household car ownership in Belgium. To this end, we developed a household car ownership model based on the 2016 Belgian household travel survey. Overall, our results confirm the literature review’s findings, highlighting the importance of socio-demographic and economic characteristics of households in explaining household car ownership. The results from the multinomial logit model show that: (i) income is positively associated with car ownership, (ii) living in Flanders and wallonia increases the probability of having two or more cars compared to living in Brussels, (iii) having a driving license increases car ownership, (iv) a larger number of adults and children in a household is related to a higher likelihood of owning two or more cars per household, (v) higher level of education increases the probability of having more than one car per household and (vi) older people (65+) are less likely to have multiple cars. The results of this study can be used as a tool for researchers, policymakers and urban planners to define more effective sustainable mobility policies.

The experience of European cities shows that with the introduction of free-fare public transport, the share of public transport trips increases insignificantly, while the number of trips by individual trans port, bicycle and on foot decreases. The most common way to reduce the number of trips by private cars is to introduce parking fees and regulate the tariff. The paper examines the impact of public transport fare paid parking fees on the transport demand structure. The structure of transport demand is determined using simulation modeling on a transport macro-model of a large city with a population of 800 thousand people that do not have off-street transport. The paper proposes a criterion for determining generalized costs of travel by different transport systems, which converts monetary costs into time fares. This made it possible to take into account the costs of movement by different types of transport (private and public transport, CarSharing, taxi, pedestrian and bicycle movements). With the introduction of paid parking fees up to 80 rubles per hour, the share of private transport trips reduced from 45.5% to 37.3%. With the introduction of free public transport, private transport trips share reduced to 39.9% with a significant increase in the costs of the municipal budget.