Findings from the California Vehicle Inventory and Use Survey

Author(s):  
Mobashwir Khan ◽  
Anurag Komanduri ◽  
Kalin Pacheco ◽  
Cemal Ayvalik ◽  
Kimon Proussaloglou ◽  
...  

This paper describes the findings from the California Vehicle Inventory and Use Survey (CA-VIUS) which was administered between June 2016 and January 2018 and obtained data from a total of 11,118 fleets and 14,790 trucks. The surveys were segmented by registration, geography, vehicle type, and vehicle age, and the data collection effort exceeded sampling targets across almost all segments. The CA-VIUS is the largest statewide commercial vehicle data collection effort in the United States and will replace the 2002 National VIUS in transportation planning and emissions studies throughout California. Currently, the wealth of information provided by the survey is supporting the development of the California Statewide Freight Forecasting Model which is a fine-grained behavioral freight model. This model will allow California Department of Transportation and its partners to make more informed infrastructure and operational investment decisions. The CA-VIUS data will also be useful for researchers and practitioners hoping to understand the impacts and benefits of commercial vehicle movements on air quality, economic activity, safety, and vehicle usage. This paper documents key sampling and survey approaches, but mainly focuses on the key findings observed in the survey. This is a practical paper geared towards practitioners who are seeking to analyze a new VIUS survey and those who wish to implement one of their own.

Author(s):  
Jacob S. Duane ◽  
Joe A. Palen ◽  
Fidelis O. Eke ◽  
Harry H. Cheng

The California Department of Transportation, like many such departments in the United States, is working on developing a new family of electronic sensing devices for the purpose of monitoring certain characteristics of road vehicles as they move along the highway. The devices currently under development are to be located overhead individual highway traffic lanes, from where they can have a clear “view” of ground vehicles. In order to deploy these devices, there is a need to develop the capability to safely and efficiently mount them above highway traffic lanes, using existing overhead bridges and sign structures as support structures. This paper presents a technical study of a universal support platform for these devices. The study discusses such issues as mobility, reliability, and resistance to environmental and other hazards. Results of tests conducted on a prototype are also presented.


2003 ◽  
Vol 1855 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Robichaud ◽  
Martin Gordon

In the last decade, many agencies within Canada and the United States have initiated programs to assess the effectiveness of their traffic-monitoring programs and the value gained from their traffic-monitoring dollars. A project was initiated by the British Columbia Ministry of Transportation to assess the accuracy of the existing traffic-monitoring system and to compare it to alternatives for estimating traffic volumes on the highway network. The study included a review of findings from similar projects by the New Brunswick Department of Transportation and the Prince Edward Island Department of Transportation and Public Works. The options for traffic data collection considered by all three provincial agencies and the accuracy and cost implications that can be expected from each option are presented. Two methods for expanding short-term traffic counts to estimate average daily traffic volumes are discussed. The reported accuracy estimates allow practitioners to better understand cost and accuracy trade-offs.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Ch. Alexander ◽  
Carlo Tognato

The purpose of the article is to demonstrate that the civil spheres of Latin America remain in force, even when under threat, and to expand the method of theorizing democracy, understanding it not only as a state form, but also as a way of life. Moreover, the task of the authors goes beyond the purely application of the theory of the civil sphere in order to emphasize the relevance not only in practice, but also in the theory of democratic culture and institutions of Latin America. This task requires decolonizing the arrogant attitude of North theorists towards democratic processes outside the United States and Europe. The peculiarities of civil spheres in Latin America are emphasized. It is argued that over the course of the nineteenth century the non-civil institutions and value spheres that surrounded civil spheres deeply compromised them. The problems of development that pockmarked Latin America — lagging economies, racial and ethnic and class stratification, religious strife — were invariably filtered through the cultural aspirations and institutional patterns of civil spheres. The appeal of the theory of the civil sphere to the experience of Latin America reveals the ambitious nature of civil society and democracy on new and stronger foundations. Civil spheres had extended significantly as citizens confronted uncomfortable facts, collectively searched for solutions, and envisioned new courses of collective action. However when populism and authoritarianism advance, civil understandings of legitimacy come under pressure from alternative, anti-democratic conceptions of motives, social relations, and political institutions. In these times, a fine-grained understanding of the competitive dynamics between civil, non-civil, and anti-civil becomes particularly critical. Such a vision is constructively applied not only to the realities of Latin America, but also in a wider global context. The authors argue that in order to understand the realities and the limits of populism and polarization, civil sphere scholars need to dive straight into the everyday life of civil communities, setting the civil sphere theory (CST) in a more ethnographic, “anthropological” mode.


Shore & Beach ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 102-109
Author(s):  
Syed Khalil ◽  
Beth Forrest ◽  
Mike Lowiec ◽  
Beau Suthard ◽  
Richard Raynie ◽  
...  

The System Wide Assessment and Monitoring Program (SWAMP) was implemented by the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) to develop an Adaptive Management Implementation Plan (AMIP). SWAMP ensures that a comprehensive network of coastal data collection/monitoring activities is in place to support the development and implementation of Louisiana’s coastal protection and restoration program. Monitoring of physical terrain is an important parameter of SWAMP. For the first time a systematic approach was adopted to undertake a geophysical (bathymetric, side-scan sonar, sub-bottom profile, and magnetometer) survey along more than 5,000 nautical miles (nm) (excluding the 1,559 nm currently being surveyed from west of Terrebonne Bay to Sabine Lake) of track-line in almost all of the bays and lakes from Chandeleur Sound in the east to Terrebonne Bay in the west. This data collection effort complements the regional bathymetric survey undertaken under the Barrier Island Comprehensive Monitoring (BICM) Program in the adjacent offshore areas. This paper describes how a study of this magnitude was conceptualized, planned, and executed along the entire Louisiana coast. It is important to note that the initial intent was to collect bathymetric data only for numerical modelling for ecosystem restoration and storm surge prediction. Geophysical data were added for oyster identification and delineation. These first-order data also help comprehend the regional subsurface geology essential for sediment exploration to support Louisiana’s marsh and barrier island restoration projects.


Author(s):  
Kevin Linka ◽  
Mathias Peirlinck ◽  
Amelie Schäfer ◽  
Oguz Ziya Tikenogullari ◽  
Alain Goriely ◽  
...  

AbstractThe timing and sequence of safe campus reopening has remained the most controversial topic in higher education since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. By the end of March 2020, almost all colleges and universities in the United States had transitioned to an all online education and many institutions have not yet fully reopened to date. For a residential campus like Stanford University, the major challenge of reopening is to estimate the number of incoming infectious students at the first day of class. Here we learn the number of incoming infectious students using Bayesian inference and perform a series of retrospective and projective simulations to quantify the risk of campus reopening. We create a physics-based probabilistic model to infer the local reproduction dynamics for each state and adopt a network SEIR model to simulate the return of all undergraduates, broken down by their year of enrollment and state of origin. From these returning student populations, we predict the outbreak dynamics throughout the spring, summer, fall, and winter quarters using the inferred reproduction dynamics of Santa Clara County. We compare three different scenarios: the true outbreak dynamics under the wild-type SARS-CoV-2, and the hypothetical outbreak dynamics under the new COVID-19 variants B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 with 56% and 50% increased transmissibility. Our study reveals that even small changes in transmissibility can have an enormous impact on the overall case numbers. With no additional countermeasures, during the most affected quarter, the fall of 2020, there would have been 203 cases under baseline reproduction, compared to 4727 and 4256 cases for the B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 variants. Our results suggest that population mixing presents an increased risk for local outbreaks, especially with new and more infectious variants emerging across the globe. Tight outbreak control through mandatory quarantine and test-trace-isolate strategies will be critical in successfully managing these local outbreak dynamics.


Author(s):  
Yi-Tui Chen

Although vaccination is carried out worldwide, the vaccination rate varies greatly. As of 24 May 2021, in some countries, the proportion of the population fully vaccinated against COVID-19 has exceeded 50%, but in many countries, this proportion is still very low, less than 1%. This article aims to explore the impact of vaccination on the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the herd immunity of almost all countries in the world has not been reached, several countries were selected as sample cases by employing the following criteria: more than 60 vaccine doses per 100 people and a population of more than one million people. In the end, a total of eight countries/regions were selected, including Israel, the UAE, Chile, the United Kingdom, the United States, Hungary, and Qatar. The results find that vaccination has a major impact on reducing infection rates in all countries. However, the infection rate after vaccination showed two trends. One is an inverted U-shaped trend, and the other is an L-shaped trend. For those countries with an inverted U-shaped trend, the infection rate begins to decline when the vaccination rate reaches 1.46–50.91 doses per 100 people.


Children ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 261
Author(s):  
Priya Patel ◽  
Andrew Houck ◽  
Daniel Fuentes

Variability in neonatal clinical practice is well recognized. Respiratory management involves interdisciplinary care and often is protocol driven. The most recent published guidelines for management of respiratory distress syndrome and surfactant administration were published in 2014 and may not reflect current clinical practice in the United States. The goal of this project was to better understand variability in surfactant administration through conduct of health care provider (HCP) interviews. Questions focused on known practice variations included: use of premedication, decisions to treat, technique of surfactant administration and use of guidelines. Data were analyzed for trends and results were communicated with participants. A total of 54 HCPs participated from June to September 2020. In almost all settings, neonatologists or nurse practitioners intubated the infant and respiratory therapists administered surfactant. The INSURE (INtubation-SURrfactant-Extubation) technique was practiced by 83% of participants. Premedication prior to intubation was used by 76% of HCPs. An FiO2 ≥ 30% was the most common threshold for surfactant administration (48%). In conclusion, clinical practice variations exist in respiratory management and surfactant administration and do not seem to be specific to NICU level or institution type. It is unknown what effects the variability in clinical practice might have on clinical outcomes.


Fire ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
Tony Marks-Block ◽  
William Tripp

Prescribed burning by Indigenous people was once ubiquitous throughout California. Settler colonialism brought immense investments in fire suppression by the United States Forest Service and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention (CAL FIRE) to protect timber and structures, effectively limiting prescribed burning in California. Despite this, fire-dependent American Indian communities such as the Karuk and Yurok peoples, stalwartly advocate for expanding prescribed burning as a part of their efforts to revitalize their culture and sovereignty. To examine the political ecology of prescribed burning in Northern California, we coupled participant observation of prescribed burning in Karuk and Yurok territories (2015–2019) with 75 surveys and 18 interviews with Indigenous and non-Indigenous fire managers to identify political structures and material conditions that facilitate and constrain prescribed fire expansion. Managers report that interagency partnerships have provided supplemental funding and personnel to enable burning, and that decentralized prescribed burn associations facilitate prescribed fire. However, land dispossession and centralized state regulations undermine Indigenous and local fire governance. Excessive investment in suppression and the underfunding of prescribed fire produces a scarcity of personnel to implement and plan burns. Where Tribes and local communities have established burning infrastructure, authorities should consider the devolution of decision-making and land repatriation to accelerate prescribed fire expansion.


2020 ◽  
pp. 147797142095908
Author(s):  
Renford Reese

The Reintegration Academy was founded in 2009. It was the first program of its kind in the United States to bring a group of parolees to a college campus for an extended period for academic programming. Since its inception, the Reintegration Academy has collaborated with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s Division of Adult Parole Operations to host nine cohorts and served 251 parolees. Division of Adult Parole Operations assists in recruiting, screening, and giving participants referrals to the program. The program immerses 35 participants in Academic Orientation, Life Skills, and Career Development modules for eight weeks. The Reintegration Academy has an 85% success rate of enrolling participants in college and/or placing them in gainful employment. This article is a reflective essay that concisely discusses the genesis of the program, integrates a review of literature on the challenges in re-entry, the program’s anatomy, and the outcomes of the program.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 102-102
Author(s):  
Alice Prendergast ◽  
Kristi Fuller

Abstract Efforts to include community voice in health policy and service planning are gaining recognition and support in the United States. Findings suggest community involvement can contribute to a better understanding of systems and factors that impact health, and, subsequently, more effective and sustainable policy and program design. Additionally, engagement can increase community buy-in, and community members can gain a greater awareness of services; increased confidence navigating systems; feelings of social connectedness; and capacity to advocate around issues through participation. Despite these findings, the extent to which community members are engaged in planning and decision-making varies considerably. Researchers from Georgia State University conducted a review of state plans on aging using the Person-Centered Outcomes Research Initiative (PCORI) Engagement Principles and the Health Research & Educational Trust’s Community and Patient Engagement Spectrum as frameworks to assess evidence of community engagement. The frameworks recognize engagement throughout the planning process, including design, data collection and interpretation, and dissemination. The review revealed that few planning processes described significant engagement, but rather met the minimal requirements established by federal policy. Federal guidance on community-informed planning practices is sparse, as are resources to support states in adopting these processes. To address this gap, the research team drew on the frameworks and other promising practices to design two community engagement projects, both in partnership with Georgia’s Division of Aging Services. Methods for participant engagement, data collection, interpretation and application of results, and lessons learned through both projects will be discussed, as well as potential implications.


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