Evaluation of the Visually Impaired Experience of the Sound Environment in Urban Spaces

Visually impaired people have unique perceptions of and usage requirements for various urban spaces. Therefore, understanding these perceptions can help create reasonable layouts and construct urban infrastructure. This study recruited 26 visually impaired volunteers to evaluate 24 sound environments regarding clarity, comfort, safety, vitality, and depression. This data was collected in seven different types of urban spaces. An independent sample non-parametric test was used to determine the significance of the differences between environmental evaluation results for each evaluation dimension and to summarize the compositions of sound and space elements in the positive and negative influence spaces. The results suggested that visually impaired people (1) feel comfort, safety, and clarity in parks, residential communities, and shopping streets; (2) have negative perceptions of vegetable markets, bus stops, hospitals, and urban departments; (3) feel anxious when traffic sounds, horn sounds, manhole cover sounds, and construction sounds occur; and (4) prefer spaces away from traffic, with fewer and slower vehicles, with a suitable space scale, and moderate crowd density. These results provide a reference for the future design of activity venues (i.e., residential communities, vegetable markets, bus stops, parks, shopping streets, hospitals, and urban functional departments) and the planning of accessibility systems for visually impaired urban residents.

Pavimentos Táteis em Paragens de Autocarro

O Projeto de Investigação ACCES4ALL focaliza-se em interfaces modais projetadas de acordo com o conceito de “Design Universal”. Tem como objetivo principal desenvolver um estudo piloto de uma paragem de autocarros acessível, inteligente e sustentável, a localizar numa interface multimodal. Num contexto de sustentabilidade social, os ambientes construídos inclusivos têm de garantir acessibilidade universal. Assim, as pessoas com deficiência visual necessitam de pavimentos táteis e/ou com diferenciação cromática que forneçam orientação e informação sobre os espaços e os meios de transporte. Com esta comunicação pretende-se apresentar exemplos internacionais de sistemas de encaminhamento, através de pavimentos táteis, em paragens de autocarro, tendo-se recorrido a pesquisa bibliográfica e realizado desenhos técnicos. Os resultados indicam que existe uma grande diversidade de soluções técnicas de encaminhamento tátil no ambiente construído, recomendando-se a necessidade de harmonização de soluções podotáteis no mundo, considerando um contexto de Turismo Acessível.Palavras-chave: Turismo Acessível. Acessibilidade universal. Ambiente construído. Paragens de autocarro. Pavimentos táteis. Pessoas com deficiência visual. Tactile Floors at Bus StopsABSTRACTThe ACCES4ALL research project focuses on modal interfaces designed according to the concept of "Universal Design". Its main objective is to develop a pilot study of an accessible, smart and sustainable bus stop to be located at a multimodal interface. In a context of social sustainability, inclusive built environments must guarantee universal accessibility. Thus, people with visual disability need tactile and/or chromatically differentiated pavements that provide orientation and information about spaces and means of transport. This paper intends to present international examples of guiding systems, through tactile surfaces, at bus stops, having resorted to bibliographic research and technical drawings. The results indicate that there is a great diversity of technical solutions for tactile routing in the built environment, recommending the need for harmonization of podotactile solutions in the world, considering an Accessible Tourism context. Keywords: Accessible Tourism. Universal accessibility. Built environment. Bus stops. Tactile surfaces. People with visual disability.

Classification of Bus Driving Behaviour In Universiti Malaysia Sabah Campus

Driving behaviour has been studied by numerous researchers for the past few years. It includes the instantaneous driving behaviour observations and the drivers speed which are said to be influenced by many factors, such as the demographic measure of the drivers, environmental, passenger effect, and road characteristics. This paper describes the recent analysis and classification of driver behaviour in actual driving scenarios among the bus drivers in Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) Main Campus, Kota Kinabalu. This research focussed on determining the riderships of bus in UMS campus, to investigate the differences of instantaneous driving behaviours of bus drivers during the acceleration phase when leaving bus stops, and to poduce the classification of the bus driving behaviour in UMS based on the driver’s accelerations. In order to achieve the objective of this study, observations were made for determining the riderships and the differences in instantaneous bus driving behaviour several times for each bus stops. For drivers speed and accelerations, a mobile applications called Speedometer GPS was used to obtain the data. Interview was conducted to a total number of 10 respondents to obtain their demographic measure. The results obtained shows the ridership of UMS bus is the highest in the afternoon peak. The instantaneous driving behaviour produce the head movement as the highest percentage during peak hour, and inattentive behaviour as the highest during the off peak hour. The bus drivers in UMS were classified as Aggressive and Calm Behaviour Category.

Enabling and Emerging Sensing Technologies for Crowd Management in Public Transportation Systems: A Review

Management of crowd information in public transportation (PT) systems is crucial to foster sustainable mobility, by increasing the user’s comfort and satisfaction during normal operation, as well as to cope with emergency situations, such as pandemic crises, as recently experienced with COVID-19 limitations. This paper presents a taxonomy and review of sensing technologies based on Internet of Things (IoT) for real-time crowd analysis, which can be adopted in various segments of the PT system (buses/trams/trains, railway/subway stations, and bus stops). To discuss such technologies in a clear systematic perspective, we introduce a reference architecture for crowd management, which employs modern information and communication technologies (ICT) in order to: (i) monitor and predict crowding events; (ii) adapt in real-time PT system operations, by modifying service frequency, timetables, routes, and so on; (iii) inform in real-time the users of the crowding status of the PT system, by means of electronic displays installed inside vehicles or at bus stops/stations, and/or by mobile transport applications. It is envisioned that the innovative crowd management functionalities enabled by ICT/IoT sensing technologies can be incrementally implemented as an add-on to traditional intelligent transportation system (ITS) platforms, which are already in use by major PT companies operating in urban areas. Moreover, it is argued that, in this new framework, additional services can be delivered, such as, e.g., on-line ticketing, vehicle access control and reservation in severely crowded situations, and evolved crowd-aware route planning.

Socioeconomic patterning of food and drink advertising at public transport stops in Edinburgh, UK

Objective: Outdoor advertisements for food and drink products form a large part of the food environment and they disproportionately promote unhealthy products. However, less is known about the social patterning of such advertisements. The main aim of this study was to explore the socioeconomic patterning of food and drink advertising at bus stops in Scotland’s capital city, Edinburgh. Design: Bus stop advertisements were audited to identify food/drink adverts and classify them by food/drink category (i.e. ‘advert category’). This data was then linked to area-based deprivation and proximity measures. Neighbourhood deprivation was measured using the bus stop x/y co-ordinates, which were converted to postcodes to identify the matching 2012 deprivation level via the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD). Distance to schools and leisure centres were also collected using location data. Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) and linear regression analyses were used to assess associations between the promotion of advert categories and deprivation and proximity to schools/leisure centres, respectively. Setting: Edinburgh city, United Kingdom Results: 561 food/drink advertisements were identified across 349 bus stops, with eight advertisement categories noted and included in the final analysis, including alcohol, fast food outlets and confectionary. The majority of adverts were for ‘unhealthy’ food and drink categories, however there was no evidence for any socioeconomic patterning of these advertisements. There was no evidence of a relationship between advertisements and proximity to schools and leisure centres. Conclusions: While there is no evidence for food and drink advertising being patterned by neighbourhood deprivation, the scale of unhealthy advertising is an area for policy evaluations and interventions on the control of such outdoor advertising.

Abstract 9876: Optimizing Public Naloxone Kit Locations Through Mathematical Modeling

Introduction: Use of bystander-administered naloxone may lead to improved likelihood of recovery from opioid overdose. We sought to determine the accessibility of public access naloxone kits on nearby opioid overdose incidents if placed at public transit stops, compared to placing kits outside pharmacies or with existing public access automated external defibrillators (PADs). Methods: We included all incidents in Metro Vancouver, British Columbia responded to by British Columbia Emergency Health Services coded as a drug overdose with naloxone administered on-scene (Dec. 2014 to Aug. 2020). We geo-coded all public transit bus stops and used a mathematical optimization model to select bus stops where publicly accessible naloxone kits could be placed to maximize accessibility (defined as ≤100 m walking distance) to opioid overdoses. We evaluated accessibility on out-of-sample OHCAs using five-fold cross validation and compared against two baseline policies: placing publicly accessible naloxone kits at all pharmacies identified by the College of Pharmacists of British Columbia, and placing kits at all PADs identified by the British Columbia AED Registry. Statistical analysis was conducted using McNemar’s test. Results: We identified 14,318 opioid overdoses, 8,972 bus stops, 736 pharmacies, and 425 PADs. Accessibility of public naloxone kits for opioid overdose locations was 5.1% when placed at all pharmacies and 3.5% when placed with all existing PADs. Optimized naloxone kit placement using bus stops as candidate locations resulted in significantly higher accessibility than both pharmacy and PAD-based placement at 14.8% with 10 optimized locations (P<0.001), increasing to 36.7% with 500 locations (P<0.001). Conclusion: Optimizing placement of public access naloxone kits at select public transit locations can provide significantly higher accessibility to opioid overdose locations compared to placement at pharmacies or at existing PAD locations.