Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter presents an overview of the importance of planning of water supply during the development of a city. The size of a city is limited by the quantity of water that is available to it for residential, commercial, and industrial purposes. A survey in a city of a half-million persons revealed the consumption of about 90 gallons of water per family per day. All water is not alike. There is hard water, soft water, water with different amounts and varieties of mineral content, water that becomes polluted by local activities, and other water characteristics that present the problems that are not easy to solve. When plans are drawn up for the future of a city, the conditions under which water can be dispensed to the citizens must be considered. If reservoirs are to be built, rivers dammed back, or any other physical controls designed, space must be provided and this can easily affect the potential distribution of all manner of institutions including homes, manufacturing plants, recreation grounds, and public buildings.

Abstract

In South Africa (SA), the school transport industry provides millions of children with a means of travelling to and from school. The industry has, however, been reported to be plagued by widespread safety concerns. The consequent road traffic incidents have often been attributed to driver factors, including driving in excess of legal speeds or at inappropriate speeds; driving while under the influence of alcohol, while sleepy or fatigued; or driving without using protective equipment for vehicle occupants. There are currently very few SA interventions that specifically target this important industry role-player. The Safe Travel to School Programme was recently implemented by a national child safety agency, with a focus on driver road safety awareness, defensive driver training, eye- testing, vehicle roadworthy inspections with selected upgrades, incentives for safe performance, and implementation of a vehicle telematics tracking system with regular, individual driving behaviour information updates. This quasi-experimental study offers an evaluation of the initial impact on safety performance of this telematics-based driver and vehicle safety intervention in terms of speeding, acceleration, braking, cornering, and time-of-day driving, and compares the school transport driver performance with that of general motorists. Despite concerns that some school transport vehicles are used for multiple purposes outside of school transport duties, at night, and for longer distances, overall these vehicles recorded lower percentages of speeding, lower harsh braking, and lower average harsh cornering and acceleration than general drivers. Document type: Article

Abstract

Vulnerable road users (VRUs) represent a large portion of fatalities and injuries occurring on European Union roads. It is therefore important to address the safety of VRUs, particularly in urban areas, by identifying which factors may affect the injury severity level that can be used to develop countermeasures. This paper aims to identify the risk factors that affect the severity of a VRU injured when involved in a motor vehicle crash. For that purpose, a comparative evaluation of two machine learning classifiers&mdash decision tree and logistic regression&mdash considering three different resampling techniques (under-, over- and synthetic oversampling) is presented, comparing both imbalanced and balanced datasets. Crash data records were analyzed involving VRUs from three different cities in Portugal and six years (2012&ndash 2017). The main conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that oversampling techniques improve the ability of the classifiers to identify risk factors. On the one hand, this analysis revealed that road markings, road conditions and luminosity affect the injury severity of a pedestrian. On the other hand, age group and temporal variables (month, weekday and time period) showed to be relevant to predict the severity of a cyclist injury when involved in a crash. Document type: Article