Overall visibility plays a key role in the safety of pedestrians. Despite its importance, verifying the right provisioning of sufficient available sight distances among pedestrians and vulnerable road users (VRUs) is not a prevalent practice. On top of that, the pursuit for more sustainable modes of transportation has promoted the establishment of different shared mobility services which are prone to increase walking and, thus, the number of pedestrians and other VRUs in urban settings. With the intention of verifying how car-centered designs perform for non-motorized users, a 3D procedure that evaluates the visibility of pedestrians and other users is presented and applied to specific cases in Madrid, Spain. The proposed solution employs virtual trajectories of pedestrians with mobility impairments and without them, cyclists, and personal transportation device riders. Their visibility was assessed around the functional area of urban intersections, including zones where possible jaywalking practices might occur. The evaluation was performed three-dimensionally, making use of LiDAR data, GIS tools, and 3D objects. Results show the impact of street furniture location on visibility, the distinctive influence of vegetation on the lines of sight of each observer, and how design parameters that were intended to improve motorized traffic could affect VRU.
Numberless Heading] Abstract [Normal] Manuscript preparation for CETRA 2014 proceedings is a fairly simplified process. Everything you need for a properly formatted article is contained in this template document which uses a feature of Microsoft Word called Styles. A style is a set of formatting characteristics that you can apply to text in your document to quickly change its appearance. When you apply a style, you apply a whole group of formats in one simple step. For example, you may want to format the sections headers to make them stand out. Instead of changing the headings one by one, you can give them a style and change them all at once. All the styles in this document are preformatted so you only need to pick an appropriate one for the part you are working on. In this example document each section that uses a specific style starts with a style name surrounded by square brackets for easy identification. The text you are reading at the moment is formatted using [Normal] style, whilst the heading above it uses [Numberless Heading] style and so on. These words serve only as a reference and should be omitted in the paper you submit. Figure 1. Styles dialogue in Microsoft Word 97-2003[Normal] Depending on the version of Microsoft Word you are using, you can access styles in one of two ways. Word 97-2003 features styles as a part of standard formatting toolbar, just left to where you usually choose the font you wish to use. This case is shown in Figure 1. Word 2007-2013 users will find 'Styles' group on the Office ribbon under the 'Home' tab, as shown in Figure 2. This group may be expanded to a list by clicking on the icon in its lower-right corner which will open a window similar to the one in Figure 3.
Existing roads require periodic evaluation in order to ensure safe transportation. Estimations of the available sight distance (ASD) are fundamental to make sure motorists have sufficient visibility to perform basic driving tasks. Mobile LiDAR Systems (MLS) can provide these evaluations with accurate three-dimensional models of the road and surroundings. Similarly, Geographic Information System (GIS) tools have been employed to obtain ASD. Due to the fact that widespread GIS formats used to store digital surface models handle elevation as an attribute of location, the presented methodology has separated the representation of ground and aboveground elements. The road geometry and surrounding ground are stored in digital terrain models (DTM). Correspondingly, abutting vegetation, manmade structures, road assets and other roadside elements are stored in 3D objects and placed on top of the DTM. Both the DTM and 3D objects are accurately obtained from a denoised and classified LiDAR point cloud. Based on the consideration that roadside utilities and most manmade structures are well-defined geometric elements, some visual obstructions are extracted and/or replaced with 3D objects from online warehouses. Different evaluations carried out with this method highlight the tradeoff between the accuracy of the estimations, performance and geometric complexity as well as the benefits of the individual consideration of road assets.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.