No abstract

Urban population growth and urbanization with its impact on urban planning require continuous research in order to address the challenges posed by transportation requirements. Identifying transportation capacity (road and railways) is an important task that can identify whether the network is capable of sustaining the present volume of traffic and whether it can handle the future intended traffic flow. A new city, XiongAn, will be built in the coming years in order to relieve the pressure of population on Beijing and disperse the economic growth, business activity, and opportunities across the country. The focus of this research is to generate a transportation model between Beijing and XiongAn, in order to increase connection and connectivity, reduce travel time, and increase transfer capacity between the two hubs (Beijing-XiongAn). The existing transportation network between two cities is analyzed and a network which can handle future demand has been proposed. The first stage has been the investigation of a variety of options using geographic information system (GIS). Planning and implementing a mass transit system requires choosing among options such as an existing intercity railway line, a new high-speed railway line, and/or motorway options. In the second phase of our analysis, we assess these options relative to multiple criteria, using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The options were evaluated using various criteria responsible for selection of alternative; it is found that travel time, cost of travel, safety, reliability, accessibility, and environment are key criteria for selecting the best alternative. The GIS and multicriteria analysis suggested that the best option is to build a new high speed railway line.

No abstract

As man continues to encroach on the natural habitat of the arboreal (birds and other wildlife), problems like aircraft-bird strikes continues to aggravate as air traffic volume increases. This study focused on the Aminu Kano International Airport in Nigeria due to importance of its geographical location and the air traffic flow. The analysis result reveals that 12 bird species were involved in 44 strikes at the airport between the year 2001-2010 and mostly during the rainy seasons. The airport during the same period recorded 55,205 aircraft movement that carried 3,551,587 passengers. Distribution of these strikes by phase indicates that 32% occurred on approach, 25% on landing roll, 20% on takeoff, 4.5% on descend, 4.5% during climb while 14% at other phases. Using the International Bird Strike Committee strike rate (per 10,000 flights), the computed strike rate for this airport is 7.97 per 10,000 flights. It is therefore recommended that "Bird Strike Avoidance Radar" equipment that will alert the control tower which will in turn alert the pilot of the presence of birds along his way be installed in major airports in the country.