Streets, being vital elements of public spaces, provide mobility and social contact. Beyond their transportation character, streets are the locations where people may interact with each other, satisfy needs, express themselves. These functions contribute to liveliness have a significant influence on life in spaces. This research examines street characteristics as factors that help us identify s...

Western Australia is famous for its wild flowers, but its doctors are even wilder. Or so Bruce Shepherd, president of the Australian Medical Association (and a Sydneysider), told the opening session of the BMA's overseas meeting in Perth. The BMA arrived in Perth in early November to find not only a vast isolated land of desert and sea but also streets with Scottish names and Father Christmases...

Thousands of images are generated every day, which implies the necessity to classify, organise and access them using an easy, faster and efficient way. Scene classification, the classification of images into semantic categories (e.g. coast, mountains and streets), is a challenging and important problem nowadays. Many different approaches concerning scene classification have been proposed in the...

INTRODUCTION Walking and bicycling are important but underused modes of transportation in the United States. Road design influences how much walking and bicycling takes place along streets and roads. Currently, numerous national policy initiatives, including Safe Routes to School and Complete Streets, are attempting to improve pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure and "friendliness." However,...

OBJECTIVES We compared cycling injury risks of 14 route types and other route infrastructure features. METHODS We recruited 690 city residents injured while cycling in Toronto or Vancouver, Canada. A case-crossover design compared route infrastructure at each injury site to that of a randomly selected control site from the same trip. RESULTS Of 14 route types, cycle tracks had the lowest ri...

In this paper we present an algorithm to build a road network map enriched with traffic rules such as one-way streets and forbidden turns, based on the interpretation of already detected and classified traffic signs. Such algorithm helps to automatize the elaboration of maps for commercial navigation systems. Our solution is based on simulating navigation along the road network, determining at ...

BACKGROUND This study examined the impact of transportation infrastructure at intersection and non-intersection locations on bicycling injury risk. METHODS In Vancouver and Toronto, we studied adult cyclists who were injured and treated at a hospital emergency department. A case-crossover design compared the infrastructure of injury and control sites within each injured bicyclist's route. Int...

“Big Games are human-powered software for cities, life-size collaborative hallucinations, and serious fun” Frank Lantz. “Play” was once a word that used to be associated with games such as Hide and Seek and Tag. It is now widely used to represent sedentary activities. To quote a fourth-grader in San Diego, “I like to play indoors ‘cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are”, (Last Child ...

With increasing urbanization vector-borne diseases are quickly developing in cities, and urban control strategies are needed. If streets are shown to be barriers to disease vectors, city blocks could be used as a convenient and relevant spatial unit of study and control. Unfortunately, existing spatial analysis tools do not allow for assessment of the impact of an urban grid on the presence of ...

In this paper, we derive a topological pattern of urban street networks using a large sample (the largest so far to the best of our knowledge) of 40 US cities and a few more from elsewhere of different sizes. It is found that all the topologies of urban street networks based on street–street intersection demonstrate a small world structure, and a scale-free property for both street length and c...