In aiming to decrease the number of casualties and people with difficulty in wide-area evacuations due to a large earthquake, it is highly important to visualize and quantify the potential danger in residential areas. In this paper, we construct a multi-agent simulation model, which describes property damage (such as building-collapse, the spread of fire and blocking of streets) and people’s ev...

INTRODUCTION To address the paucity of research around smokefree streets, we: (i) refined existing data collection methods; (ii) expanded on the meagre previous research in this area; and (iii) compared results by differing size of urban centre. METHODS We refined established methods; a solo observer simultaneously observed smoking and measured fine particulate levels (PM(2.5)) on a route of ...

This paper presents an explicit formula for propagation path loss prediction of microcellular communication in an urban street scene. The formula is derived based on geometrical optics and diffraction theory and it takes into account multiple reflections along main streets, side streets and diffractions around corners. Comparisons between our theoretical results with measurements and ray tracin...

T hroughout the United States, citizens are asking their city traffic engineers to reduce “excessive” cut-through traffic and speeding cars on their local streets. A recent ZTE Journal article noted an “epidemic” of street closure requests,’ and many recent ITE articles have dealt with aspects of neighborhood traffic control. More and more, city and county traffic engineers must shift their att...

The effects of streets on biodiversity is an important aspect of urban ecology, but it has been neglected worldwide. Several vegetation attributes (e.g. street tree density and diversity) have important effects on biodiversity and ecological processes. In this study, we evaluated the influences of urban vegetation-represented by characteristics of street trees (canopy size, proportion of native...

The decline of shopping streets and the rise of shopping malls have been major trends in European retailing for decades. So far, research has failed to investigate this shift of agglomeration format (AF) patronage from a marketing perspective, including the consumers’ point of view. This paper presents a theoretical comparison of generic similarities and conceptual differences between shopping ...

Many complex networks erase parts of their geometry as they develop, so that their evolution is difficult to quantify and trace. Here we introduce entropy measures for quantifying the complexity of street orientations and length variations within planar networks and apply them to the street networks of 41 British cities, whose geometric evolution over centuries can be explored. The results show...

At high frequencies, the sound propagation can be approximated by the propagation of sound particles which are reflected and absorbed at the boundaries. This propagation follows then a transport process. In urban canyons, this transport process can be reduced to a diffusion process. The resultant model allows one to obtain the spatial distribution of the acoustical energy in a street for a very...