road transport is a ubiquitous source of lead contamination in the soil near highways with direct and indirect impacts on human health. accumulation of traffic-induced lead in the soils depends on gasoline lead content, traffic volume, as well as meteorological conditions. to evaluate the effect of traffic on soil lead concentration, 113 samples from the topsoil (0-15 cm) were collected in a re...

Ecological civilization construction has become an important part of national development. We must establish and practice the idea that clear water green mountains are gold silver, adhere to basic state policy resource conservation environmental protection, form a way development life, firmly follow path civilized with production development, prosperous life sound ecology, build beautiful China...

Judge's Commentary The focus of most problem-oriented projects is crime, but it might just as well be any other of the recurring problems dealt with by police. In fact, this year's winner of the Goldstein Award was focused on a traffic problem—a high rate of fatal accidents on a particular stretch of rural highway in California. The projects' novelty was one reason for its selection. Another wa...

Proper traffic control is critical in highway work zone safety. Traffic control devices such as signs, barricades, cones, and plastic safety barrels are often used. Accidents can occur because of improper work zone design, improper work zone housekeeping, and driver negligence. One solution is to automate safety devices. This paper presents a mobile safety barrel robot. The Robotic Safety Barre...

Empirical data and statistical models are employed to predict where new highway routes are most likely to be located. The land use, population distribution, and highway network for the Twin Cities’ Metro Area from 1958 to 1990 are used. Binary logit models estimate the likelihood a particular cell will see the construction of divided highways and secondary highways. The results show that the ar...

We study two speedup techniques for route planning in road networks: highway hierarchies (HH) and goal directed search using landmarks (ALT). It turns out that there are several interesting synergies. Highway hierarchies yield a way to implement landmark selection more efficiently and to store landmark information more space efficiently than before. ALT gives queries in highway hierarchies an e...

This paper describes the design of a MPEG coding algorithm targeted to compress video sequences generated by highway surveillance cameras. The physical constraints of vehicles as well as the geometry of the highway environment projected into the camera determine a relevant base of a-priori knowledge, which allows obtaining considerable processing speed up as well as higher compression ratio. Th...