Various plant indexes are used or recommended for bioindication. However, the nonmonotonic dose-response dependences (hormesis and paradoxical effects) of these indexes are insufficiently explored upon exposure to pollution. We studied the dependences of these Betula pendula indexes on the intensity of motor traffic pollution. Regression analysis did not reveal any dependence of chlorophyll and...

In two experiments participants were asked to walk inside the city Hradec Králové along a track, which consisted of streets with various amounts of vegetation and various degrees of traffic intensity. The walking speed was measured in eight selected sections. The environmental properties of the sections were estimated by raters, who described a level of naturalness of a place, intensity of traf...

In this paper a stochastic model of tanker traffic is developed to determine the probability of vessel casualties resulting from the transit traffic through a narrow waterway. More specifically, the present study models the collision and grounding probabilities in a waterway resulting from course changes due to hydrodynamic forces acting on the vessel. The computation of vessel positions and th...

Frequent lane-changes in highway merging, diverging, and weaving areas could disrupt traffic flow and, even worse, lead to accidents. In this paper, we propose a simple model for studying bottleneck effects of lane-changing traffic and aggregate traffic dynamics of a roadway with lane-changing areas. Based on the observation that, when changing its lane, a vehicle affects traffic on both its cu...

Environmental noise management is an important part of the policy across the European Union policy context, because transportation and industrial noise is a significant local environmental problem for most of the urban population. Increasing number of vehicles is associated with growing noise level from road transport in urban areas and rising public health problems. Motor transport is consider...

Two of the most popular approximations for the distribution of the steady-state waiting time, W∞, of the M/G/1 queue are the so-called heavytraffic approximation and heavy-tailed asymptotic, respectively. If the traffic intensity, ρ, is close to 1 and the processing times have finite variance, the heavy-traffic approximation states that the distribution of W∞ is roughly exponential at scale O((...

In Belgium, every year approximately 50.000 injury accidents occur in traffic, with almost 70.000 victims, of which 1.500 deaths (Belgian Institute for Traffic Safety, 2000). Not only does the steady increase in traffic intensity pose a heavy burden on the society in terms of the number of casualties, the insecurity on the roads will also have an important effect on the economic costs associate...

By acquiring information over a wide area regardless of weather conditions and solar illumination, space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has the potential to be a promising application for traffic monitoring. However, the backscatter character of a vehicle in a SAR image is unstable and varies with image parameters, such as aspect and incidence angle. To investigate vehicle detectability i...