With the railway transportation Industry moving actively towards automation, accurate location and inventory of wayside track assets like traffic signals, crossings, switches, mileposts, etc. is of extreme importance. With the new Positive Train Control (PTC) regulation coming into effect, many railway safety rules will be tied directly to location of assets like mileposts and signals. Newer sp...

Besides direct impacts of urban biodiversity on local ecosystem services, the contact of city dwellers with urban nature in their everyday life could increase their awareness on conservation issues. In this paper, we focused on a particularly common animal urban species, the feral pigeon Columba livia. Through an observational approach, we examined behavioral interactions between city dwellers ...

the main design criteria of ballasted railway tracks include rail deflections, rail bending stresses, rail wheel contact stresses, sleeper bending moments and ballast sleeper contact pressures. numerous criteria have been defined for the design of ballasted railway tracks owing to the various mechanical properties of track components and their complex interaction. therefore, railway track desig...

In the context of public transportation system, improving the service quality and robustness through minimizing the average passengers waiting time is a real challenge. This study provides robust stochastic programming models for train timetabling problem in urban rail transit systems. The objective is the minimization of the weighted summation of the expected cost of passenger waiting time, it...

This article aims at identifying some commonalities and differences in intermodal freight in France and Japan, focusing on urban zones. This comparison puts into perspective two spatial situations tinged with land pressure. It helps us identify opportunities for knowledge and transfer of best practices for the promotion of modal shift and for land use and planning policies that favor intermodal...

Urban authorities are continuously drawing up policies to promote cycling among commuters. However, these initiatives are counterproductive for the targeted objectives because they increase opportunities for bicycle theft. This paper explores Inner London as a case study to address place-specific risk factors for bicycle theft at the street-segment level while controlling for seasonal variation...

The public transport reform discussion initiated in 1992 in the Netherlands ended in 2000 with the enactment of a new passenger transport law. According to this new law, about a third of public transport services will have to be tendered by regional authorities in the coming years. In the meantime, a few regional railway lines have been contracted or tendered and preparations are made to tender...

In the framework of transport theory, we are interested in the following optimization problem: given the distributions μ of working people and μ− of their working places in an urban area, build a transportation network (such as a railway or an underground system) which minimizes a functional depending on the geometry of the network through a particular cost function. The functional is defined a...

A popular (well at least popular with me) TV show concerns two 'mad' scientists who love nothing more than to explode urban myths. For instance they have investigated the possibility of death by urinating on a live railway line! We could do with something similar in finance. We have a bad habit of accepting theories as fact within finance, of accepting statements as if they were truths. Even wh...