Dominique Gillis

The influence of traffic noise on appreciation of the living quality of a neighborhood.

Traffic influences the quality of life in a neighborhood in many different ways. Today, in many patsy of the world the benefits of accessibility are taken for granted and traffic is perceived as having a negative impact on satisfaction with the neighborhood. Negative health effects are observed in a number of studies and these stimulate the negative feelings in the exposed population. The noise produced by traffic is one of the most important contributors to the appreciation of the quality of life. Thus, it is useful to define a number of indicators that allow monitoring the current impact of noise on the quality of life and predicting the effect of future developments. This work investigates and compares a set of indicators related to exposure at home and exposure during trips around the house. The latter require detailed modeling of the population’s trip behavior. The validity of the indicators is checked by their ability to predict the outcome of a social survey and by outlining potential causal paths between them and the outcome variables considered: general satisfaction with the quality of life in the neighborhood, noise annoyance at home, and reported traffic density in the area.

The use of smartphone applications in the collection of travel behaviour data

The MOVE project deals with the collection and analysis of crowd behaviour data. The main goals of the project are to collect data through the use of mobile phones and to develop new technologies to process and mine the collected data for crowd behaviour analysis. This paper describes the different steps in the development of tracking applications for smartphones that make use of advanced data mining. The results on data collection, analysis, and reporting have led to the development and operation of an advanced urban data monitoring system.

Cohousing and EV Sharing: Field Tests in Flanders

This paper investigates the potential of electric vehicles (EVs) in a context of a pilot test in Belgium, consisting of car sharing services managed and exploited in small communities. Part of a broader testing activity in the framework of the e-Mobility NSR project, the test had the objective of metering EVs’ charging and consumption in real daily transport operations, but soon it acquired new meanings. It shaped EV sharing services at a small scale, directly managed by the users, which also share energy and maintenance costs. The chosen context was cohousing, a special type of collaborative housing, and four ones were selected in Flanders: two urban units and two larger semi-urban ones. The two urban communities received a prepaid card for reserving and using EVs provided by Cambio, a Belgian car sharing company. The other two cohousings received two EVs and a charging box, organising and running an internal car sharing system for the duration of 1 year. During the tests, quantitative and qualitative data were collected. The paper reports the intermediate results, identifying potential EV sharing consumers, based on their behaviour and attitudes in relation to the condition of the local context in which they live.

Observing Human Activity Through Sensing

This chapter gives an overview of technological solutions that allow us to observe human activity during travel or in interaction with each other or with the environment. Different categories of solutions are presented, namely observation by scanning, location-enabled devices and tagging. For each category we look into current innovative solutions, both in applied hardware as in how the data is processed. For each category examples are discussed and the possibilities and bottlenecks of each solution are highlighted.

Noise emissions at intersections: comparing microscopic and macroscopic traffic simulation approaches

Environmental noise mapping often involves the use of traffic simulation software. In most cases, traffic flows are simulated in a macroscopic way, considering only traffic flow parameters averaged over road segments. This approach does not allow to correctly account for the typical deceleration and acceleration patterns of traffic at intersections, which influence local noise emissions. Microscopic traffic simulation models, which model each vehicle individually, incorporate these dynamic effects. However, they require much larger amounts of input data for calibration, and are therefore less suited to map large areas. In this paper, we investigate the possible influence of the choice of simulation detail on simulated traffic flow parameters and, as a consequence, on noise emissions near intersections. As a case study, several types of road intersections under various traffic demand and traffic composition conditions are considered. Simulation results are obtained using a microscopic (Paramics) as well as...