The quality of evidence regarding the associations between road traffic noise and hypertension is low due to the limitations of cross-sectional study design, and the role of air pollution remains to ...be further clarified.
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the associations of long-term road traffic noise exposure with incident primary hypertension; we conducted a prospective population-based analysis in UK Biobank.
Road traffic noise was estimated at baseline residential address using the common noise assessment method model. Incident hypertension was ascertained through linkage with medical records. Cox proportional hazard models were used to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) for association in an analytical sample size of over 240,000 participants free of hypertension at baseline, adjusting for covariates determined via directed acyclic graph.
During a median of 8.1 years follow-up, 21,140 incident primary hypertension (International Classification of Diseases-10th Revision ICD-10: I10) were ascertained. The HR for a 10 dBA increment in mean weighted average 24-hour road traffic noise level (
) exposure was 1.07 (95% CI: 1.02-1.13). A dose-response relationship was found, with HR of 1.13 (95% CI: 1.03-1.25) for
>65 dBA vs ≤55 dBA (
for trend <0.05). The associations were all robust to adjustment for fine particles (PM
) and nitrogen dioxide (NO
). Furthermore, high exposure to both road traffic noise and air pollution was associated with the highest hypertension risk.
Long-term exposure to road traffic noise was associated with increased incidence of primary hypertension, and the effect estimates were stronger in presence of higher air pollution.
Transportation system is facing a sharp disruption since the Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) can free people from driving and provide good driving experience with the aid of Vehicle-to-Vehicle ...(V2V) communications. Although CAVs bring benefits in terms of driving safety, vehicle string stability, and road traffic throughput, most existing work aims at improving only one of these performance metrics. However, these metrics may be mutually competitive, as they share the same communication and computing resource in a road segment. From the perspective of joint optimizing driving safety, vehicle string stability, and road traffic throughput, there is a big research gap to be filled on the resource management for connected autonomous driving. In this paper, we first explore the joint optimization on driving safety, vehicle string stability, and road traffic throughput by leveraging on the consensus Alternating Directions Method of Multipliers algorithm (ADMM). However, the limited communication bandwidth and on-board processing capacity incur the resource competition in CAVs. We next analyze the multiple tasks competition in the contention based medium access to attain the upper bound delay of V2V-related application offloading. An efficient sleeping multi-armed bandit tree-based algorithm is proposed to address the resource assignment problem. A series of simulation experiments are carried out to validate the performance of the proposed algorithms.
Deceased organ donation: Need of the hour Asawa, Shrikant S; Bhowate, Sandeep; Gill, Avtar Singh ...
Journal of Punjab Academy of Forensic Medicine & Toxicology,
2020, Letnik:
20, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Few studies have investigated whether road traffic noise is associated with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), and have yielded inconsistent findings. We aimed to investigate whether maternal ...exposure to residential transportation noise, before and during pregnancy, was associated with GDM in a nationwide cohort.
From the Danish population (2004–2017) we identified 629,254 pregnancies using the Danish Medical Birth Register. By linkage with the National Patient Registry, we identified 15,973 pregnancies complicated by GDM. Road traffic and railway noise (Lden) at the most and least exposed façades for all residential addresses from five years before pregnancy until birth were estimated for all. Analyses were conducted using generalized estimating equation models with adjustment for various individual and area-level sociodemographic covariates gathered from Danish registries, as well as green space and air pollution (PM2.5) estimated for all addresses.
We found no positive associations between road traffic noise at either façade and GDM. For railway noise, a 10 dB increase in railway noise at the most and least exposed façades during the first trimester was associated with GDM, with an odds ratio (OR) of 1.06 (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.03–1.10) and 1.07 (95% CI: 1.02–1.13), respectively. We found indications of higher odds of GDM among women exposed to both high road traffic and railway noise at the least exposed facade during the first trimester (OR: 1.24; 95% CI: 1.07–1.44).
In conclusion, this nationwide study suggests that railway noise but not road traffic noise might be associated with GDM.
Microscopic simulation of pedestrian traffic is an important and increasingly popular method to evaluate the performance of existing or proposed infrastructure. The social force model is a common ...model in simulations, describing the dynamics of pedestrian crowds given the goals of the simulated pedestrians encoded as their preferred velocities.
The main focus of the literature has so far been how to choose the preferred velocities to produce realistic dynamic route choices for pedestrians moving through congested infrastructure. However, limited attention has been given the problem of choosing the preferred velocity to produce other behaviors, such as waiting, commonly occurring at, e.g., public transport interchange stations.
We hypothesize that: (1) the inclusion of waiting pedestrians in a simulated scenario will significantly affect the level of service for passing pedestrians, and (2) the details of the waiting model affect the predicted level of service, that is, it is important to choose an appropriate model of waiting.
We show that the treatment of waiting pedestrians have a significant impact on simulations of pedestrian traffic. We do this by introducing a series of extensions to the social force model to produce waiting behavior, and provide predictions of the model extensions that highlight their differences. We also present a sensitivity analysis and provide sufficient criteria for stability.
•Extensions to the social force model to include waiting pedestrians are proposed.•Simulations of interactions between waiting and passing pedestrians are performed.•Predictions of the models are characterized and the differences are analyzed.•Sufficient criteria for the stability of the models are given.•The choice of waiting model is showed to significantly impact simulation results.
•The findings suggested the variability of the association between alcohol consumption and mortality of road users in Russia from 1965–2019.•The differentiating effect of different alcoholic ...beverages on mortality of road users were detected.•There is evidence of the effect of beer rather than other alcoholic beverages consumption on the mortality of drivers and passengers.•New data, police data on mortality by pedestrians and cyclists and motor vehicle occupants, were used.
A vast body of literature suggests a relationship between alcohol consumption and road traffic fatalities. Despite an impressive downward trend in road traffic fatalities in Russia, the death rate is still unacceptably high. Far fewer studies have differentiated the association by road users and types of alcoholic beverages. This population-based study aims to estimate the associations of total and beverage-specific alcohol per capita (15+) consumption (APC) based on official alcohol sales statistics and road traffic mortality using police data on the number of deaths by road users. The study covers the period 1965–2019. We employed a first-order difference linear regression model with robust and autocorrelation consistent standard errors, controlling for a level of motorisation. To examine the possible evolution of the phenomenon, we repeated models separately for three consecutive periods (1965–1984, 1985–2002, 2003–2019). The findings suggest that an annual 1-litre increase in APC (in litres of pure alcohol) associated with a corresponding increase in the death rates (per 100,000 inhabitants) of both unprotected road users and motor vehicle occupants by about 0.3 (p < 0.01) and 0.4 (p < 0.05), respectively. A beverage-specific analysis for 1965–2019 revealed a positive and significant association between mortality of pedestrians and cyclists and the consumption of strong alcoholic beverages (p < 0.05) as well as mortality of drivers and passengers and the consumption of weaker alcoholic beverages, primarily beer (p < 0.01). Various road safety strategies should be applied to prevent road traffic fatalities of road users.
While battery electric vehicles (EVs) are on the advance, the broad customer basis is still concerned about battery electric range, a phenomenon commonly known as range anxiety. To tackle these ...concerns, the functionality of in-vehicle navigational systems must adapt to the new propulsion technology with a limited battery capacity. Central aim is to consider charging infrastructure in route planning. Furthermore, detailed powertrain models are required to accurately forecast an EV's energy consumption. On the other hand, such detailed models are hardly applicable to large scale road networks that are usually handled by routing services for vehicle navigation. This study proposes a two-staged approach to compute time optimal routes for EVs. To this end, a reduced road network is obtained from a leading routing service. Subsequently, a detailed consumption model is applied and the resulting multiobjective shortest path problem is solved using an adapted Moore-Bellman-Ford algorithm. Within an experimental study, the consumption forecast is validated against measurement data and query times of the proposed methodology are assessed for generic routing problems. The former shows significant improvement of consumption forecast accuracy compared to state-of-the-art models while the latter indicates potential for application in car manufacturers vehicle backend services.
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