Nowadays, the elderly tend to make more trips: Health benefits resulting from their daily walking routines are an important topic in the context of urban renewal processes. Many health organizations and researchers have demonstrated the influence of the urban environment on walkability levels. This article aims to design a multifactor Walkability Index for Elderly Health (WIEH), capable of associating both the adequacy level of public spaces to elderly walkability, and physical exercise benefits while walking. The methodological approach comprised two main parts: Firstly, a literature review of main reports, legislation, and scientific articles was conducted at the intersection of ‘gerontology and physical exercise’ with ‘urban design and mobility’, leading to the selection of four aging-related studies as main contributors to the design of the WIEH; and, secondly, the development of the WIEH was undertaken, based on two premises and designed according to four steps. The first premise defined three systematic areas (urban tissue, urban scene, and safety), variables, and criteria to classify the pedestrian network; and the second premise focused on slopes and stairs in public spaces. The WIEH is divided in four steps: (1) Analyzing public spaces and characterizing their quality for walking, (2) considering the existence of slopes and stairs, (3) calculating different routes for the elderly in their daily routines, or when going to points of interest, and (4) selecting the “heart-friendly route” for elderly people. Adequate walking paths for the elderly can be identified through this innovative approach, with the aim of achieving direct health benefits during their daily routines. Ultimately, the WIEH is capable of supporting decision makers and designers in creating inclusive and age-friendly spaces.

The capacity analysis of roundabouts in Portugal is

While researchers agree as to the safety benefits of turbo-roundabouts, their improvements in terms of capacity and delay remain open to discussion. This is mostly because previous research is based on capacity models that do not fully describe the complex interactions between traffic streams on multi-lane roundabouts. This paper proposes a procedure to calculate capacity based on gap-acceptance theory. It addresses the limitations mentioned by accounting for usually disregarded effects such as the dynamic choice of the entry lane and unequal allocation of traffic in the circulatory lanes. Capacities were calculated for a wide range of demand scenarios and it has been shown that only under demand scenarios that are very specific and uncommon in real-world networks, associated with very high percentages of right-turning entry traffic, can a standard turbo-roundabout be expected to provide more capacity than the equivalent two-lane roundabout. It has also been shown that two-lane roundabouts can normally be expected to provide capacities of 20–30% above those of comparable turbo-roundabouts.

One of the most important tasks in the microscopic simulation of traffic flow, assigned to the car following sub-model, is the modelling of the longitudinal movement of vehicles. The calibration of a car-following model is usually done at an aggregated level, using macroscopic traffic stream variables (speed, flow, density). There is an interest in calibration procedures based on disaggregated data. However, obtaining accurate trajectory data is a real challenge. This paper presents a low-cost procedure to calibrate the Gipps car-following model. The trajectory data is collected with a car equipped with a datalogger and a LIDAR rangefinder. The datalogger combines GPS and accelerometers data to provide accurate speed and acceleration measurements. The LIDAR measures the distances to the leading or following vehicle. Two alternative estimation methods were tested: the first follows individual procedures that explicitly account for the physical meaning of each parameter; the second formulates the calibration as an optimization problem: the objective function is defined so as to minimize the differences between the simulated and real inter-vehicle distances; the problem is solved using an automated procedure based on a genetic algorithm. The results show that the optimization approach leads to a very accurate representation of the specific modeled situation but offers poor transferability; on the other hand, the individual estimation provides a satisfactory fit in a wide range of traffic conditions and hence is the recommended method for forecasting purposes.

There is a widespread agreement in the scientific community that the transformation of a conventional multi-lane roundabout into a turbo-roundabout results in a significant increase of road safety levels. However there is no consensus regarding its effect in terms of capacity, as there are some authors that point towards a small reduction in capacity, namely in the major roads entries. The concept of turbo-roundabout is quite recent and therefore there are only a few studies of its performance, in particular, when applied in a network or in a corridor. In this context, this paper focuses on the evaluation of the performance of the turbo-roundabout solution, when applied in corridor, compared to a normal double-lane roundabout. The analysis was based on two key components: capacity and pollutant emissions. The work was supported by microsimulation techniques using the AIMSUN software, based on a real case study calibrated and validated for this purpose. It was possible to conclude that the turbo-roundabout performance is strongly influenced by the traffic load of the network, severely losing its performance in oversaturation conditions. The performance of the solution was also particularly sensitive to the traffic directional distribution, both in the entries as well as in the corridor. In global terms, it was found that the results for the environmental indicators follow the progress of the capacity indicators.