Ricerc@Sapienza

Most road accidents occur in urban areas and notably at urban intersections, where cyclists and motorcyclists are the most vulnerable. In the last few years, cycling mobility has been growing; therefore, bike infrastructures should be designed to encourage this type of mobility and reduce motorized and/or private transport. The paper presents a study to implement a new cycle path in the existing cycle and road network in Rome, Italy.

Both the construction and use of roads have a range of environmental impacts; therefore, it is important to assess the sources of their burdens to adopt correct mitigation policies. Life cycle analysis (LCA) is a useful method to obtain demonstrable, accurate and non-misleading information for decision-making experts. The study presents a "cradle to gate with options" LCA of a provincial road during 60 year-service life. Input data derive from the bill of quantity of the project and their impacts have been evaluated according to the European standard EN 15804.

The turbulent dispersion of a passive tracer emitted by a line source simulating vehicular traffic in an idealized urban canyon in neutral conditions is studied in the water channel by means of simultaneous measurements of velocity and concentration fields. The experiments are conducted for two geometrical arrangements of two-dimensional obstacles reproducing the skimming flow (AR=1) and the wake-interference regime (AR=2), where AR is the canyon aspect ratio.