News by Subject Social & Behavior

A worldwide study of 327,403 metro and bus passengers shows that women are ten per cent more likely to feel unsafe than men on urban public transport.

One of the most challenging tasks for drivers is parallel parking, which is why automatic parking systems are becoming a popular feature on some vehicles. However, the cost of designing and implementing such computing-intensive systems can significantly increase a vehicle's price, creating a barrier to adding the feature in many models. Now researchers have developed a more efficient automated parking guidance control strategy that mimics the approach to parallel parking commonly used by human drivers.

There may be a better way for autonomous vehicles to learn how to drive themselves: by watching humans. With the help of an improved sight-correcting system, self-driving cars could learn just by observing human operators complete the same task. Researchers from Deakin University in Australia published their results in IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica.

Have you taken an Uber ride and disagreed with the 'fastest' route that the GPS app suggested because you or the driver know a 'better' way? For society to truly embrace self-driving cars, the experience of passengers must feel just as comfortable as any trip with a human driver to get there. This is an extremely difficult computational challenge, but researchers are getting us a little bit closer to that ideal comfy ride.

With only minutes to respond, fire education really counts.

Researchers developed a new method of analyzing travel survey data to show that the rates of households in the Kumamoto, Japan metropolitan area with everyone out-of-home has increased from 41.3% in 1984 to 51.5% in 2012. This increase partly explains the recent rise in failed parcel redeliveries. The researchers believe their work can be used to reduce redeliveries, develop efficient at-home interview survey methods, and for crime prevention such as burglary countermeasures.

What does the car you drive say about your manners? New UNLV study finds that drivers of flashy cars are less likely to yield for pedestrians.

While electric vehicles alone may not reduce carbon emissions, a new study reveals that when electric vehicles are powered with renewable energy and coupled with carbon policy strategies, they can help combat climate change without sacrificing economic growth.