• Transport Research
• Proceedings of the Institution of C... close

The historic Islamic centre of Cairo is now a more pleasant place to be thanks to a new, state-of-the-art road tunnel through the middle of one of the world's largest cities. The new 2·4 km long, twin-bore El Azhar road tunnel was designed and built in just 40 months to Europe's highest fire-safety standard. It has pioneered the use of a reinforced fire lining, which protects the tunnel structure from temperatures in excess of 200°C and thus prevents spalling. It also has an unusual escape system—rather than escaping through cross-passages between bores, users slide down into a safe passage beneath each road deck. This paper describes the design and construction of this innovative, fast-track project.

The A$1·95 billion (£1·3 billion) Ipswich motorway upgrade near Brisbane was Australia's largest road infrastructure alliance. Origin Alliance – comprising the client, two designers and three contractors – was tasked with transforming an existing substandard four-lane motorway into a modern, intelligent six-lane highway with a future capacity for eight lanes using network-managed hard-shoulder running. Only 8·5 km long, the upgrade demanded an unprecedented level of temporary traffic management for up to 100 000 vehicles a day. This paper outlines the complexities in design and construction and the means by which works were planned to guarantee the utmost level of safety to the travelling public and on-site workforce.

Recent experiments in mainland Europe and more recently the UK have found that removing the traditional separation between traffic and people in urban areas can make streets safer and less congested. Removing standard kerbs, barriers, highway signs and road markings forces motorists to use eye contact with other road users and pedestrians, for which they need to be travelling at less than around 30 km/h. As this paper reports, the result is slower, more careful traffic, increased safety for cyclists and pedestrians and a more attractive urban environment overall—in which local architecture and culture prevails over standard traffic infrastructure.

Light rail public transport schemes are well-liked by the public, who find their efficiency and reliability levels and general ‘high tech’ image far superior to buses. However, light rail schemes are also proving increasingly expensive to build and operate and the UK Government has recently withdrawn support for a number of future schemes. This paper suggests that public transport schemes incorporating guided busways—of which there are already six schemes operating in the UK—could be a viable alternative for busy urban areas, potentially combining the efficiency and reliability benefits of light rail with the traditional flexibility of bus operations.

Integrated transport is not about what sort of transport people want, it is about what sort of city and countryside they want—close-knit friendly streets or suburban sprawl. This paper contends that sustainable transport is achievable but expresses the concern that the civil engineering profession could be more a hindrance than help. It concludes that if we continue to see major road projects as the natural order and all other transport projects as too small, too green or too unworldly, we will be left behind and will have missed the point.

The provision of quality travel information to the travelling public and transport network managers is a key component in managing and ultimately reducing traffic congestion. It requires real-time information to be effective, but this is only the beginning as journeys take place over time and space—and conditions in a particular part of the network can change rapidly. To inform the travelling public and network managers more fully, real-time traffic models with self-learning capabilities able to provide short-term forecasts need to be developed. This paper discusses recent developments in real-time travel information and identifies ways in which it can be taken to new levels, resulting in more intelligent and effective use of existing transport infrastructure.

Tools for visualising the current traffic state are used by local authorities for strategic monitoring of the traffic network and by everyday users for planning their journey. Popular visualisations include those provided by Google Maps and by Inrix. Both employ a traffic lights colour-coding system, where roads on a map are coloured green if traffic is flowing normally and red or black if there is congestion. New sensor technology, especially from wireless sources, is allowing resolution down to lane level. A case study is reported in which a traffic micro-simulation test bed is used to generate high-resolution estimates. An interactive visualisation of the fine-grained traffic state is presented. The visualisation is demonstrated using Google Earth and affords the user a detailed three-dimensional view of the traffic state down to lane level in real time.