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High-speed rail edge stations, which are located within the urban fabric limits of a city, have generally a good access through motorised transportation modes while the pedestrian/bicycle access becomes, in many cases, very difficult. This paper assesses the quality of pedestrian routes linking high-speed rail edge stations to the city centre, considering physical aspects such as footpaths width, characteristics of the built environment or detours at street crossings. The assessment demonstrates that a pedestrian route could be redesigned to minimise discontinuities and to improve walkability, extending the walkable distance threshold through an adequate design. The proposed methods could provide a useful tool for cities to identify the most appropriate footpath to create convenient and legible pedestrian routes with walkable promenades for edge stations, because, in general, there are no specific strategies or policies to favour these walkable connections. In many cases, these edge stations are hidden city gates and the station-city pedestrian connection is the missing link in this intermodal transport chain.

This study aims to identify potential geosites and show existing geosites in a young glacial landscape in northern Poland through a qualitative assessment of the local geoheritage. Three areas of diversified morphology and geology located within the extent of the last Scandinavian Ice Sheet have been selected as the research polygons: the north-eastern part of the Dobrzyń Lake District, the Lower Vistula Valley and the Kashubian Lake District. Three basic abiotic components of the environment have been analysed: geology, terrain relief and hydrology. This research is based on some specific materials including maps and photographs. Methodology of this research includes the inventory, characterization and assessment of selected areas. The final results are proposals for geosites of high educational value in each of the three investigated regions. For the north-eastern part of the Dobrzyń Lake District, the creation of a geopark has been proposed, and the geosites of the Lower Vistula Valley provide the potential for a geotourist footpath to be designed. The Kashubian Lake District is characterised by the occurrence of numerous glacial landforms and sediments as well as high denivelations and a concentration of erratic boulders. Therefore, this region also has the potential to be selected for valuable geosites and the designing of a geotourist footpath.

Pedestrian deaths causing from road traffic crashes are a foremost and rising problem in urban India. However, pedestrian safety assessment using precise statistical analysis and modeling techniques is still in an early stage in urban India owing to the absence of crash data collection and maintenance, difficulties in obtaining appropriate road inventory data and traffic volume data. The present study composes an effort to fill the research gap by analyzing past crash data (2011–2016) collected from Kolkata police and identifies the hazardous corridors and intersections posing the high risk to the pedestrian. Consequently, to develop an understanding of the risk factors associated with pedestrian fatalities, a set of fixed-parameter Negative Binomial models is established. In these models, several attempts are made to identify the risk factors linked to traffic exposures and operational parameters, roadway characteristics and infrastructure, land use and road network planning. Based on the statistical analyses carried out in this study, there is evidence that factors such as approaching speed of the vehicles, vehicular traffic and pedestrian volume of the intersection and their interaction, disorderly movement of traffic (i.e., overtaking tendency of the vehicles), the presence of specific land-use type (i.e., commercial hubs), inefficient planning and design (i.e., inaccessibility of the pedestrian crosswalk, the absence of pedestrian signal head, etc.), the presence of wider carriageway, the encroachment of the footpath, restricted visibility (i.e., inadequate sight distance) are found to be major risk factors with regards to the fatal pedestrian crash occurrence in Kolkata City, India.

Background Alcohol-related harm is a major global health issue, and controls on alcohol marketing are one intervention utilized by governments. This study investigated the use of Google Street View (GSV) as a novel research method for collecting alcohol-related data in the urban environment. Methods The efficacy of GSV and on-street observation by observer teams was compared by surveying 400 m stretches of 12 streets in Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand. Data on alcohol sale, alcohol-related advertising, health promotion materials, regulatory information and visible alcohol consumption were collected. Results A total of 403 retailers with evidence of alcohol sales and 1161 items of alcohol-related communication were identified in on-street observation. Of the latter, 1028 items (89 %) were for alcohol marketing and 133 (11 %) were for alcohol-related health promotion and alcohol regulation. GSV was found to be a less sensitive tool than on-street observation with only 50 % of the alcohol venues identified and 52 % of the venue-associated brand marketing identified. A high degree of inter-observer reliability was generally found between pairs of observers e.g., for the detection of alcohol retail venues the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) was 0.93 (95 % CI: 0.78 to 0.98) for on-street observation and 0.85 (95 % CI: 0.49 to 0.96) for using GSV. Conclusions GSV does not seem suitable for the comprehensive study of the influences on alcohol consumption in the urban streetscape. However, it may still have value for large, static objects in the environment and be more time efficient than traditional on-street observation measures, especially when used to collect data across a wide geographical area. Furthermore, GSV might become a more useful research tool in settings with better image quality (such as more ‘footpath views’) and with more regularly updated GSV imagery.

In the last decade, several influential scholars have rigorously worked on the impact of neoliberal globalization on the poor in the cities of the South. But they have yet to provide a comprehensive account of how and why some groups in the margins are seen to successfully negotiate with the new modes of governing populations and increase their visibility as a “category,” while some groups fail to do so. This paper seeks to bridge this research gap by comparing a successful and a failed mobilization in Calcutta. In both cases, use of the footpath has been central. The paper shows how the success of the hawkers in claiming the footpath is tied to the marginalization of the claims of the pavement dwellers that has (a) homogenized the representation of the footpath as only used by pedestrians and hawkers and (b) led to the elision of the pavement dwellers as a governmental category. The paper argues that by arrogating to themselves an archival function—which is conventionally associated with the governmental state—sections of population like the hawkers can become successful in their negotiations with the government.

Geodiversity includes not just rocks and major geological features, it also embraces soft sediments and landscape features. This paper demonstrates how soil profiles can be promoted within geoheritage as an important feature of the aesthetics of the landscape as well as being vital to support biodiversity and many environmental functions including pollution abatement, climate change and food production. Their importance is recognised increasingly by scientists and policy makers but there is great diversity of soil types that often goes unrecognised, and hence soils are not always used appropriately. Whilst writing a guide to the coastal footpath around Anglesey, it became obvious that there are numerous opportunities to view the soil exposed on cliff edges and this prompted the idea of a trail leaflet for walkers and the interested public. This paper summarises the range of soils on view and how they support different land uses and form the underlying reason for the diversity of the landscape.

¶This paper compiles and analyzes the rockfall data in Hong Kong in the last fifty years. A simple rockfall hazard analysis is presented based on this rockfall inventory. A frequency-magnitude relation, which is analogous to the Gutenberg-Richter relation for earthquake occurrence, is proposed for rockfall, and direct correlation between rockfall frequency and the daily rainfall is observed. Data analysis shows that a threshold daily rainfall of about 150–200 mm is expected in order to trigger rockfall events in Hong Kong. Among the 368 rockfall events in the 13 year period from 1984 to 1996 in Hong Kong, 35% of the incidents lead to blockage of or damage to roads, 22% lead to damages or evacuation of squatter huts, 21% lead to blockage of pedestrian pavement and footpath, and 15% affect buildings, such as housing apartments and schools. Only 15% of these rockfalls fell onto open space and caused negligible effects on human activities. Most of these rockfall events occurred during heavy rain and when “landslide warning” should has been issued by the Hong Kong Observatory, thus only 6% of these events led to injury or casualty, car damages, and damages to public utilities. Rockfall hazard zonation maps in terms of the spatial distribution of previous rockfalls are proposed for both Kowloon Peninsula and Hong Kong Island.

One of the most pressing problems facing wilderness managers in the ecologically fragile Drakensberg Mountains, South Africa, is that of path erosion, since it detracts from the wilderness experience and is very costly to remediate. As increasing demand for wilderness and outdoor recreation places greater pressure on paths and trails, it will be necessary to increase path network size and capacity, and it is important that new paths are routed such that maintenance requirements are minimal.