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Urban agriculture requires local water to replace ‘hydrologic externalities’ associated with food produced outside of the local area, with an accompanying shift of the water footprint (WF) for agricultural production from rural to urban areas. Water requirements of urban agriculture have been difficult to estimate due to the heterogeneity of shading from trees and buildings within urban areas. We developed CityCrop, a plant growth and evapotranspiration (ET) model that couples a 3D model of tree canopies and buildings derived from LiDAR with a ray-casting approach to estimate spatially-explicit solar inputs in combination with local climate data. Evaluating CityCrop over a 1 km ^2 mixed use, residential neighborhood of Vancouver Canada, we estimated median light attenuation to result in 12% reductions in both reference ET (ET _o ) and crop ET (ET _c ). However, median crop yields were reduced by only 3.5% relative to potential yield modeled without any light attenuation, while the median crop WF was 9% less than the WF for areas unimpeded by shading. Over the 75 day cropping cycle, median crop water requirements as ET _c were 17% less than that required for a well-watered grass (as ET _o ). If all lawns in our modeled area were replaced with crops, we estimate that about 37% of the resident population could obtain the vegetable portion of their diet from within the local area over a 150 day growing season. However doing so would result in augmented water demand if watering restrictions apply to lawns only. The CityCrop model can therefore be useful to evaluate trade-offs related to urban agriculture and to inform municipal water policy development.

Purpose: Older people experiencing a decline in their mobility often choose to use a mobility scooter. They are used by those with mobility impairments to enable them to travel independently and engage in activities outside the home. This project explored the perceptions of mobility scooters by older adults who experience mobility difficulties but do not use mobility scooters. It aimed to understand how scooters were perceived by this group to uncover any barriers to scooter use and to help in predicting future uptake. Materials & Methods: Semi-structured interviews were carried out to enable the elicitation of attitudes and perceptions about mobility decline and mobility scooters. All the interviewees were classified as preclinically disabled so that they had some mobility limitations that would indicate that a mobility scooter could be beneficial to increase their mobility. Results: Non-mobility scooter user are wary of scooter users due to negative experiences interacting with them. Potential personal scooter uptake is viewed with great reluctance and as an indication that they themselves have given up. Conclusions: Older adults with mobility impairments could benefit from using a mobility scooter by gaining an improved quality of life, engagement and social relationships. However the wish to disassociate oneself with ageing or physically decline means that large proportions of this population are unwilling to. Mobility scooter use can aid those with restricted mobility to increase their independence and quality of life. Stigmatization of and previous negative interaction with mobility scooter users discourage potential users from utilizing them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Recent increases in road crashes have reversed New Zealand's formerly declining crash rates to produce annual fatal and serious injury counts that are 49% higher than the lowest rates achieved in 2013., Method: We model twenty-one factors in fatal and serious injury crashes, four years before and after 2013 using logistic regression. Three major factors are significantly different in the period after 2013, when crash rates increased: (1) alcohol as a cause, (2) learner licence holders, and (3) a regional effect for Auckland. Newly defined speed zones are a more common setting for crashes in the period of upturn but there is no coinciding elevated likelihood of 'speed as a causal factor'. Three factors related to road safety were less common: aged under 25-years old, fatigue, and not wearing a seatbelt., Results: Results are compared to rates of prosecutions for alcohol-related driving offences over this period. It is possible that New Zealand's successful road safety initiatives of the past have been undermined by reduced levels of enforcement and an unexpected outcome from the graduated driving licence system., (Copyright © 2019 National Safety Council and Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

As older people start to have difficulty in walking many choose to use a mobility scooter to help them move around. Benefitting from improved design, mobility scooters are becoming an increasingly popular mobility device and are a common sight on many streets. However, very little is known about their usage or their impact in terms of either quality of life or functional health. Whilst mobility scooters may help to improve the quality of life of their users, it is also possible that the sedentary nature of their usage results in a decline of physical functionality and therefore reduced capabilities. Before any substantial research can be carried out it is crucial to understand the importance of a mobility scooter on the lives of the people that use them and to review the initial research published on the effect of scooter use on physical health. This paper is a state-of-the-art review. It describes the current research knowledge on mobility scooters, shows where gaps in knowledge exist and where future research needs to focus.

Accurate information on the incidence of serious road traffic casualties is needed to plan and evaluate prevention strategies. Traditionally police reported collisions are the only data used. This study investigate the extent to which understanding of trends in serious road traffic injuries is aided by the use of multiple datasets. Health and police datasets covering all or part of Great Britain from 1996-2003 were analysed. There was a significantly decreasing trend in police reported serious casualties but not in the other datasets. Multiple data sources provide a more complete picture of road traffic casualty trends than any single dataset. Increasing availability of electronic health data with developments in anonymised data linkage should provide a better platform for monitoring trends in serious road traffic casualties.