Travels and Humans

BA Khalidou

MARCOU Paul

MUKENDI KAYEMBE Kenan

    Science Project

                 Travels and Humans

Plan :

1. Local Traveling

• The synchronisation/change of the travelers ( cars, pedestrians, cyclists, trains etc...)
• The way stoplights work(the math behind it, how and when it changes,

1. Air / Maritime Traveling

• How Airplanes fly
• How boats floats

1. Space Traveling

• Quit the atmosphere
• Travel through the space

Introduction

Traveling, since the dawn of human existence, ever has been innate in our nature. This is an everyday routine. We, humans, love to travel and this is why we are such a mixed race. But why do we travel ? Several reasons answer that question. There is a huge flow of people moving everyday in the world, every morning people go to work and every evening they go back to home, and this flow repeats days after days.  Also, discovering the world and the different cultures is part human being. Since antiquity people always wanted to know what’s hiding all around them, for that they had to go higher, further away, faster. They’ve found several ways to make this wish come true.

They started to develop means of transportation to make traveling easier ; it started with [ INSERT NAME ], but this way was not effective enough: it was taking too much time and damages were easy to take. Human kind started to think about better means of transportation, as they were developing them, they began to reach places they would never think of.

And so, what are the technical aspects that lie beyond it ?

1- Local Traveling

If you live in a major city, I will take a wild guess at one of your most common frustrations: traffic. In city driving, the journey never tends to be the most attention-grabbing part of it. In most cases, we have a tendency to simply want to reach our destination. Traffic isn't just frustrating,it has consequences to the environment as well. All those inactive vehicles have an effect on air quality and contaminate it quite a lot. Once you’re stuck waiting and sitting behind an extended line of cars, it’s easy to let your mind wander over solutions to our traffic woes. But, traffic management in dense urban areas is a particularly complex problem with a number of conflicting goals and challenges. One of the most important challenges happens at an intersection, where multiple streams of traffic such as vehicles, bikes and pedestrians need to safely, and with any luck, efficiently, cross each others’ paths. Over the years we’ve developed various ways in which to manage this challenge of who gets to go and who gets to wait, from simple signs to roundabouts, the one of the most common ways we can manage the right-of-way at intersections is through the use of traffic signals.

There are plenty of excellent analogies between cities and human anatomy, and roadways are no exception. Highways are just like the aorta with a high capacity and single major destination.

Small collector roads are like the capillaries with not a lot of capacity however have a connection to every individual house and business. And, in between are the so called arterial roadways, the medium-capacity connections between urban centers. Instead of ramps, overpasses, and access roads to regulate the flow of traffic, arterial roads use at-grade intersections through which only a number of traffic streams can pass at a time. We call this “interrupted traffic flow” for obvious reasons. In most cases, these intersections are the limit to the maximum throughput of the roadway.In different words, increasing the amount of lanes or the speed limit won’t have any impact on the general capacity of the road.The only way to increase the number of vehicles that safely travel from point A to B is to extend the efficiency of the intersection.In addition, these intersections are where an enormous majority of accidents occur. For these reasons, traffic engineers put tons of thought and analysis into the design of intersections and the way to make them as safe and efficient as possible.

Controlling the flow of traffic through an intersection, otherwise called assigning right-of-way is a huge challenge and nearly always requires a compromise of various conflicting considerations, such as space, cost, approach speed, cycle time, sight distance, types and volumes of traffic and human factors like habits, expectations, and reaction times. Intersections additionally have to be rigidly standardized so that, when you see an unknown one, you already grasp your role in the careful and chaotic dance of vehicles and pedestrians. This is where the traffic signals come into play. A lane has the right-of-way to cross when the light is green, when the light is red, they don’t. The orange light warns that the signal is on the point of changing from green to red. beyond this basic function, traffic signals will take on countless complexities to accommodate all types of situations.Let’s take the example of a typical intersection in the U.S. to point out how they work. At each approach to the intersection, there are three directions vehicles can go referred to as movements: right, through, or left. Right and through are typically grouped together as one movement, thus a typical four-way intersection has eight vehicle and four pedestrian movements. These movements are often grouped into phases of the traffic signal. For example, the left turn movements on opposite approaches can be grouped into a single phase as a result of they can each go at the same time without conflicts.Traffic engineers use a ring-and-barrier diagram to sketch out how different phases of the signal are allowed to operate. Here’s a ring-and-barrier diagram for our example intersection :

Most traffic signals of late are more refined than that. Actuated signal control is the term we tend to use for signals which will receive input from the outside and use that data to make choices about light timing and sequence on the fly. These forms of signals need data from traffic detection systems. These detectors are most likely video cameras or radars, however most ordinarily they are inductive loop sensors embedded into the road surface. These are basically massive metal detectors that simply measure whether or not or not a car or truck is present; all of them feed data into an equipment cabinet located nearby which is basically a straightforward computer that's programmed with specific logic to determine when and how long every light will last based on the data from the detectors.

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