Simultaneous Assessments of Innovative Traffic Data Collection Technologies for Travel Times Calculation on the East Ring Road of Lyon

AbstractIn recent years, many innovative technologies for the travel times calculation evolved, but have never been evaluated and compared to each other at the same time. These technologies depend on the kind of implemented sensor for the traffic data collection. The purpose of this paper is to introduce an original experimentation, which will compare several recent technologies of data collection allowing travel times calculation from Bluetooth sensors, magnetometers, Floating Car Data from GPS embedded devices and even inductive loops stations for speeds interpolation. For this assessment, number plate readers (ANPR) were chosen to provide the reference travel times according to their high traffic's identification rate (near to 90%), which is much greater than the whole of assessed systems, and also allows to reach an optimal representativeness of the traffic flow. This trial takes place in a 12 kilometres long segment of the Lyon East ring road, which DIR-CE is the road operator. The daily traffic flow is about 90,000 vehicles with around 10% of trucks. The East ring road of Lyon usually presents any kind of traffic density: free-flow, heavy traffic, regular 1 to 2 kilometres long end of day congestion. So, it will be interesting to test the swiftness of each of these new technologies for all of the various traffic conditions, especially during the fast transition phases of the traffic flow or even while the traffic is jammed and therefore when the travel times are high. There are five measurements test points along this itinerary and so four elementary segments. The installation of all the field sensors ended at the beginning of March and when all the systems will be in a nominal operating mode (actually, they are at present in a testing and settling phase), it is planned to collect data during at least three months, which will allow to build a large travel times database. Among these four road segments, one of them has neither entry nor exit, thus the penetration rate and the overall performances of each of these technologies will be able to be estimated with no disruption in travel time measurements

Anarchism, Geohistory, and the Annales

It has been hypothesized that the celebrated geographer and anarchist Elisée Reclus was a decisive influence on several concepts that are characteristic of the Annales School, the historical French school of the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, such as longue durée, material history, space-movement, and geohistory. Yet no systematic research exists on the topic. In this paper, on the basis of textual analysis and new archival materials recently published in France, I argue that Reclus’s influence particularly affected the Annales’s founder Lucien Febvre, and that it springs from not only Febvre’s scholarly interest in Reclus, but also his early engagement in socialist milieus and sympathies for both anarchism and figures like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Finally, I show how these topics could be useful for present debates on critical social theory and radical geographies

Evolution and revolution: Anarchist geographies, modernity and poststructuralism

International audienceThis paper addresses the recent rediscovery of anarchist geographies and its implications in current debates on the ‘foundations’ of science and knowledge. By interrogating both recent works and original texts by early anarchist geographers who have greater influence on present-day literature such as Elisée Reclus (1830-1905) and Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), I discuss the possible uses of a poststructuralist critique for this line of research by first challenging ‘postanarchist’ claims that so-called ‘classical anarchism’, allegedly biased by essentialist naturalism, should be entirely dismissed by contemporary scholarship. My main argument is that early anarchist geographers used the intellectual tools available in their day to build a completely different ‘discourse’, criticising the ways in which science and knowledge were constructed. As they openly contested ideas of linear progress, racism and European supremacy, as well as anthropocentrism and dichotomized definitions of ‘man’ and ‘nature’, it is hard to make them fit simplistic definitions. The body of work I address stresses their possible contributions to critical, anarchist and radical scholarship through their idea of knowledge, not limited to what is now called ‘discourse analysis’, but engaging with social movements in order to transform society