Walking experience:Exploring the trilateral interrelation of walkability,temporal perception,and urban ambiance

Walking experience through urban spaces is a frequent daily activity.Thus,planning and designing for walkability become crucial for building up quality of life.Our daily walks around the city are affected by fulfilling the needed psychological contentment that is in turn measured unconsciously by our temporal perception.This contentment is inherent in what we experience in accordance with urban ambiance that goes beyond the spatial attributes of spaces to include their social and sensorial dimensions.Thus,the question here is how walkability of urban routes is affected by urban ambiance and therefore perceived in terms of time.Therefore,this study aims to understate the trilateral interrelation of walkability,temporal perception,and urban ambiance in walkable routes for daily routine use.This work depends on an experimental study where participants are asked to walk along two selected routes.Data-gathering tools rely on documenting the lived experience of the target group via reporting their trips and answering a questionnaire.Pattern analysis demonstrates this trilateral interrelation to clarify the interplay.This study concludes specific qualities of walkable routes for routine use that reduce sense of time,which is highly crucial to be realized in such daily walk journeys.

Noise levels inside the coaches of Greater Cairo tunnel metro, line 3 tunnel

This paper investigates the noise inside a metro coach running through the most recent tunnel of Cairo.The study focuses on the effects of alignment profiles on the A-weighted noise level.Although the latest line has not been studied yet,noise levels inside the old lines attracted the attention of researchers due to their importance as the first mass transit system in Africa.Given that windows are usually kept open,measurements were conducted inside the empty cabin at the end of the train with open windows according to ISO 3381:2005.Results showed that noise emissions inside the running coaches are high and do not follow either international or general national legislation,which presents health hazards for drivers and commuters.Speech intelligibility is required for train radio units and driver consoles for voice communications,which provides a safe working environment for the train crew.The present study reveals that tight curves mainly contribute to high noise.The noise levels are further raised by the reflective surface of the tunnel with a circular cross-section and the unballasted track.Moreover,the noise level is affected by the location of the coach and window conditions(open/close)to some extent.

Acoustic improvement on two lecture auditoria： Simulation and experiment

Based on the commonly used indicators for speech intelligibility, this work acoustically evaluates the two largest auditoria in the Faculty of Engineering, Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt, using experimental and digital simulation techniques. Design treatments were also suggested to improve the acoustic performance of the auditoria, where the impact of these treatments was checked using the simutation as well. The models that were analysed using the CATT-software were first validated utilizing the results of the fietd work in the unoccupied rooms. The results showed that the acoustic quality of the two auditoria are far from the optimal conditions due to their improper acoustic characteristics and the high noise revers as weft. The results of improvement proposals showed that altering the ceiling shape and adding efficient absorptive materials to the rear surfaces successfully reduced the excessive reverberation time to the optimal values, increased the earty reflections and eliminated the shadow zones. In addition, decreasing the noise Levels by 20 dB due to improving the window insulation noticeably improved the speech intelligibitity at all receivers.