Appendix B: Photo-electronic fuelmeter for motor vehicle operating cost studies.

Reliable running costs based on field tests of motor vehicles are presented as broken down into the cost categories of fuel, oil, tire wear, maintenance, depreciation, and accident costs. Relationships between the cost categories and highway grades operating speeds, roadway surface, horizontal alignment, and traffic volumes are provided to facilitate the calculation of automobile and truck fuel and tire costs for free-flowing volumes. Included are detailed examples illustrating typical problems that can be solved by use of the information presented. Annotated bibliographies are included on the subjects of motor-vehicle operating costs and on relationships between highway accident costs and highway design.

Various methods of assessing noise, loudness, and noise annoyance are reviewed and explained; sources, types, and intensities of traffic noise are noted; typical means of abatement and attenuation are described; design criteria for various land uses ranging from low-density to industrial are suggested and compared with the results of previous BBN and British systems for predicting annoyance and complaint; and a design guide for predicting traffic noise, capable of being programmed for batch and on-line computer applications, is presented in form suitable for use as a working tool. A flow diagram describes the interrelationships of elements in the traffic noise prediction methodology, and each element is discussed in detail in the text. The text is presented of a tape recording that takes the listener through a series of traffic situations, with such variables as traffic distance, flow velocity, distance, outdoors and indoors, and presence or absence of absorbers and attenuators.

This book provides information concerning the costs of transportation on non-urban highways and the relationships between these costs and characteristics of highways such as surface roughness, and vertical and horizontal geometry. The sources of the information presented here are four major road user cost studies performed between 1970 and 1982 in Kenya, the Caribbean, Brazil, and India. In these studies road user costs were investigated in considerable depth. Surveys of commercial road users were performed, surveys on a far larger scale than had been conducted prior to the 1970s. Large scale experiments were undertaken, aimed at determining the fuel consumption of cars, buses and light and heavy goods vehicles under alternative highway conditions, and considerable effort was devoted to obtaining data on vehicle speeds and their responses to highway conditions. The resulting body of knowledge concerning road users' costs is enormous, spanning three continents, diverse highway conditions and radically different economic environments.