"Jack Kerouac Does Not Lie" recounts my pilgrimage in the summer of 2000, from southwest Florida to a canyon beach in California where Jack Kerouac—as I had read in his Big Sur—lost his mind forty years earlier. I was heavily influenced. Kerouac’s On the Road showed me what to do with myself. Big Sur showed me where to go. In the twentieth century Americans shifted their notions of the west coast from a means for sustenance to a symbol of post-war freedom. Kerouac seems to embody this momentum; the world and the burning spirit his work describes is a precursor to the sixties. His muse, Neal Cassady, is the common link—appearing as Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s first major work and later as himself in Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. My parents were a part of this westward yearning’s last true surge in the early seventies, when they ventured cross-country and stayed out there for a time. They’d caught the tail end of the wave, and told me a bit about it. I was full of stories, mostly fiction. Sweating in my twenty year old conversion van with a big friend, Ben—whose goals were less "literary"—I sought to recreate the legends I had read, the movies I had seen, and the tales my parents had told me. I was on a mission; I wanted my trip to measure up. Ben was on vacation. Our folly is chronicled within; three weeks and four thousand miles of it.

Aggressive driving is not clearly and consistently defined in the literature, neither in terms of the specific behaviors chosen for inclusion nor the degree to which the emotional state of the driver is taken into account. Principally, the aim of this current research is to determine the extent to which aggressive driving and road rage overlap. This will be accomplished primarily by applying two well-supported dichotomies in aggression research: hostile/instrumental and impulsive/premeditated. Relevant personality traits will also be measured to help discern the aggressive driving- road rage overlap and to explore secondary areas of interest, such as sex and age differences in driver aggression.

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A trace metal speciation scheme proposed by Batley and Florence (1976) was applied to determine the physiochemical forms of zinc, cadmium, lead, and copper in two Central Florida highway drainage systems. The linearity and limitations of the ASV technique were also examined. The measurements showed that (a) more than 70% of the soluble Zn and Cd in all of the waters analyzed existed as liable ionic metal (b) lead was divided between labile and non-labile inorganic forms, but one particular form, PbCO3, predominated (c) a substantial fraction of copper is associated with organic colloids if humic substances are present. In addition a computerized chemical model for trace and major element speciation was applied to the waters in both drainage systems using measured average water quality for input parameters. A comparison between metal species measured by ASV and those predicted by the computer model are presented. There appears to be good agreement between the metal fractions measured in the water samples by ASV and those predicted by the chemical model.

Yes / Cattle grids are used on roads and tracks to prevent grazing animals from leaving an open space without fencing onto a more controlled area where access to the road from surrounded land is more limited. They are widely used in the UK at the entrances to common and moorland areas where animals are free to roam, but also on private drive entrances. Typically, they consist of a series of metal bars across the road that are spaced so that an animal’s legs would fall through the gaps if it attempted to cross. Below the grid is a shallow pit that is intended to further deter livestock from using that particular crossing point. The sound produced as vehicles cross these devices is a characteristic low frequency “brrrr” where the dominant frequencies relates to the bar passage frequency under the tyres. The sound can be disturbing to riders and their horses and walkers and residents living close by as evidenced by press reports and the need to consider noise aspects in planning for new installations. For this reason and due to the lack of available information on the size and nature of the problem measurements and recordings have been made at a number of sites in Yorkshire in the UK. In addition, questionnaire surveys of residents living close by and façade measurements have also been used to gauge impact. Results show that there is a wide variation in the maximum noise level produced by cattle grids of apparently similar design. This can be related to impact noise produced by the movement of all or part of the grid as the frame comes under impulsive loading as the vehicle crosses. It was further established that some residents living close to the cattle grids were disturbed by the noise, and in some cases vibration, and wanted them removed or suitably modified. / The work was funded by the Bradford Centre for Sustainable Environments, University of Bradford.

The tire is one of the most complex subsystems of the vehicle. It is, however, the least understood of all the components of a car. Without a good tire model, the vehicle simulation handling response will not be realistic, especially for maneuvers that require a combination of braking/traction and cornering. Most of the simplified theoretical developments in tire modeling, however, have been limited to on-road tire models. With the availability of powerful computers, it can be noted that majority of the work done in the development of off-road tire models have mostly been focused on creating better Finite Element, Discrete Element, or Boundary Element models. The research conducted in this study deals with the development of a simplified tire brush-based tire model for on-road simulation, together with a simplified off-road wheel/tire model that has the capability to revert back to on-road trend of behavior on firmer soils. The on-road tire model is developed based on observations and insight of empirical data collected by NHSTA throughout the years, while the off-road tire model is developed based on observations of experimental data and photographic evidence collected by various terramechanics researchers within the last few decades. The tire model was developed to be used in vehicle dynamics simulations for engineering mobility analysis. Vehicle-terrain interaction is a complex phenomena governed by soil mechanical behavior and tire deformation. The theoretical analysis involved in the development of the wheel/ tire model relies on application of existing soil mechanics theories based on strip loads to determine the tangential and radial stresses on the soil-wheel interface. Using theoretical analysis and empirical data, the tire deformation geometry is determined to establish the tractive forces in off-road operation. To illustrate the capabilities of the models developed, a rigid wheel and a flexible tire on deformable terrain is implemented and output of the model was computed for different types of soils; a very loose and deformable sandy terrain and a very firm and cohesive Yolo loam terrain. The behavior of the wheel/tire model on the two types of soil is discussed. The outcome of this work shows results that correlate well with the insight from experimental data collected by various terramechanics researchers throughout the years, which is an indication that the model presented can be used as a subsystem in the modeling of vehicle-terrain interaction to acquire more insight into the coupling between the tire and the terrain. / Ph. D.

Road smoothness is one of the most important road functional characteristics because it affects ride quality, operation cost, and vehicle dynamic load. There are many types of devices that measure the road profile, which is often used to compute different smoothness indices. The development of performance-based specifications and pavement warranties that use ride quality as a performance measure has increased the need for accurate measurement of pavement smoothness. For this reason, researchers have compared and evaluated the performance of available profilers and several profiler accuracy criteria have been proposed. However, there is not a definite answer on the ability of available profilers to accurately measure the actual road profile as well as the various smoothness indices. A recent profiler round-up compared the performance of 68 profilers on five test sections at Virginia Smart Road. The equipment evaluated included high-speed, light-weight, and walking-speed profilers, in addition to the reference device (rod and level). The test sites included two sites with traditional hot-mix asphalt (HMA) surfaces, one with a coarse-textured HMA surface, one on a continuously reinforced concrete pavement (CRCP), and one on a jointed plain concrete pavement (JCP). This investigation used a sample of the data collected during the experiment to compare the profiles and International Roughness Index (IRI) measured by each type of equipment with each other and with the reference. These comparisons allowed determination of the accuracy and repeatability capabilities of the existing equipment, evaluation of the appropriateness of various profiler accuracy criteria, and recommendations of usage criteria for different applications. The main conclusion of this investigation is that there are profilers available that can produce the level of accuracy (repeatability and bias) required for construction quality control and assurance. However, the analysis also showed that the accuracy varies significantly even with the same type of device. None of the inertial profilers evaluated met the current IRI bias standard requirements on all five test sites. On average, the profilers evaluated produced more accurate results on the conventional smooth pavement than on the coarse textured pavements. The cross-correlation method appears to have some advantages over the conventional point-to-point statistics method for comparing the measured profiles. On the sites investigated, good cross-correlation among the measured and reference profiles assured acceptable IRI accuracy. Finally, analysis based on Power Spectral Density and gain method showed that the profiler gain errors are nonuniformly distributed and that errors at different wavelengths have variable effects on the IRI bias. / Master of Science