ABSTRACT
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the railway sector experienced a significant worldwide decrease in the number of passengers due to the reduced transportation capacity of trains introduced for limiting social contacts and passengers fears from the disease. The reduction in population mobility resulting from national anti-pandemic measures led to the fact that carriers in the Slovak Republic began to optimize and limit the rail transport performance. Several measures were also implemented to reduce the risk of the spread of the COVID-19 disease so that passengers feel safe while traveling by train. Globally, we are entering the third year of coronavirus, and the pandemic is expected to continue even this year. For this reason, forecasting passenger demand for rail transport is becoming increasingly important and it is necessary to take measures in public passenger transport that will consider the reduced mobility due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper deals with the proposal of a methodology for planning transport services on selected regional railway lines during the COVID-19 pandemic. © 2023 Lenka Cerna et al., published by Sciendo.
ABSTRACT
Air pollution is one of the major problems in today's urban areas. With increasing development and the need for the transport of goods and people, it has become imperative to seek sustainable urban mobility solutions. The impact of restrictive COVID-19 pandemic measures provides a unique insight into the possible reductions in air pollution. This paper presents a case study on the city of Skopje, North Macedonia, and attempts to identify the effect of traffic emissions on air quality. Resultant correlation analysis and linear regression models show the impacts of multiple factors contributing to air pollution. Finally, a discussion on the impact of COVID-19 measures on air pollution is provided. The main findings of this research are the observed drop in air pollution levels during COVID-19 measures, the effects on air pollution models, and the identification of primary pollutants in the city of Skopje.
ABSTRACT
During the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, most of the usual activities, such as attending business meetings, classes at schools, and universities, as well as social gatherings with friends, colleagues, and family, took place on various online platforms. This migration has led to a globally significant increase in the number of users of videoconferencing applications and, thus, a significant increase in the share of video traffic in total Internet traffic. Encouraged by such a situation, we became curious and motivated to explore user experiences and practices when using these online meeting platforms. This paper brings the first results of a survey conducted on a sample of 541 respondents. There are three main result categories which we discussed in the paper: (a) characteristics of a user environment from where the conferences are most often accessed, (b) description of a typical online meeting use-case scenario, and (c) user perception about different quality degradations, which may occur during the meeting. One of the interesting findings we unraveled is that user quality of experience for videoconferencing service varies depending on their role in the meeting. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
In 2020, we investigated the quality of online meetings to find out whether various video and audio degradations can affect end-users’ perception and experience. We collected a total of 542 questionnaires that were suitable for analysis. This paper uses the results to compare the Quality of Experience for three popular videoconferencing applications: Skype, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. Due to the COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease 2019) and anti-epidemic measures, survey participants were all faced with using these applications daily, whether for work, attending lectures, or keeping in touch with friends and family. They rated their frustration level for specific quality degradations (e.g., blocking of the image or echo in the audio). The paper shows how the three applications compare to each other when different network performance degradation situations occur and how they affect the end user’s perception. © 2021, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.