Evaluation of the felt comfort on a bus: a preliminary study

Recently, the problem to estimate the felt comfort associated with the vibrations on city buses has been put in evidence, with particular attention about the infrastructure-vehicle interactions. The aim of this work is to evaluate the effects of the traffic calming devices on the passengers of the public transports by vibration measurements. A self-sufficient measurement system has been implemented. It links each measurement with a geographical information resulting from a Global Positioning System (GPS), and permits to obtain a map of a comfort index directly, using the Geographic Information System (GIS). The presented system is based on widely used hardware components, i.e. a laptop computer, a commercial GPS receiver and three mono-axial servo-accelerometers. A custom software has also been developed.