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S. Sillem

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2 records found

Master thesis (2019) - Rutger de Waard, Pieter van Gelder, Simone Sillem, Niek Mouter
Recent years the Netherlands have been shocked by a series of earthquakes. Normally an earthquake would be considered as a natural hazard, however extracting gas induces these earthquakes. Whenever a hazard is induced, it is perceived as man-made and therefore controllable. This leads to differences in risk acceptance in relation to natural hazards. When ambiguity about risks exists, a participatory strategy should be used with involvement of the local community. In cases of induced hazards, low trust between local communities and authorities exists, leading to ineffective risk mitigation. The first step of improving mitigation measures is finding out whether differences in risk acceptance lead to differences in mitigation measure preferences. In this paper this research objective is carried out by gathering data in the earthquake area in Groningen with the Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) method. Next the data is analysed using factor analysis and logistic regression. Based on the results is concluded that citizens with lower trust in authorities prefer measures that directly target the consequences of the induced hazard. While citizens with more trust in authorities and more belief in the benefits of the activity causing the hazard are more open for measures that target the indirect consequences of the hazard. During this research, assumptions were made to construct the context of the PVE method. To improve the validity of this research it is suggested to repeat the research with different variables. ...
Master thesis (2017) - Tony Hoogendoorn, Marjan Hagenzieker, Haneen Farah, Simone Sillem, P Schepers
Cycling is one of the main transport modes in the Netherlands and the total number of bicycles and the total cycling distances are still rising. Although this seems a positive development, the number of seriously injured cyclists due to bicycle crashes without motor vehicles increased rapidly in recent years. Within these crashes the infrastructure seems to play an important role and research towards the contribution of infrastructure characteristics to bicycle crashes without motor vehicles is needed because this is limited and especially research on more detailed infrastructure characteristics (e.g. bicycle path width) has not been done yet. This study aims to fill in parts of the knowledge gap between the safety problem and the lack of research done on the contribution of infrastructure characteristics. This study was done by using data from a survey held by VeiligheidNL. In total, 3146 cyclists that were treated at an emergency department responded to the survey and provided information on the crash location and the trip origin. A case-control method was applied in this study which compared infrastructure characteristics of case (crash) and control locations (no crash). The control locations were selected from the route of a bicycle crash victim. The design of the method included basic steps for the selection of the controls and four measures to lower the bias in the method and increasing the statistical power of the results. With the application of the case-control method to the data several results were found: First, the width of streets contributes to riding off the road crashes and handlebar collisions, whereas the width of bicycle paths next to bollards contributes to crashes with these objects. Secondly, the presence of intersections decreases the likelihood of kerb collisions. Thirdly, two-directional bicycle paths are more likely to induce bicycle-bicycle crashes and they possibly induce more severe crashes because frontal collisions were found more severe than same direction bicycle-bicycle crashes. And finally, the placement of bollards increases the severity of the injuries caused by the corresponding crashes. These findings could be used to further increase the quality of bicycle design guidelines such that future bicycle infrastructure could be designed safer. ...