In recent years adverse processes of suburbanization have been observed in cities. It has become a serious challenge for urban and transport planners, as it influences largely the quality of space, the quality of life, and the cost of running the city. This paper is dedicated to travel models in areas serviced by a railway system, and is based on a real-life survey example of the Błonie community, a district belonging to the Warsaw metropolitan area. Research carried out in 2014 focused on combined travels behaviors recorded using GPS locators as well as quantitative research (volumes of users across various transport systems).

Differences in patients motivating factors influence their attitudes towards the role and quality of tourism agents’ services. This paper identified three major components (treatment-related, economic and travel-related) that explain patients motivation to travel for treatment. The study can help medical tourism agents to refine their marketing strategies and suggest the proper incentives to encourage participation in medical tourism. The research was made on the basis of a critical analysis of scientific literature, surveys and analyses.

Celebrating patron saints as an element of the Sicilian character: the foreign travelers point of view – This article will look at descriptions of some patronal festivals in Sicily drawn from the works of the most important foreign travelers and will try to show how such celebrations represent a fundamental aspect of Sicilianity.

Thermoacoustic converters are devices for direct conversion of acoustic energy into thermal energy in the form of temperature difference, or vice versa – for converting thermal energy into an acoustic wave. In the first case, the device is called a thermoacoustic heat pump, in the second – thermoacoustic engine. Thermoacoustic devices can use (or produce) a standing or travelling acoustic wave. This paper describes the construction and properties of a single-stage thermoacoustic engine with a travelling wave. This kind of engine works using the Stirling cycle. It uses gas as a working medium and does not contain any moving parts. The main component of the engine is a regenerator equipped with two heat exchangers. Most commonly, a porous material or a set of metal grids is used as a regenerator. An acoustic wave is created as a result of the temperature difference between a cold and a hot heat exchanger. The influence of working gas, and such parameters as static pressure and temperature at heat exchanger on the thermoacoustic properties of the engine, primarily its efficiency, was investigated. The achieved efficiency was up to 1.4% for air as the working medium, which coincides with the values obtained in other laboratories. The efficiency for argon as working gas is equal to 0.9%.

The article presents a disastrous in the consequences earthquake between Sicily and Calabria described by different travelers of Grand Tour after 1783 and analyses the style and method of commenting these historical, tragic events. Several Polish intellectuals and politicians, disappointed in t he situation in the country had chosen the Southern Italy (Sicily, Calabria) and Malta as Destination of their travel. Who arrived there after the terrible earthquake and observed in Messina and/or Reggio Calabria the ruins of these important towns leaved very emotional description in their travel reports. The purpose of the article is to compare different human reactions as well as different ways of describing, from many points of view, the situations they found and observed.

Messina in the stories of Polish travelers over the course of centuries: the double face of the city – The article presents Messina’s ‘verbal postcards’ left by Polish participants in the Grand Tour and travelers who visited Sicily in later times. Travelers whose accounts are widely known, such as Anonymous (1595), Michał Borch, Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Chrystian Kamsetzer (XVIII c.), Zygmunt Krasiński (nineteenth century), but also less well-known ones such as writer Zofia Sokołowska, arriving in Sicily in the tragic year of the earthquake (1908), left descriptions from their stays in Messina about the emotional charge they felt, one closely related to the historical moment in which they arrived on the island. This will therefore be a thorough analysis of a fragment of the Sicilian journey concerning Messina left by some Polish travelers, taking into account their professions, areas of interest and the period in which they were in Sicily.

The given article is an analysis of Władysław Wężyk’s Travels to the ancient world taking into consideration the most important problems and components of the 19th century Romantic worldview. Particular attention will be paid to the great Romantic themes such as folklore, art, music, spontaneous literary works and concepts of new humanity. Wężyk’s memoir reveals his openness towards the Other and the understanding of foreign cultures which is by far the most important feature of a Romantic intellectual.

This article presents an overview of a literary sketch The Bathing Beaches on the Baltic Coast in the West Guberniyas… by Faddei Bulgarin (1789-1859), first published in Russian in 1827 (“Severnaya Pchela”, № 122-125) and in 1828 in Polish (“Kolumb”, vol. 1, № 4). The interpretive context for the story is founded on author’s journeys across the Baltic region and his stay in Karlov near Dorpat as well as development of the resorts by the Baltic Sea. Bulgarin’s sketch was the first description of Palanga (Polish: Połąga) as a seaside resort town. Among other elements of the writing the article discusses its composition and style, focusing primarily on a number of descriptive features concerning: the sea, the land, the nature, entertainments, local inhabitants and travellers and their customs.

The author investigated traffic flow quality on a new 2+1 long road bypass with an exceptionally high share of heavy vehicles in order to assess rational limits of heavy vehicle shares in traffic flow, dependent on the length of the 2+1 road and the number of passing segments in each direction. This paper presents the results of traffic flow quality analyses through the use of empirical and simulation methods for a single 2+1 road segment with additional passing lanes, as well as for the study of the entire section of the bypass – 2+1 road. Variables include analysis of travel speed distribution, platoon traffic, and amount of passing maneuvers. Results show that large passing demands lead to very high speeds (over 100 km/h) on segments with additional passing lanes. The conclusions include remarks related to the use and operation of 2+1 cross-sections with high shares of heavy vehicles.

Canal connecting Elbląg with Ostróda was built in the XIX century to transport corn to the port of Elbląg. Due to economic and political changes it never played its economic function. Now it is a tourist attraction. The canal is thus of some tourist value which is difficult to assess. Tourist value of the Elbląg Canal was assessed with the travel cost method (TCM) within the study carried out in 2003. The study allowed for estimating the object’s value based on its usefulness expressed by inclination to payment. Three groups of users were distinguished when analysing the demand for recreational canal’s services: tourists using ships of the Elbląg–Ostróda Navigation Company, individual sailors and anglers. Total tourist value of the canal calculated as NPV of the annual value of canal’s services depends on adopted interest rate. At a rate of 3.2% the value is 328 thous. PLN (73.9 thous. euro), at a rate of 4% – 282 thous. PLN (63.5 thous. euro), while at 8% interest rate it decreases to 160 thous. PLN (36.0 thous. euro).

Mario Puccini between Italy and Argentina – The Italian writer Mario Puccini travelled to Argentina in 1936 to attend the Pen Club Congress. In the essay, the results of Puccini’s stay in Argentina are studied for the first time in Italy: books, stories, articles, translations, correspondences, unrealized projects. Puccini is confirmed as an important cultural mediator in relations between Italy and the Spanish-speaking nations.

This essay concerns the fiction works of some Polish writers who made their literary debuts after 1989 (A. Stasiuk, P. Siemion, W. Kowalewski, Z. Kruszyński, K. Varga). Analysis of the urban space in their novels and tales based on three chronotopes (Bachtin) – center, street, road – serves to define certain characteristics of the hero and of the literary narrative mode. In the Polish literary city of the post- -socialist era, there is now no trace of the flâneur: replaced with the figure of a wanderer or fugitive, the hero of Polish literary fiction is lost in urban centers that take on the unique characteristics of the labyrinth. In this can be sought the reason behind the revived popularity of the theme of travel in the new Polish prose.

The article integrates the 18th century vampire discourse with problems and approaches of postcolonial studies on the one hand, and with the Galicia research in historical and cultural studies on the other hand. For this purpose, vampirism and postcolonial studies are defined at first, while the change of the vampirism discourse – passing from the revenant image to the one of bloodsucker – is analysed in the next step. Finally it is shown how the vampire’s character and discourse have been adjusted and narratively transformed in 18th-century travel literature on Galicia

An electronic system and an algorithm for estimating pedestrian geographic location in urban terrain is reported in the paper. Different sources of kinematic and positioning data are acquired (i.e.: accelerometer, gyroscope, GPS receiver, raster maps of terrain) and jointly processed by a Monte-Carlo simulation algorithm based on the particle filtering scheme. These data are processed and fused to estimate the most probable geographical location of the user. A prototype system was designed, built and tested with a view to aiding blind pedestrians. It was shown in the conducted field trials that the method yields superior results to sole GPS readouts. Moreover, the estimated location of the user can be effectively sustained when GPS fixes are not available (e.g. tunnels).

Scientific research discussed in the present article is focused on the determination of the vertical conveyance capacity in the process of mining minerals, while applying a mathematical calculation and verification of the calculation results by simulation. Input parameters for the capacity calculation include the transport cycle time. The article presents the results of measuring a transport cycle during the operation and a calculation of the transport cycle while using known formulas. On the basis of the observed findings, two methods of increasing the hoisting machine capacity were proposed. The first method is increasing the velocity from the original value of 6 m.s–1 to the velocity of 7 m.s–1. In this case, we achieved the daily capacity increase in 2-2.5%. The second method consisted in changing the hoisting machine acceleration and deceleration modes by which we achieved as much as 9% increase in the daily capacity. The article also describes a transport cycle simulation model, with its output being the number of work cycles parameter. The obtained parameter was used again in the capacity calculation. The simulation model was used in experiments for both, the current status as well as proposed solutions. The simulation model serves also for calculation verification.

The article shows, on the example of the accounts of the journey of John James Blunt and Auguste de Forbin, how the folk religiosity of Sicilians, especially patron saints, was perceived. The analysis of the texts showed that the newcomers who come into contact with the Sicilian culture notice that patron saints are a very characteristic phenomenon for this area and play an important role in social and political life.

Se non la realtà, published in 1960, collects travel stories written by Tommaso Landolfi during the 1950s. Among the texts contained in the collection you can find stories, articles, micro-reports on various – also less known – Italian cities. The writer chooses alternative routes to mass tourism, which he strongly criticizes. Anti-tourism practiced by Landolfi is also reflected in his literary style, adopting strategies unusual for travel literature, such as combining literary and non-fiction fiction, numerous allusions and quotes, and esoteric illuminations. Unlike other authors of travel reports from the 1950s, such as Pasolini or Piovene, Landolfi criticizes the euphoria associated with the development of Italy during the economic boom, anticipating some of the topics of Guido Ceronetti’s Un viaggio in Italia.

Within the INMOP 3 research project, an attempt was made to solve a number of problems associated with the methodology of modelling travel in urban areas and the application of intermodal models. One of these is the ability to describe the behaviour of transport system users, when it comes to making decisions regarding the selection of means of transport and searching for relationships between travel describing factors and the decisions made in regard of means of transport choice.

The paper describes a probabilistic approach to the determination of modal split, and the application of a logistic regression model to determine the impact of variables describing individual and mass transport travels on the probability of selecting specific means of transport. Travels in local model of Warsaw city divided into 9 motivation groups were tested, for which ultimately 8 models were developed, out of which 7 were deemed very well fitted (obtained pseudoR² was well above 0.2).

The article presents selected literary texts of Russian Romanticism, which can be classified as utopian or dystopian literature. Attention was drawn to the fluidity of borders between the species of positive and negative utopia. Works by Utopian writers were divided into two groups: those sympathizing with decay (A. Ulybyshev, W. Küchelbecker) and those representing the Pushkin era: J. Senkovskij and V. Odojevsky. The analysis of utopian texts showed that they belonged mainly to escapist utopias, and Russian Romanticism significantly influenced the development of negative utopias, which were open to the literary experiment. It was also shown that the works in question are related to the genre of travel literature and scientific fantasy.

The research into the use of less costly modifications of road links and networks, and changes in the service of road surroundings aimed at ensuring an improvement of through traffic performance in suburban areas, and on roads passing through built-up areas as small localities, with application of simulation model, is presented in this paper. From among possible designs, the authors investigated and presented the effectiveness of two, i.e. implementation of an additional multifunctional median lane in the road cross-section, and construction of service roads with different locations of intersections (end or middle of the road section).

The analysis is focused on the impact of such changes on traffic performance and road safety. The authors analysed travel speed, delay and share of platoon traffic on a uniform sections of the road for different types of road surroundings service. The study presents the results of analyses of road network before and after modification, and the assessment of:

•impact of access points density and level of their use on road traffic performance,
•impact of driving through road sections in built-up area on building platoon traffic,
•impact of change in the cross-section type on traffic performance.