The Mid Niigata Prefecture Earthquake of 2004 was an inland earthquake characterized by damage focused in local and mountainous areas. The damage of road infrastructures is also marked by the characteristics of the local area. In order to prevent or reduce earthquake damage in the future, it is important to clarify the characteristics of the damage level and the road traffic performance in the local and mountainous area, and reflect them in future earthquake prevention measures.This paper highlights the damage of road embankments and discusses the effects of road closures on local societies, based on related documents and field investigations. The study also quantitatively estimates the damage levels of road infrastructures, road traffic performances in the local and mountainous areas and the relationships between the seismic intensity scale and both damage level and road traffic performance. From these evaluations, new lessons for future earthquake prevention measures have been obtained.
Roads or highways are very important and fundamental infrastructures for the activities of life and production, and their safety are required to be secured against the various disasters such as rainfalls and earthquakes etc. The road networks are composed of many types of attached structures such as bridges, embankments, slopes, tunnels etc. During earthquakes, the abovementioned structures have been damaged in the past earthquakes and will be possible to be damaged in the near future.
A novel slot antenna designed on the road surface for machine-to-machine (M2M) RFID communication is presented. A corrugated ground plane with perturbed surface impedance is used underneath the antenna's radiator to adjust the antenna's radiation pattern, which otherwise will be highly affected by the properties of the road surface. The proposed antenna configuration is verified by full-wave simulations with various road surface conditions. The results show that the antenna has a stable performance with different road conditions. It possesses more than 12 dB return loss, more than 1.4 dBi gain, vertical polarization, and desirable radiation pattern from 880 MHz to 960 MHz.