Post date: Dec 17, 2015 2:21:56 PM
This week, we set off to take surveys at San Marco's square and Marco Polo airport. The goal of these surveys was to gauge interest in taxi sharing. Mainly, we wanted to see how much of a discount tourists would like to see and how long they'd be willing to wait to share a taxi with other people. We initially took surveys over at San Marco's square on Monday, but at the end of the day found there were some flaws in our questionnaire and we decided to update it before heading out to Marco Polo airport to continue on Friday. Our surveys, both old and new, can be found here.
For cargo, this week we received the GPS tracker from Oreste Venier at Eraclit and got in contact with a cargo driver. He allowed us to place the tracker on his boat for a 24-hour period in order to gather data for one day's worth of deliveries. We purchased an external battery pack to power the GPS tracker, and met with the cargo transporter who placed the cardboard box containing the tracker near the cockpit in the open air. We placed it on a Thursday afternoon in order to get data for next Friday's morning deliveries. Unfortunately, the battery did not last as long as we had expected, and it died approximately two hours in, which meant we got no useful data from it. As a result, the battery was recharged and a trip was simulated by walking through Venice with the GPS tracker, and that data was analyzed instead of the boat data.
Finally, we used Maxsurf to perform a hydroanalysis of the boat hulls created during the past few weeks. The current hull resistivity was graphed at varying speeds, and then re-graphed using the same hull with a lesser weight. Then, the new hull resistivity was also graphed at the initial vs updated weights. These graphs were used to conclude that an efficiency increase of 29% at the low speeds inside the canals could be achieved if the hull shapes and structure were updated.
Fig 1. The GPS Tracker
Fig 2. Marco Polo Airport where Surveys were Taken