Besides the bonkers official announcements from Ford about a new Bronco and Ranger, the automaker made waves at this week’s Detroit Auto Show with a TED talk-like event about how to transform cities of the future with the technology we’re enraptured with today—electric and autonomous vehicles, all that good stuff. But…
A five-year plan. Ten years in the making. $305 billion to be spent on infrastructure. Money for roads and rail projects. Penalties for automakers breaking the law. This is the newest federal transportation bill, and this is why it’s important.
Areas of Southern California saw rare summer thunderstorms this weekend, with rainfall that broke July records all over the state. So much rainfall, in fact, that flash flooding dislodged a bridge and collapsed a section of the 10 Freeway—the major east-west freeway that links Los Angeles and Phoenix.
Americans are simply not driving as much as they used to; most experts agree we hit “peak car.” But that’s not the story according to the Department of Transportation’s forecasts, which year after year show skyrocketing demand for more roads—and year after year are proven wrong. Still, states use this data to fund…
The first road-legal autonomous truck made a splashy debut earlier this month. The Freightliner Inspiration Truck is shiny and new, but it will not be good for everyone. Autonomous trucks will destroy jobs, Scott Santens points out at Medium, killing the truck stop as we know it.
If you live in a post-industrial city, odds are good that it’s got its share of abandoned, blighted transit infrastructure. Some cities demolish it, some cities let it fester, and other cities repurpose it. In Seoul, they’re choosing the latter.
Some might say New Yorkers had more money than sense in the Roaring Twenties. Somewhat profoundly, John K. Hencken's idea to build highways on top of skyscrapers in Manhattan required both. Bummer about that stock market crash—otherwise these elevated boulevards might have been built! Emphasis on the might have.
Route 66. The Autobahn. The Trans-Eurasian Belt Development? The head of Russia's railway system has proposed a superhighway through Siberia across the Bering Strait that would link Europe with the United States through Russia.
Los Angeles is widely considered to be the home of the freeway. It's also considered to be the home of the film industry. A fascinating story from Nate Berg over at Re-Form chronicles the way that two emerging forces which would come to define LA ended up making the sound of our ever-noisier roadways (somewhat) more…
All along America's open highways are the sight of rest stops—lonesome, and often odd, miniature roadside parks that dot the landscape. Photographer Ryann Ford is on a mission to document these architectural emblems.
It's the difference of just one inch. In 2005, the guardrail manufacturer Trinity Industries shaved that much off its guardrail design, saving the company $2 per guardrail head. It also neglected to report this design change to the Federal Highway Administration. Tens of thousands of these potentially deadly guardrail…
Who doesn't like a math pop quiz when driving down to the Mexican border? If you turn onto Interstate 19, which runs 63 miles (101 kilometers) from Tucson, Arizona, down to Mexico, the road signs suddenly change to metric units. Interstate 19 is a relic from a more optimistic era, when we believed all of the U.S.…
Migration is a mainstay of American culture—the perpetual dream of manifest destiny started with wagons and ended with, well, this: 240 million individual roads and streets, mapped onto a single image by the good folks at Fathom Information Design.
Highways let us humans zip from one place to another—at least when the traffic's not horrendous. But for wild animals, highways are like wide concrete fences that feature metal boxes of death barreling down at 70 mph. In the Santa Monica Mountains, a population of wild mountain lions has become penned in by highways…
The rest areas were always my favorite parts of road trips. There was room to walk around and, somewhere, a vending area. I always got lost in the weird maps and wondered who used those curious barbecues. And so when I saw Nicolò Sertorios blissfully barren photo series, I wanted to hop in the car.
We've all heard about how well Google's self-driving car does on the highway. But is that so impressive? Heck, put on cruise control and an audiobook, and any car seems like it can drive itself on an Interstate. The latest update from Mountain View, however, suggests that this miracle vehicle is entering a new phase…
It's like staring at the night sky only instead of looking up to see stars and constellations, we're looking at the bright lights of cities connected by highways. A Reddit user superimposed state boundaries and interstate routes onto a NASA photograph of the United States of America at night to show how and why things…
The vast and looping knots of L.A.'s elaborate freeway system have long inspired an unlikely stew made from equal parts road rage, suffocating air pollution, and an unexpected aesthetic appreciation for their stacked coils and crisp lines. A drivable geometry textbook, the freeways are perhaps the city's real…
A couple of Israeli students figured out a way to create fake traffic jams using the popular, Google-owned Waze GPS app. And while it sounds silly at first, these kinds of infrastructure hacks could have serious consequences as we depend more and more on data to help us get around town.
It's one of those things you've seen your entire life and probably never thought much about. There's that iconic blue shield shape with a white number inside and a single word on a white background: "Interstate." It could've been so much worse.
