roads

This Guy Built a Toll Road Just To Avoid Construction Delays

When life hands you landslides, make your own private toll road detour. (Haven’t you heard the saying?) Since February, a landslide has closed the A431 highway between Bristol and Bath in England, adding an extra hour to the commute. So one enterprising local guy built a road through a private field—the UK’s private first toll…

Tiny Sensors Powered By Passing Cars Could Monitor Our Aging Roads

Between rush hour traffic and 18-wheelers, our roads take a real beating over time. Tiny sensors in the asphalt could give us a real time map of stress on aging roads, but then how do you keep embedded sensors powered for years? By harnessing the very motion of the cars whizzing by. That’s the clever…

This video explains why solar roadways won’t work anytime soon

These people claim their solar roadways technology is the future. They have raised over $1.8 million from people who are too gullible and decide to ignore simple physics and economics in favor of nice dreams of green energy. This video shows why their invention doesn’t make any sense. Concerns don’t just stem from the unsuitability…

This bridge over the San Gabriel River outside of L.A. was built in 1936 but devastating floods washed out the canyon and the road to it was never completed. The popular “Bridge to Nowhere” hike is nine miles round-trip and on weekends, hikers are greeted by the screams of bungee-jumpers. [@ZachBehrens, KCET]

Examining rap lyrics to measure quality of life in Compton. An ambitious housing plan from New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. How Boston is changing thanks to one architecture firm. Why Atlanta is putting all its money on the BeltLine. Plus, Bike Month! All in this week’s Urban Reads! Why does all the rap and…

The Futuristic Superhighways of 1964 Had Glow-in-the-Dark Roads

Glow-in-the-dark roads are finally a reality; at least in the Netherlands. But we’ve been waiting on this particular vision of the future for quite a while now — for over 50 years, in fact. https://gizmodo.com/glow-in-the-dark-roads-finally-exist-outside-of-hot-whe-1562937639 RCA ran this stunning illustration in a 1964 print ad touting its transistors. Companies have always loved positioning themselves alongside…

You Can Drive Over This Parking Lot Paved With Solar Panels

If you’ve scampered barefoot across asphalt on a sunny day, then you know driveways are already absorbing plenty of solar energy. What if we could actually harness it? Solar Roadways has created solar panels so strong you could drive a tractor right over them—plus they light up at night and heat to melt snow. In…

In The Netherlands, There Are Now Glow-in-the-Dark Roads

There’s a quarter mile stretch of highway in the Netherlands that now features light-absorbing glow-in-the-dark road markings. It’s a pilot project that, if proven effective, could dramatically reduce our need for streetlights. The project is a collaboration between interactive artist Daan Roosegaarde and Dutch civil engineering firm Heijmans. The paint contains a “photo-luminising” powder that…

NYC Is Falling Apart, and That’s OK

How old would you say the average piece of NYC subway is? 50 years? 60? You sweet, naive fool. No, the average subway is a nonagenarian. A new report on NYC’s infrastructure is out, and it is not good. But should we be panicking? All this and (way) more is detailed in the latest report…

5 Ideas To Make Roads Safer for Cars and Pedestrians

“Vision Zero,” New York mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to eliminate traffic deaths in the city, is audacious but not unprecedented. Like almost all good social policies, the Swedes did it first. And we could learn a thing or two from them. Sweden first introduced its own version of Vision Zero in 1997 as a…

We Can Now Pave Roads With Used Cooking Oil

You might not realize it, but quitting our addiction to oil means more than just finding something besides gasoline to put in our cars. If we really want to stop using fossil fuels, we have to change the way we make roads—and cooking oil might just be the answer. Over the past few months, Washington…

Why the hell are these F-18 pilots taking off from public roads?

Watch these F-18 pilots training to take off and land on public roads, a skill they used to practice more often back in the Cold War days, when they had to be ready in case the Soviet Union decided to bomb their airfields during an invasion. Taking off and landing on public roads used to…

4 Ways to Make Better Roads and Parking Lots From the Ground Up

As a surface for wheels, pavement does its job well enough. Asphalt concrete is flat, smooth, and solid (usually). But there is a price we pay for the convenience of paved roads and parking lots everywhere—a price paid in heat, noise, and polluted runoff. We went in search of better pavement and found these potential…

A Massive Road-Building Initiative Is Transforming Africa’s Landscape

Africa is home to some of the poorest road networks in the world, which act as a major barrier for trade, education and healthcare. Not for long, though—as it’s embarking on a frenetic road-building exercise that could revolutionize the entire continent. You only need look at the numbers to realize that Africa’s roads need attention.…

Hypnotizing video somehow reorganizes the cars on the road by color

There is no CG in this video and yet it messes with reality so much that it sure seems like it’s complete make believe. Instead, Cy Kuckenbaker simply removed and reorganized cars of the same color to make it seem as if they were driving together in a group. It’s a hypnotizing effect to see…

All the roads and flight paths America is taking for Thanksgiving

Tomorrow and Thursday, an estimated 43.4 million Americans will travel to celebrate Thanksgiving with their loved, hated and annoyed ones. According to NASA, 90 percent will travel by road, and the rest will use airplanes and trains. Here are the roads, train tracks and flight paths they will take. The photo above shows the road…

Building a Highway Is Way More Complicated Than You’d Think

There’s way more to building a road than just slathering some asphalt all over the ground. The process is actually pretty involved, with a bunch of steps you probably hadn’t thought of. And even a little bit of art to it. This fantastic video from Aaron Jones shows the E.T. Simonds construction company from Carbondale,…

Where Exactly Is the Middle of Nowhere?

We’ve all said it or thought it or joked about it or believed it at one point in our lives. That damn, we were in the middle of nowhere. But that corn field or dark stretch of the highway hardly qualifies as nowhere. True nowhere is actually in Idaho. Visual Statistix created this wonderful map…

Google Street View Could Be the Best Road Crew Ever

Potholes are not a joke. They get in your way, damage your car and make you spill a Big Gulp’s worth of Grape Fanta on your already-dingy upholstered seats. But new research shows that Google Street View may be all municipalities need to correct the problem. The U.S. has about 4 million miles of road…

All Roads Should Glow in the Dark (Obviously)

The Dutch design firms Studio Roosegaarde and Hejmans Infrastructure just came up with a brilliant prototype for a “Smart Highway” that uses interactive lighting that adapts to driving conditions to make the roads safer. Enough with crap infotainment systems inside cars that distract us from driving with Twitter and dinner reservations—let’s light up the roads…