transportation

Some Canadian Roads Smell Like French Fries Thanks to Recycled Oil

Fryer oil turns plain old potatoes into delicious french fries. It powers our biodiesel cars. And, now, it’s being used to turn the dusty surfaces of rural Canadian roads into stable makeshift asphalt—AND THEY SMELL LIKE FRENCH FRIES. God bless our obsession with that infernally unhealthy liquid. It seems like slathering canola over a path…

This 1947 Train of Tomorrow Puts Today’s Trains to Shame

Here in 21st century America, train travel isn’t seen as very futuristic. But in the years after World War II, trains were right up there with airplanes as the coolest in luxurious transportation of tomorrow. And in 1947 Americans got a peek at what was promised to be their train-bound future. It was called the…

Some of L.A.’s Most Beautiful Landscapes Are Its Freeways

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 monuments, Stonehenge-like megastructures that novelist J.G. Ballard…

L.A.’s Interchanges Are Beautiful (If You’re Not Stuck in Traffic)

To anyone who’s ever endured a maddening, 15-minute crawl through one, freeway interchanges may seem the furthest thing from beauty. But given some psychic distance—and the skilled composition of a photographer—we can indeed appreciate the elegance of these concrete structures. Some we admire for their symmetry, like the famous Four-Level Interchange. It’s best viewed from…

Hugo Gernsback’s vision for the flying car of 1973, as it appeared on the May 1923 cover of Science and Invention magazine. The thing had two wheels, a bubble-top and a push-button control panel. I guess if we’re honest with ourselves, American designs for the flying car of tomorrow peaked in 1923, didn’t they? [Image…

Hackers Can Now Create Fake Traffic Jams

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. The Waze hack is…

Watch a Bus Stop Get Redesigned Before Your Very Eyes

When patience is short and waits are long, squeezing onto the bus becomes a mad, lawless scramble. And that won’t do if your buses have to transport 100,000 passengers a day, like Vancouver’s extremely busy 99 line. So transportation planners got out a camera and some tape—you can watch the results in this transfixing time-lapse…

Text While Driving In The Bay Area And You Might End Up On A Billboard

This month, some residents of San Francisco could discover photographs of themselves engaging in rather embarrassing behavior. A website has been collecting photos of people texting while driving, and some of those photos have now found their way onto billboards throughout the region. The project, called Texting While in Traffic (TWIT) is the brainchild of…

This Beautifully Simple App Wants to Change How Public Transit Works

Public transit is a hard problem. Imagine how difficult it is for a city to meet the needs of millions, all of whom want to go different places at different times. And, inevitably, you’re left standing on the platform. Ototo wants to change all of that. This ambitious Israeli startup is founded upon a simple…

Continuing our inadvertent Snøhetta theme today, the Norwegian architecture firm has also proposed this fuselage-like metro station for downtown Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The outer skin of the building—a long tube enclosing a station on the city’s Metro-C line—would be surfaced with ceramic tiles “developed in cooperation with local artists.” This joins other large-scale rail projects…

Springfield Should Be Ashamed About the State Of Its Public Transit

A city as progressive as Springfield—renowned globally for its renewable energy production—should be on the forefront of public transit innovation. But as we’ve learned this week, Springfield is rife with transportation shortcomings. Springfield once had the greatest public transit system in the world! A beautifully designed and intelligently conceived system was once fully functional beneath…

A peek at Crimea’s controversial election day, Philly widens freeways by mistake, and does Austin, Texas, have a drinking problem? Plus, the incredible story behind Rio’s most famous monument, and the truth about earthquakes in L.A. Come along with us on this week’s Urban Reads. 96.7 percent of Crimeans can’t be wrong: What a (likely…

Should People Be Allowed to Drink and “Drive” Self-Driving Cars?

Autonomous cars are coming soon, people, maybe as soon as 2015 if you live in California. And with them will be a whole set of new rules and regulations when it comes to driving. Or, ahem, not driving. This will obviously be a gargantuan task, spanning issues related to privacy, security, safety, and, of course,…

Why Cities Need to Stop Commissioning Calatrava’s Fish Skeletons

I remember the first time I saw a Santiago Calatrava bridge, a spinal column of calcium-white ribs snaking across a Spanish ravine. “That’s cool,” I thought. Then, a few years and a few thousand miles away, I saw another one. And another one. And another one. Why did all these cities have similar structures in…

They Moved Mountains (And People) To Build L.A.’s Freeways

Carmageddon—it was the nightmare scenario L.A.’s transportation authorities warned of when a construction project shut down a critical stretch of freeway for an entire weekend in July 2011. Gridlock. The glow of brake lights. The overwhelming angst of a city denied its full and unimpeded access to its freeways. In the end, the public outreach…

Paris’s Smog Has Gotten So Bad, It’s Making Public Transportation Free

Ah Paris—city of light, city of love, city of smog? Unusually warm spring weather has trapped diesel car emissions, blanketing much of France in noxious and dangerous air pollution. It’s gotten so bad that officials in Paris are taking the radical next step of making public transportation, bike shares, and electric car shares free to…

The number of Californians who walk, bike, or take transit on an average day has doubled in the last decade, according to a new study by Caltrans. Also notable: More people in their 20s and 30s are not getting their licenses at all. [Los Angeles Times]

Why the Speed of Ships Is Measured in Knots

How fast you’re going while out floating on the big blue can be notoriously tricky to judge if you’re just eyeballing it. One method used to get around this issue was introduced in the sixteenth century using a “chip log” or “log-line.” In a nutshell, this method used a plank of wood (usually wedge shaped…

How to Design the Perfect Subway Map

Cameron Booth is a seasoned graphic designer. In his spare time he also edits transitmaps.tumblr.com, the web’s finest emporium for bus maps, subway diagrams, train network maps and more. We’re enormous fans of his site and wanted to pin him down on a subject that’s close to our own hearts: what makes a good transit…

A Whole Year of Taxi Rides in New York City Mapped

New York’s fleet of iconic yellow taxis are still the city’s reliable, non-surge priced transportation backbone. Its 13,500 medallion taxis make 170 million trips a year, every single one of them mapped in this beautiful new visualization from the folks at the MIT Senseable City Lab. The interactive map isn’t just here to be pretty—it’s…