Parking protected bike lanes use parked cars to create a buffer between moving vehicles and cyclists. While this eliminates a few parking spots, it improves traffic flow for vehicles increases retail sales for nearby businesses, and improves bicycle safety and encorages more people to bike. After a pilot project on 9th Avenue in 2007, then New York City transportation official Janette Sadik-Khan used 1% of her agency’s budget to build 1200 miles of protected bike lanes.
Is it a bus? Is it a streetcar? No, it’s both. The Autorailer, a dual-mode vehicle, or road–rail vehicle can travel on roads and rails. The rails are used as a “guideway,” and the tires provide locomotion. Slotted wheels keep the thing on the tracks. These days most road-railers are for heavy construction, but there was a time when they were envisioned as perfect freight and commuter vehicles.
In the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, battery-powered trucks get recharged while they’re rolling down eHighway truck lanes, using the century-old technology of catenary wires and pantographs. Tom Scott explains.
Can hydrogen be used as a fuel to wean us off gasoline and diesel and power steel plants and other heavy industries? That would decarbonize the environment and slow climate change. Hydrogen is safer than you think. A video from The Economist.
By the end of the 19th century, 38% of American cars were electric. But early car batteries were expensive and inefficient, and the vehicles were twice the price of a gas-powered car. Enter the cheap Model T, and goodbye electric autos. Now that gas-powered cars have warmed the climate, can the market for electric cars heat up again? A TED-Ed video by Daniel Sperling and Gil Tal, narrated by Jack Cutmore-Scott, and animated by Lobster Studio.
In regions where there’s real winter, a “sneckdown” (“snow” + “neckdown”) can help illustrate how a traffic neckdown curb extention makes intersections safer for pedestrians by slowing turning vehicles. A Streetfilms video.
More:
“Undriven Snow: Activists Trace Winter Car Routes Reshape City Streets,” Kurt Kohlstedt, 99 Percent Invisible
Commercial airline flights today take longer than the same routes in the 1960s. Why? The same reason your morning commute takes longer: traffic congestion. A video by Sam Denby of Wendover Productions.