Out of over 2,600 entries, a multi-disciplinary consortium led by Fernando Romero / FR-EE was recently announced as one of the 10 winning teams in the Hyperloop One Global Challenge with the proposal “Mexloop”, the 330-mile Mexico-Guadalajara route. The Mexloop project builds on Mexico's... View full entry
Hyperloop One just announced the winners of its global challenge, unveiling ten teams from five countries with their proposals of the strongest routes for future Hyperloop connections. As a next step, the company plans to work with the teams and expert business and engineering partners to... View full entry
The Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge sits across the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C. Named after the prominent American abolitionist, the bridge was built in 1950 and today, makes crossing the river possible for 77,000 daily commuters. Over the decades, the bridge has deteriorated faster... View full entry
During the speech, Cuomo suggested that one way to get more funding for the ailing transit system would be to offer companies the opportunity to sponsor subway stations for an annual fee. That money could go toward “enhanced maintenance, additional security, and aesthetic features.” — Curbed NY
The practice of letting corporations put their stamp on the subway has precedents— in 2009, the MTA sold the naming rights for Atlantic Ave–Pacific St station in Brooklyn to Barclays, which according to NY Times, gets MTA $200,000 per year for the next two decades. However, many crucial... View full entry
When built, Union Station was called the "Last of the Great Railway Stations." Designed by father and son team John and Donald B. Parkinson, the landmark opened in 1939 at a time when railway service was already beginning to wane. Combining Art Deco, Spanish Colonial, and Mission Revival styles... View full entry
When most Amish men were farmers, it was common for them to work seasonally with non-Amish in town, on more traditional things like cabinet making or carpentry, or even making cigar boxes, boats and band instruments. Nolt, who conducted interviews in the late ‘90s with Amish workers in the boat-making industry, said interviewees pointed to the fact that making the wooden boats was similar to wood working. — Atlas Obscura
According to Steve Nolt, Senior Scholar at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, most of the Amish men under 65 work in factories. The majority of these manufacturing plants either assemble RVS or supply parts such as cabinets or windows. Such increased... View full entry
[P]erhaps enticed by predictions of a $7 trillion autonomous driving industry, Lyft is saying it wants a build its own technology stack so it can operate its own self-driving cars.
To accomplish this, Lyft is opening a new 50,000-square-foot engineering facility in Palo Alto, California, that it’s calling the “Level 5” center in reference to the most advanced level of autonomous driving. Kapoor said the goal is to have “hundreds” of engineers working out of the facility by the end of 2018.
— The Verge
According to The Verge, Lyft is yet to release more concrete details of their plan, including which components of a self-driving car they will build themselves or how much money they plan to spend. Last month, Lyft announced their partnership with self-driving car startup NuTonomy to launch a test... View full entry
Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. — Elon Musk, Twitter
NY-DC in 29 mins?... View full entry
Until now, architects have had to design around the elevator shafts, which can comprise 40 percent of a building's core. Multi could allow them to install elevators almost anywhere, including the perimeter.
Strong magnets on every Multi car work with a magnetized coil running along the elevator hoistway’s guide rails to make the cars float. Turning these coils on and off creates magnetic fields strong enough to pull the car in various directions.
— Wired
After three years of work, ThyssenKrupp, a company synonymous with elevators, is testing the Multi in a German tower and finalizing the safety certification. Zooming up, down, left, right, and diagonally the new elevator was just sold to a residential building under construction in Berlin, and is... View full entry
Facebook announced today that it has partnered with OMA to design the masterplan for Willow Campus, a mixed-use neighborhood adjacent to their existing headquarters in Menlo Park. "The first official step will be the filing of our plan with Menlo Park in July 2017. We will begin more formal... View full entry
With the rise of autonomous transportation technology in the U.S., what implementable strategies can help a dense urban landscape like New York City prepare efficiently for a driverless future? Design teams from around the world proposed their ideas in the Driverless Future Challenge... View full entry
When Uber picked this former Rust Belt town as the inaugural city for its driverless car experiment, Pittsburgh played the consummate host. [...]
Nine months later, Pittsburgh residents and officials say Uber has not lived up to its end of the bargain. [...]
The deteriorating relationship between Pittsburgh and Uber offers a cautionary tale, especially as other cities consider rolling out driverless car trials from Uber, Alphabet’s Waymo and others.
— nytimes.com
"Starting later this month," wrote Bloomberg less than one year ago, "Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved." Since then, Pittsburgh appears to have... View full entry
Since the company’s introduction, many (including Futurism) have speculated that the tunnels’ true purpose was to work in tandem with the Hyperloop. This is the real clincher here. It seems like The Boring Company isn’t just going to be for cars. “The electric skate can transport automobiles, goods, and/or people. And if one adds a vacuum shell, it is now a Hyperloop Pod which can travel at 600+ miles per hour,” the site explains. — Futurism
Back in December, the business magnate Elon Musk tweeted his frustration of being stuck in LA traffic along with a half-joking suggestion of building a tunnel to fix his gridlocked woes.Well as it turns out... View full entry
The strategy reflects a consensus among some developers and planners that California’s vaunted car culture is inevitably going to run out of gas...[Andy] Cohen, co-chief executive of Gensler, predicts car ownership will peak around 2020 and then start to decline, with more Americans relying on some form of ride-sharing than their own vehicles by 2025. That means cars gradually would disappear from home garages, curbs and parking structures, freeing up acre upon acre of real estate for new uses. — Los Angeles Times
Some developers are already planning for a not-so-far-off future Los Angeles where more people primarily rely on ridesharing (including from autonomous vehicles) than driving their own car, particularly in the form of parking garages that can be redesigned for other uses like commercial spaces or... View full entry
Passengers and cargo are loaded into a pod which gradually accelerates with electric propulsions through a low-pressure tube. Then, the pod lifts above the track using magnetic levitation and moves at airline speeds. This would connect 80 percent of the country, making a cross-country trip just about five hours long. — 6sqft
Hyperloop One–whose transportation concept was first proposed by Elon Musk–has revealed a plan that would take travelers from NYC to D.C. in just 20 minutes via magnetically levitating pods that move by electric propulsion and travel faster than 700 miles per hour. View full entry
