The vehicle's early life was confined almost entirely to California highways. Hundreds of thousands of test miles later, the car more or less has mastered the art — rather, the computer science — of staying in its lane and keeping its speed. So about a year and a half ago, Google's team shifted focus from the predictable sweep of freeways to the unpredictable maze of city streets. I was invited along as the first journalist to witness how the car is handling its new urban lifestyle. — theatlanticcities.com

So it is that nearly a third of the interstate system consists of stretches through our cities, in the form of loops, spurs and freeways. So it is that American motorists drive nearly twice as many miles on urban interstates as they do the lengthier rural legs. So it is that every metropolis in the country has reorganized itself around these roads, and that they've shaped where we live and work, how we shop, what we eat, and how we pass our time. — theatlanticcities.com

Before the buses became a symbol for San Francisco’s gentrification woes, they were just a fleet of several hundred private coaches that whisked some seventeen thousand workers around San Francisco and to and from the Silicon Valley campuses of such companies as Apple, Google, and Genentech. [...]

San Francisco is deep into a second tech boom—and, with it, many less affluent workers are getting priced out of the city. — newyorker.com

Since Gruen Associates and Grimshaw Architects were approved in 2012 to create the L.A. Union Station Master Plan, the leading designers and their team recently got the green light from the L.A. Metro to begin the plan's third and final phase.

Preserving the station's iconic nature and enhancing its surrounding 17 hectares to address the city's most pressing needs in the future, the proposal is set for completion in Summer 2014. — bustler.net

For the next year, UCLA Architecture and Urban Design professor Craig Hodgetts and his graduate students will join forces with private and university physicists and engineers at UCLA's cross-disciplinary IDEAS facility in Playa Vista...

Hodgetts, who oversaw the acoustical redesign of the Hollywood Bowl, insists Musk's plan is doable. — laweekly.com

Notes on the Year: This year Los Angeles entered fresh civic territory as a range of initiatives across the city helped fuel an urban reawakening. — latimes.com

“The people who design the cars and the people who design the roads never talk to each other,” according to Kati Rubinyi. With a background in architecture, urban planning, and fine arts, Rubinyi wants to enrich mobility planning by bringing everyone involved to the same table. Her book, The Car in 2035: Mobility Planning for the Near Future, includes essays from the different viewpoints of planners, policymakers, architects, and car designers [...]. — buildabetterburb.org

Imagine a hospital on top of a mountain. How would doctors and patients get in and out? In Portland, Ore., commuters don't have to drive up a twisty, two-lane road to get there. Instead, they glide up 500 feet in the air in a gleaming silver gondola.

Portland's aerial tram connects the south waterfront down near the river to the Oregon Health and Science University on top of Marquam Hill. — npr.org

After 15 years, kadawittfeldarchitektur's redesign for the historic Salzburg Central Station is steadily inching toward completion. Before reconstruction began in 2009, the firm won a two-phase competition out of 12 architecture teams back in 1999. [...]

Even before its expected completion in mid-2014, kadawittfeldarchitektur has already received the Austrian "Staatspreis Design" award and the European Steel Award. — bustler.net

Superpedestrian, a start-up in Boston, announced on Monday that it has received $2.1 million in financing to help build a wheel that transforms some standard bicycles into hybrid e-bikes.

The product, the Copenhagen Wheel, is a design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology SENSEable City Laboratory. The original goal of the wheel was to entice more people to more bicycles in large cities in lieu of cars by giving them help from a motor. — New York Times

We typically see photovoltaic panels up on roofs, as they're broad, open surfaces that receive a lot of sunlight. You know what else spends a lot of time in the scorching sun, though? Sidewalks. With that in mind, a team at Washington DC's The George Washington University has created what is claimed to be "the first walkable solar-paneled pathway in the world." — Gizmag

When aircraft Shelter 610 opens its ruthless doors, a monstrous black behemoth slowly comes driving out. The object revives the mysterious atmosphere of the Cold War and its accompanying terrifying weaponry. At an almost excruciatingly slow pace, the artwork uses its caterpillar tracks to cross the seemingly infinite runway. — Rietveld Landscape

For those that suffered through classes in planning school in order to hack Illustrator and Photoshop to show streetscapes, behold Streetmix. You can drag and drop transit elements like light rail, streetcars, buses and bike lanes. You can add street furniture like benches, way finding signs, transit shelters, parklets and trees. You can adjust the width of the lanes and change the type of plantings. — untappedcities.com

Take the public transportation provided by corporate shuttle buses from the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook, and others. It’s not news that these shuttles, and the big digital tech companies that run them, are changing the fabric of San Francisco as we’ve known it. What feels new is that it’s not enough to say that change is coming soon. It’s already, very much here. — wired.com

Reforming parking policy is an urgent imperative which could have significant positive effects on the natural environment, our cities, the economy, and our society. For many issues, from affordable housing to carbon emissions, it is an obvious solution that has remained hidden in plain sight for too long. — Graphing Parking