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Candy Chan, an architect living in New York City, has what she describes as a "love-hate relationship" with her subway system. Fascinated in particular by the mechanisms of the MTA's stations – their navigation and placemaking methods, their circulation patterns – Chan was surprised to learn... View full entry
After 19 years, the Arnhem Central Station masterplan will finally be complete with the public opening of the new transfer hall tomorrow. Since UNStudio won the competition in 1996, the journey to construct the urban development in the Dutch city of Arnhem was an arduous one filled with “an... View full entry
This is the work of Canadian architectural photographer Chris Forsyth who has been sharing his pictures on Instagram, looking to show how beautiful design is all around us. [...]
"What draws me to the architecture in the metro system is its variety from station to station. I love the colours, the architectural styles and influences, and above all its very bold graphic appearance." [...]
Forsyth uses long exposures to blur the motion and to remove traces of people passing through the shot.
— bbc.com
For more work by the architectural photographer, you can follow Chris Forsyth on Instagram @chrismforsyth, with more shots of the Montreal Metro through #mtlmetroproject. View a selection of photos below: View full entry
Minus a TV, a temporary bus shelter at S. 6th Street and the Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis has most of the cozy comforts of your living room: pillows, books, board games, a clock, a rug and string lighting. [...]
High-traffic bus stops can be flash points for safety concerns, and projects like Living Room Station represent an opportunity to bring in creative thinkers and builders to improve the experiences for riders, passersby and neighbors
— masstransitmag.com
Milton Keynes is currently the host city for a set of driverless car trials funded indirectly by the U.K. government — the most ambitious testing yet staged in the world.
If all goes as planned, by 2018, Milton Keynes’ downtown will be served by an on-demand, publicly run system of 30 to 40 driverless two-seater pod cars, which will allow residents to travel between any two points in the city’s downtown without navigating or reacting to obstacles themselves.
— nextcity.org
For a glimpse of the LUTZ Pathfinder autonomous vehicles in action, check out the video below: View full entry
even given that the Hyperloop whitepaper was a rough sketch, the most important elements of the plan—its speed and price—have been vastly oversold. [...]
But there’s a final reason to be skeptical, not just of the technical details of the Hyperloop, but of the supposedly utopian motives behind it: It may not even be Musk’s idea.
— fortune.com
More on the much hyped (and griped) world of Hyperloop:Elon Musk launches Hyperloop Pod Competition to university students and engineersLA's Arts District now home to Hyperloop World HeadquartersThe town that Hyperloop builtDon't write off Elon Musk's Hyperloop yet...Designing the Hyperspace: UCLA... View full entry
A combination of (mostly) public transit along with some Uber rides can be affordable for a wider range of customers than Uber alone. — Five Thirty Eight Economics
According to a study of New York City's private-car hiring habits, many of those who hired Uber did so as an extension of public transit: in other words, instead of Uber-ing all the way to a particular destination, a wider socioeconomic spectrum of New Yorkers frequently use some combination of... View full entry
[London Mayor Boris] Johnson, who uses the city’s bike-share system to commute to work most days, told the Guardian that he would welcome the quieter, greener buses on his city’s streets, saying current buses are like “throbbing, belching machines that emit their fumes like wounded war-elephants”. — qz.com
Since 2008, London Mayor Boris Johnson has introduced over 1,300 hybrid buses onto city streets, and all-electric single-decker buses have been in use since 2013. It was previously thought that all-electric double-decker buses weren't feasible – their size makes them too difficult to efficiently... View full entry
Driverless pods, gliding above city streets using a network of elevated guideways. This is SkyTran -- but is it the future? SkyTran wants to do away with train schedules and central stations to develop a grid system above the ground with multiple "off ramps" acting as stations where users can board pre-booked pods – a cab service for the skies. Call for SkyTran on your smart phone and a computer-controlled, magnetically levitating pod arrives. It will whisk you across the city... — CNN
SkyTran claims the pods, weighing just 300 lbs, would consume about a third of the electricity used by today's hybrid cars. And the infrastructure can be built for $10 million per mile, at least according to the CEO Jerry Sanders.Later this year, the company plans to complete its first pilot... View full entry
With the right mindset, commutes can become an abundant source for inspiration. Creative commuters or commuters in need of a creative outlet are invited to send submissions about public transit to the New York Transit Museum's PLATFORM 2015.Now in its second year, PLATFORM 2015 lets commuters... View full entry
By shutting down New York City’s subways, commuter rail, and roads for this week’s storm-that-wasn’t, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) made the right call. [...]
The city has learned the hard way that the best way to keep people off the streets is by shutting down mass transit. [...]
Preemptively shutting down subways before Hurricane Irene in 2011 and Superstorm Sandy in 2012 worked well in keeping people home.
— city-journal.org
Nashville’s bid to build its first high-capacity transit line is dead, the Tennessean is reporting today. It’s a victory for the Koch brothers-funded local chapter of Americans for Prosperity and a defeat for the city’s near-term hopes of transitioning to less congested, more sustainable streets.
The project, known as the Amp, called for a 7-mile busway linking growing East Nashville to downtown and parts of the city’s west end.
— streetsblog.org
Friday, January 9:Boston wins U.S. Olympic Committee's bid for 2024 Games: Beating out Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, DC, Boston's Olympic campaign estimates it can finance the Games with $4.5B in private funds and $5B or so in publicly-funded infrastructural projects.Thursday, January... View full entry
California's bullet-train agency will officially start construction in Fresno this week on the first 29-mile segment of the system, a symbol of the significant progress the $68-billion project has made against persistent political and legal opposition. [...]
But the milestone marked by Tuesday's groundbreaking ceremony also will serve as a reminder of the enormous financial, technical and political risks still faced by the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco project.
— latimes.com
At the broadest level, it's fair to say that urban mobility didn't have the most encouraging day. In recent years, conservative transportation policy has been much more inclined to favor highways serving rural and outer suburban regions than alternative modes that boost balanced city networks [...] But at the city and county level, where most transit initiatives occur, the midterms yielded a number of big victories, in keeping with the general success of transit ballot measures in recent years. — citylab.com
