Issues & Insights
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Critics say big change to US traffic safety 'bible' could put drivers at risk
Verge, May 22, 2013 -
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A massive plan is underway to upgrade aging road signs in the US. The goal is to make them more reflective at night, and easier for drivers to see. But the main government instruction manual for doing so, the longtime bible of roadside signage and safety, could soon be chopped in half. Advocates worry the change will cause confusion for drivers and increase the risk of accidents. "The idea of dividing the baby and only keeping the parts that are mandated is, we think, shortsighted," said Henry Jasny, vice president and general counsel for the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a lobbying group made of up of insurance organizations and consumer rights' proponents.
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USDOT says driving down 3.7 billion vehicle miles in March.
USDOT, May 2013 - Travel on all roads and streets changed by -1.5% (-3.7 billion vehicle miles) for March 2013 as compared with March 2012.
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Are streetcars the future of public transportation?
Salon, May 16, 2013 - Suddenly streetcars — those clanging, clattering, spark-emitting icons of public transit’s past — are among the hottest and most coveted components of public transit’s future. Right now the list of cities looking to introduce new streetcar lines or extend existing ones reads like a back-of-the-envelope tally by members of the NBA’s expansion-team task force, circa 1978: in addition to Charlotte, there’s Dallas, Kansas City, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, Fort Lauderdale, Cincinnati, Baltimore, and Tucson, among others.
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A Better Way to Grade Metro Transportation Systems
DCStreetsBlog, April 15, 2013 - TTI’s narrow focus on congestion has come under increasingly intense scrutiny in recent years, with critics pointing out that it is used to justify road-widening projects that purport to reduce congestion but mainly serve to encourage sprawl and lengthen commutes. A study recently released by the University of Minnesota presents an interesting alternative to the TTI’s metrics. UMN Transportation Engineering Professor David Levinson recently analyzed metropolitan commuting according to a very different criterion: accessibility, or “the ease of reaching desired destinations.”
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When cars talk, this is what they'll tell each other
Computerworld May 10 2013- Researchers are developing machine-to-machine (M2M) communication technology that allows cars to exchange data with each other, meaning vehicles will soon know what the cars all around you are doing on the highway.
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What If We Never Run Out of Oil? Methane-hydrate could rival fracking
Atlantic magazine, May 2013 - “When will the world’s supply of oil be exhausted?” the MIT economist Morris Adelman has written. “The best one-word answer: never.”
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Fatal traffic crashes involving cellphones substantially under-reported
AP, May 7, 2013 - Fatal cellphone-involved crashes are seriously underreported, according to an analysis of state and federal data released today by the National Safety Council, an advocacy group.
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Tesla CEO Talking With Google About ‘Autopilot’ Systems
Bloomberg, May 7, 2013 - Elon Musk, the California billionaire who leads Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA) (TSLA), said the electric-car maker is considering adding driverless technology to its vehicles and discussing the prospects for such systems with Google Inc. (GOOG) (GOOG)
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Grids are for squares: Alternatives to rectilinear street networks
Transportationist, May 7, 2013 - Just as we have cut the earth into a grid of latitude and longitude (and knowing that each "block" of 1 degree latitude by 1 degree longitude gets smaller and smaller as we approach the poles), we similarly cut our cities and rural areas into a finer mesh from that same grid. Much of this arises from the various large scale ordinance surveys that took places in the Americas, Australia, and India.
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