The MIT station, at Massachusetts Avenue and Amherst Street, saw the most ridership among all Hubway stops, averaging 6.3 rides per bike per day during its 118 days in service .

via Cambridge releases Hubway usage statistics – The Tech.

YAYYY HUBWAY!

HT Pranjal

During the development of the project, a train on the Beijing-Shanghai route hit a record speed of 486km/h during a test run, which the Xinhua news agency said was the fastest speed recorded by an unmodified conventional commercial train.

This is still a developing country, and there are complaints that the prices are too high. The top price for a ticket from Beijing to Guangzhou is more than 2,000 yuan (€235), which is about the same price as a flight.

via China gets its rail network up to speed – The Irish Times – Mon, Feb 11, 2013.

via China has almost 10,000 kilometers of high speed rail now and 5 times more by 2020 – Forcing China's Airlines to Shift Focus to International Travel.

Financially viable high-speed rail system in China

Drivers can sign up for CurbTXT by registering their license plates and phone numbers. A sticker on the car gives people an anonymous way to contact the driver through text messaging by referencing the plate number. The service forwards the message to the owner.

via Bad parking job? Text the driver through the license plate | Crave – CNET.

via Opportunity Notes | CurbTXT Turns Jerks Into Altruists.

The basic world of Virtual Traffic Lights operates like this: as you approach an intersection, your car transmits data, such as location and speed, to other nearby cars. The virtual system processes this information for all the cars in the area, with the help of a lead car that changes every cycle, and determines your individual traffic signal. Instead of seeing a red or green light hanging in the intersection, you see it on your windshield and stop or go accordingly.

The basic technology for Virtual Traffic Lights is already here. Car-to-car conversations can operate over Dedicated Short Range Communication at 5.9 Gigahertz — a radio system being tested and refined by the federal government. Tonguz expects D.S.R.C. to become mandatory for new cars soon, and he’s working on a prototype to retrofit older models. (His work is being sponsored by the Department of Transportation, and Tonguz says he’s also received funding from General Motors throughout his career.)

The biggest obstacle, says Tonguz, is getting the government to test the system in a real-world setting.

via How Virtual Traffic Lights Could Cut Down on Congestion – Commute – The Atlantic Cities.

Ozan Tonguz (CMU ECE) – Virtual Traffic Lights, LLC

Those eight factors, as defined by Davies, are: road safety; ease of crossing the street; quality of sidewalks; hilliness; ease of navigation; fear of crime; what he refers to as how "smart and beautiful" a street is, in other words its aesthetic quality; and whether the street is "fun and relaxing."

The app, which just launched, so far covers London and other English cities, San Francisco, and Manhattan. Next up is Toronto, with Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston slated for inclusion later this year.

via An App That Tells You How Walkable a Street Really Is – Technology – The Atlantic Cities.

Walkonomics [src] (app)
Walk Score [src] (website)

Assistant Professor Dan Work and his team made the trip to Manhattan to deploy a new system that can provide valuable, real-time information to police, emergency personnel and the public during major events and disasters.  Called TrafficTurk, the system enables anyone with a smart phone to easily collect traffic data using a specially design application. Work’s team held its first large-scale deployment of TrafficTurk in Champaign-Urbana on Oct. 27, Homecoming weekend at the U of I.  At that time, more than 100 students were stationed around town to use the app and send data back to “mission control” in Newmark Civil Engineering Laboratory. The following weekend found the team in Times Square, documenting post-Sandy traffic patterns with the help of Columbia University students.  They also invited the public to download the app and use it anywhere in Manhattan. They will analyze the collected data to see what they can learn about post-disaster traffic patterns.

TrafficTurk promises to revolutionize traffic monitoring during extreme congestion events, Work said. For decades, traffic engineers have relied on manual data collection on surface streets, using tools called turning movement counters. The devices are expensive, though, and municipalities could never afford to give them to hundreds of people at once for real-time monitoring, he said. TrafficTurk employs an application that essentially turns a smart phone into a turning movement counter. The application can be downloaded from a website and utilized by as many people as necessary, depending on the size of the event. The information recorded can be made immediately available.

via CEE Researchers Study the Effects of Hurricane Sandy in New York | Civil and Environmental Engineering at Illinois.

Widely deployable ad hoc dynamic traffic probes via smartphone-enabled mobile sensor networks.

Dan Work, Assistant Professor at UIUC (CEE), PhD from Berkeley (Alex Bayen)

HT Andrew Tinka

Micro-Transit. The goal: To turn every car in America into a taxicab.

His vision, detailed in a white paper shared with Next City, is to put radio-frequency identification chips into the hands of passengers — in key fobs, transit cards or even driver’s licenses. Willing drivers, in turn, would be equipped with readers. When a potential passenger comes within scanning distance of a participating car, the driver’s picture would appear on an external display, and the rider’s on an internal one, confirming that both have gone through a background check.

Making the moment ripe for Micro-Transit, concludes Schmier, is that the technology is newly affordable: About $2 for the chip and $200 for the reader.

via The Man Behind NextBus Wants to Make Every Car a Taxi – Next City.

Reaching this point requires a ubiquity that Zipcar’s 10,000-vehicle fleet, spread out across more than 150 cities worldwide, simply doesn’t provide. In its press release announcing the Avis deal, Zipcar says that its new parent company’s bigger fleet will give it more cars to meet demand and, in the company’s words, “accelerate the revolution we began in personal mobility.”

via Why the Zipcar Deal Means You'll Finally Be Able to Give Up Your Car | Wired Business | Wired.com.