Transportation news, curated through an EECS lense. Special interest and emphasis on autonomous vehicles, scalable solutions, cost-efficient transit (e.g. busses), innovations in infrastructure, security, IU/UX, and insights into the behavioral/legal/ethical aspects.
An App That Tells You How Walkable a Street Really Is – Technology – The Atlantic Cities 2013-02-22 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, ...
CEE Researchers Study the Effects of Hurricane Sandy in New York | Civil and Environmental Engineering at Illinois 2013-02-22 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. ...
The Man Behind NextBus Wants to Make Every Car a Taxi – Next City 2013-02-22 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 ...
Why the Zipcar Deal Means You’ll Finally Be Able to Give Up Your Car | Wired Business | Wired.com 2013-02-22 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 ...
Gamasutra: Mike Rose’s Blog – Using SimCity to diagnose my home town’s traffic problem 2013-02-21 So what does this all prove? Is it indeed true that through-traffic coming from Didsbury and the motorway is causing the Northenden bottlenecks? And what can the council do to fix the issue? Well… the answer is, of course, that it means absolutely nothing. via Gamasutra: Mike Rose's Blog – Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's ...
PLA develops unmanned road vehicle | South China Morning Post 2013-02-21 China’s Military Transportation University has developed a third-generation unmanned road vehicle with technology that could eventually be implemented for civilian-use, the army’s PLA Daily reported on Tuesday. via PLA develops unmanned road vehicle | South China Morning Post.
World Highways – Using ITS to maximise safety and traffic flow for cycling 2013-02-21 Copenhagen, Denmark, has long been known as one of the world’s leading cities for cycling. In some areas of the city, the modal share of bikes has reached a level of as much as 50 %. And on some of the most frequently used bike paths the average daily number of cyclists is close to ...
Image credit: Neil Kremer