Hasta La Gadget!

The vast and looping knots of L.A.’s elaborate freeway system have long inspired an unlikely stew made from equal parts road rage, suffocating air pollution, and an unexpected aesthetic appreciation for their stacked coils and crisp lines. A drivable geometry textbook, the freeways are perhaps the city’s real monuments, Stonehenge-like megastructures that novelist J.G. Ballard would call "motion sculptures in space," abstract works of automotive art too easy to miss for all the oil stains and honking.

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"Vision Zero," New York mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to eliminate traffic deaths in the city, is audacious but not unprecedented. Like almost all good social policies, the Swedes did it first. And we could learn a thing or two from them.

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There’s way more to building a road than just slathering some asphalt all over the ground. The process is actually pretty involved, with a bunch of steps you probably hadn’t thought of. And even a little bit of art to it.

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The Dutch design firms Studio Roosegaarde and Hejimans Infrastructure just came up with a brilliant prototype for a “Smart Highway” that uses interactive lighting that adapts to driving conditions to make the roads safer. Enough with crap infotainment systems inside cars that distract us from driving with Twitter and dinner reservations—let’s light up the roads like a night club until no one crashes again. More »