When a semi-trailer truck carrying a rig filled with toilet paper crashes into a bridge, what happens? A giant mess. A giant mess that someone has to clean up. This timelapse shows a city clean up crew picking up all the crap, repackaging it for another truck and getting the streets clean so that no one would know what’s going on. This is six and a half hours of work shrunken down to two minutes. It’s kind of like seeing SimCity characters go to work, only they’re real people.
What would deter you from speeding? How about a loud, jarring, and utterly annoying noise emanating
The battle against bike lanes has turned into an all-out culture war here in the U.S., with NIMBYs shrieking about ceding a few feet of precious asphalt while squawking about the apocalyptic congestion that change will bring. But here’s a deep, data-driven investigation into the truth about bike lanes and traffic.
A couple of Israeli students figured out a way to create fake traffic jams using the popular, Google-owned Waze GPS app. And while it sounds silly at first, these kinds of infrastructure hacks could have serious consequences as we depend more and more on data to help us get around town.
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Driving in the city sucks. There are other cars and buses and bikes and people—god, so many people. And cars—being heavy metal machines capable of moving at great speed—are also highly dangerous. Instead of trying to accommodate everyone in an unhappy medium, cities are increasingly designing streets for pedestrians over cars. Check these ambitious projects all over North America doing exactly that.
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Unlike nearly every other traffic light in the U.S., the traffic light up on Tipperary Hill in Syracuse, New York displays green above red. Why this bizarre reversal? Well, St. Patrick’s Day is an appropriate time to tell this story.
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Back in January at CES 2014, Audi announced its cool new traffic light recognition system. We already know most of the details of the system with its ability to interface with the traffic lights via Wi-Fi. The point of the system is to tell the driver when the light will turn green.
Audi is able to get the traffic light system data via the wireless connection to be able to give the driver a countdown until the light turns green, as well as what speed you’ll need to maintain to make the next light. While those are definitely convenient features, Audi says that the tech could save lots of fuel and reduce emissions as well.
The Audi traffic light information system would be integrated with the engine start/stop tech in the car. The allows the engine to remain turned off until five seconds before the light turns green. As soon as it knows the light is about to change, the engine will re-engage. There are currently start/stop systems which just shut off when you’re stopped, but there’s a fraction of a second lag when accelerating from that standstill.
Audi estimates that if the technology were deployed across Germany, it could save 238 million gallons of fuel and reduce emissions by 15% (though they don’t say over what period of time that savings would take place).
Now if the system could keep morons from sitting there checking Facebook when the light is green, it will be world changing.
[via AutoblogGreen]
In one of the most ambitious announcements of his term so far, Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged yesterday to eliminate traffic deaths in New York City. In 2013, there were 286 traffic-related fatalities.
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Starchitects don’t build ’em like they used to—and now one’s getting sued for it. Chris Christie remains in troubled waters over a bridge. And if you thought the Polar Vortex was bad, how about the looming Emergency Drought? It’s all this week in What’s Ruining Our Cities.
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When not being used for poorly thought-out political revenge,
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