Tag: cities

May 3, 2019

IN THE PAST year, electric, shared scooters have sprouted like weeds on corners in cities as varied as San Diego, Detroit, and Barcelona. Riders have hopped aboard, neighborhood groups have objected to the scooter companies’ business models, and policymakers are […]

April 8, 2019

It’s been downloaded 100,000 times. Does it make a difference? A few years ago we covered Towit, an app where users posted photos of vehicles blocking bike lanes. Even its developer agreed that unless connections were made with the police, […]

February 4, 2019

Running to catch that bus is good exercise We have noted for years that cars make you fat, but a new study shows that transit makes you skinny. Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Georgia Tech did […]

January 23, 2019

THE ENVIRONMENTAL CASE for taking public transportation is pretty solid, especially in big cities where options are abundant and traffic unbearable. More than three-quarters of Americans drive by themselves to work every day by themselves, but taking a bus or […]

January 8, 2019

HAVE YOU BEEN inside an Uber? How about a Lyft, or another ride-hailing service? If the answer is duh, rethink your sense of superiority. Because you’re in the minority. According to a new poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, […]

November 6, 2018

THEY HAVE LANDED in San Francisco, San Diego, Minneapolis. They have squeezed into Charlotte, North Carolina, Miami, and Phoenix. As shared, electric scooters took off some local governments panicked. Others moralized. A few shrugged their shoulders and let the people […]

October 23, 2018

Forty thousand Americans were killed by cars last year. the IPCC says we have twelve years to limit climate change catastrophe. People in cities are dying from particulate pollution and our streets are congested with cars. Meanwhile, a class action […]

October 11, 2018

CARS KILL PEOPLE. More than 37,000 over the course of 2017—what would statistically be considered a ‘good year.’ Big tech has a solution: Have the cars drive themselves, free of the distractions, drunkenness, and other human foibles. Flood the roads […]

September 11, 2018

IT’S TIME FOR a new car. You’ve put it off as long as possible, but your old clunker guzzles gasoline—on the days it decides to start. You’ve dreaded this moment because buying a car stinks. Negotiating the right deal is […]

August 31, 2018

North Carolina legislators don’t exactly have a track record of supporting projects related to clean tech, mass transit or sustainable development. In fact, from banning planners from using future sea level rise projections to battling with tech giants over the […]

May 3, 2018

BAD NEWS FOR the cool kids who depend on their sweet fixies for cultural cachet: Cycling has hit the mainstream. According to a report just released by the National Association of City Transportation Officials, residents and tourists in US cities […]

April 20, 2018

OFTEN, STREETS ARE a futile exercise in organizing disorder. Cars are meant to go here, walkers there, cyclists in that shoddy excuse for a bike path—yet no one’s that great at staying in their lane. This month, the chaos got […]

April 16, 2018

THE TRUCE BETWEEN two old foes—city governments and secretive private companies like Uber—began at the curb. If you think the curb seems an unlikely Appomattox, you haven’t been pay attention. Today, the curb represents the most contested space in the […]

April 11, 2018

UBER: IT’S NOT just for cars anymore. Less than a decade after launching, it has rolled out rides for the normies (UberX), for those who don’t mind sharing (UberPool), and for those who don’t mind walking (Uber Express Pool). It […]

February 21, 2018

TODAY, UBER IS launching its latest innovation in ride-hailing, one it has spent the past year spinning up. There’s new tech architecture, a novel user interfaces, and in-app intro schemes to teach the rider how to use the new service. […]

January 31, 2018

THIS IS HOW quickly transportation has changed in urban America. In July 2010, a service called UberCab went live in San Francisco—that’s fewer than eight years ago. Washington, DC’s Capital Bikeshare, the country’s largest bike-sharing program, really got off the […]

December 12, 2017

Cars are killing us, and it is time to limit the damage to drivers and to people around them, just like we did with smoking. For the last few years, my particular position on cars has grown more extreme, from […]

November 3, 2017

LATE LAST MONTH, dozens of automotive and tech journalists across the country got the digital equivalent of a golden ticket in their inbox: an invitation from Waymo to go “Behind Castle Walls.” This week, Alex joined that lucky cohort on […]

September 22, 2016

No more Dutch style cycling for you; The Guardian reports on a new study by Australian statisticians Jake Olivier and Prudence Creighton that claims helmets reduce the risks of serious head injury by nearly 70 percent. Helmet use is associated […]