Electric scooters are flooding California, and they’ll be on your sidewalks soon (Quartz) Depending on who you ask, the electric, internet-connected scooters appearing all over California are either the future of transportation or a public nuisance on par with a biblical plague. Over the past few weeks, scooters primarily from three startups—Bird, LimeBike, and Spin—have flooded the streets of greater Los Angeles and San Francisco. The companies, which have collectively raised $255 million ...

Electric buses were seen as a joke at an industry conference in Belgium seven years ago when the Chinese manufacturer BYD Co. showed an early model. “Everyone was laughing at BYD for making a toy,” recalled Isbrand Ho, the Shenzhen-based company’s managing director in Europe. “And look now. Everyone has one.” Suddenly, buses with battery-powered motors are a serious matter with the potential to revolutionize city transport—and add to the forces reshaping the energy industry. With ...

Imperial College researchers and others are envisaging a future of trains powered by photovoltaic energy Running electric railways directly from sunlight may be a cost-effective way of expanding both photovoltaic energy generation and railway electrification in the UK and around the world, according to a report from Imperial College. Originally triggered by a movement that sprang from an anti-fracking protest, the idea led to a feasibility study and may end up in pilot projects. The report, ...

Amtrak’s Gateway project, spending $30 billion on new tunnels from New Jersey to Penn Station, just got its federal funding yanked. Previously the agreement was to split funding as 25% New York, 25% New Jersey, 50% federal; the states had committed to $5.5 billion, which with a federal match would build the bare tunnels but not some of the ancillary infrastructure (some useful, some not). When Chris Christie canceled ARC in 2010, then estimated at $10-13 billion, I cheered. I linked to a ...

Welcome to Reconnections’ Friday Reads. This week’s list: • How accessible are London’s new electric black cabs (DisabilityHorizons) • LTM Acton Depot celebrating Capital Design this weekend (TransportDesigned) • Why doesn’t the UK have more trams? (Wired) • Toronto subway font’s London roots (Globe&Mail) • Why New York City stopped building subways (CityLab) • Better Transit Hub: reopening Seattle’s Union Station (TheUrbanist) • How to ...

The Netherlands is a place where climate change hits close to home. When you’re already below sea level, the prospect that the sea might start rising becomes disastrous. So when a historic causeway needed renovations to combat the rising water, the Dutch found an elegant lighting solution that simultaneously fights energy consumption and light pollution by lighting up only when cars are driving past — no electricity required. Basically all of Holland is an engineering marvel. It takes a ...

On April 5 Development Minister Íñigo de la Serna unveiled a 2018-25 investment plan for Madrid’s Cercanías suburban network, the result of a year-long study by the Ministry of Development, infrastructure authority ADIF and train operator RENFE. To improve reliability and service quality, the plan has an investment budget of €5∙09bn, of which €2∙27bn is to be spent by ADIF and €2∙82bn by RENFE. In the short term, €580m is to be spent on a series of urgent measures in 2018-19, ...

Singapore will start installing smart lampposts in the near future which boast an array of sensors and cameras that will allow authorities to recognise individual faces in a crowd. But the plan is raising privacy fears among security experts and rights groups. The government said the system would allow it to “perform crowd analytics” and support anti-terror operations. The ‘Lamppost-as-a-Platform’ (LaaP) pilot project is scheduled to begin next year and will see upgrades to lighting ...

City studying ways to get more New Yorkers on commuter rail lines The city’s Department of Transportation is studying ways to get more New Yorkers to use commuter rail lines and take pressure off of the beleaguered subway system, public documents show. The department has tapped engineering firm AECOM to look at potential changes that would boost ridership on Long Island Rail Road and Metro North lines running within the five boroughs. Reducing fares within city limits, for example, would ...

Welcome to Reconnections’ Friday Reads. This week’s curated lineup: • Underground landscapes (Timo Stammberger) • Subway map complexity ranked by physicists (CityLab) • Boston proposes subway connection as HQ2 corporate welfare (NextCity) • End to bar carts on LIRR platforms (NYPost) • Signs to slow drivers removed after complaints they slow drivers (TreeHugger) • The 19th Century global railway (CityLab) • Vancouver adds double decker buses to transit fleet (CBC) • ...

Germany’s state-owned railway company, Deutsche Bahn, promises to transform public transportation (but more importantly the morning commute) with their 1:1 model of a future train concept ‘ideenzug’ (translation: idea train). The concept, which was presented to the public in Nuremberg last week, hopes to be a future rival in the rise of autonomous cars. For fitness obsessed passengers the train has coaches filled with gym equipment and for lazier travellers – or perhaps just busier? – ...

The Rail Safety and Standars Board (RSSB) has awarded a 12-month research contract to City University of London and Risk Solutions, to investigate the causes of knock-on train delays. The contract, which includes a partnership with Great Western Railway (GWR), will require the partners to assess the causes and consequences of knock-on delays and accordingly identify possible ways to tackle them and improve rail services for passengers. The primary delay in service has remained stable over the ...

A surge in the use of electric bicycles throughout the United States is prompting cities to revise regulations that restrict their use, including bans against riding them on sidewalks and trails. The nation’s capital and other Washington-area jurisdictions are among those taking steps to modernize and streamline policies advocates say are outdated, set unrealistic restrictions and confuse riders of bikes that can be run on electric power as well as by pedaling. “The number of bicyclists in ...

The second Thursday of the month brings with it our meetup, which happens next on 12th April from 6pm. As always, these are informal affairs where the beer flows, offering an opportunity to put faces to the names of a few LR writers as well as regular commentators. All are welcome, and conversation is often as much general as it is transport-specific. Location news:After last month’s annoying mixup, we have confirmed that we will be upstairs in the private room for this month’s ...

Clock-face schedules, frequent off-peak service, timed transfers are key to maximizing use of rail infrastructure “Would you put BART in the category of Berlin’s S-Bahn, or New York’s Long Island Railroad, or LA’s Metrolink, or LA Metro, the NY subway, the Paris Métro, the Washington Metro?” asked Alon Levy, transport guru, analyst of transit systems around the world, blogger and Streetsblog contributor, at the ‘Beyond Commuter Rail’ talk yesterday evening at Remix in San ...