Welcome to Reconnections’ Friday Reads. This week’s lineup: • Atmospheric Underground photos (TubeMapper) • Glasgow considering congestion charging (AirQualityNews) • Paris Mayor floats free transit for all (NextCity) • Data shows how often cars block bus & bike lanes (FastCompany) • How a few US cities are growing transit ridership (StreetsBlog) • Ghost of old L branch haunts Obama Library (Chicago Tribune) • US Parking Madness tournament (StreetsBlog) • Amazon ...

More and more people travel by train in Germany. How can we combine machine learning and visual analytics methods to help manage the passenger loads? Peak Spotting provides yield and capacity managers with rich visual tools to identify potential bottlenecks early on and react through price management, communications or logistic solutions. Based on passenger load predictions from neural nets and random forest models, the web application integrates millions of datapoints over 100 days into the ...

An agreement to co-operate to develop ‘smart’ sleepers containing real-time data collection sensors has been signed by Italian start-up company Greenrail and Spanish technology provider Indra. The companies are to work together to study the technical and economic viability of the concept, which would integrate Indra’s technology with Greenrail’s sleepers. These combine a prestressed concrete core with an external casing made from recycled rubber and plastic. Continue reading…

Discussed at length in specialist magazines… and increasingly in the popular press, it is transport’s latest buzzphrase. And with promises of a seamless choice of mobility across all modes of transport, in just one place, it is a very tempting offer. But one nagging question keeps coming up when people keep talking about it. How on Earth will anyone make any money out of it? This is for one very simple fact: it is very difficult to make any money out of transport. In a time when it is ...

Many major cities around the world are seeing rapid population growth, resulting in increased strain on existing road and public transportation network infrastructure as the numbers on the daily commute swell. Smart mobility – putting data, information, and options in the hands of the travelling public – has been beneficial to many of these cities, allowing better use of fixed resources and more efficient movement around the urban space. Opening up live and static datasets for public ...

Smartphone technology is being used on the Melbourne rail network in a way not yet seen anywhere else in the world to measure passenger traffic and send messages direct to phones in a bid to improve safety at stations. When complete, the system which is currently undergoing testing will be able to interact with smartphone handsets by using proximity technologies to collect data from and push information to handsets. The company behind the system, YPB Systems, is working with Mebourne’s Monash ...

Strava built a popular social network for millions of runners and cyclists. But more than 100 cities and states are quietly working with the app, too. Every 40 days, a million people join Strava. It’s a staggering number for a niche social network aimed at athletes– but then again, Strava came along at the right time. The company, which was founded in 2009, has grown up alongside a groundswell of new cyclists and walkers in communities around the U.S. By some counts, commuting by bike has ...

“To help close the gap between public transit and your doorstep, we’re teaming up with Amtrak,” announced Lyft, Uber’s largest competitor, earlier this month. The partnership will allow Americans to ditch their cars and let the sharing economy deliver them seamlessly to and from the train station. Compelling, right? For urban policymakers, maybe not. Public-private partnerships (we can debate whether Amtrak is public or private later, rail nerds) seek to solve the first/last mile ...

Uber’s lifting the veil – just a little – to provide data on urban transportation performance. Uber’s new Movement tool provides valuable new source of data about travel times in urban environments. We’ve gotten an early look at Movement, and think its something that you’ll want to investigate, if you’re interested in urban transportation. Uber likes to bill itself as a technology company, rather than a transportation company: technically, it’s the independent driver-owners of ...

London Underground Wifi Tracking: Here’s Everything We Learned From TfL’s Official Report Earlier this year, Gizmodo UK scored ourselves a scoop, as we exclusively revealed some of the findings from last year’s wifi tracking trial, in which Transport for London analysed wifi data picked up from our phones as we travel on the London Underground – and was able to track our movements across the tube network. Many months on and TfL has decided to share more details on what it ...

In 2016, there were 13,622 traffic collisions in Seattle resulting in 3,885 injuries, 166 serious injuries and 23 fatalities. The cost of all that property damage, injury and loss of human life: $222,827,800. Those stats come from a new data visualization tool that illustrates a decade of Seattle Department of Transportation crash data and uses National Safety Council standards to put a price on all that tragedy. Seattle-based web designer Tim Ganter worked with the advocates at Seattle ...

“The recent attacks on computer networks at health locations in Britain, Russia’s interior ministry, the Spanish telecom giant Telefonica and the US delivery firm FedEx, as well as organisations in Sweden, Germany and around the world has once again raised the issue of cyber security. “Railway control and information systems are becoming more connected, and are therefore exposed to cyber-attacks. In other industries, businesses attacks on critical infrastructures have emerged as ...

As anyone looking to properly understand London’s transport needs and network knows, context, background and best-practice are important. As readers might imagine, behind the scenes here at LR Towers we thus spend a lot of time sharing links and reading around the subjects we cover here. We also occasionally share links containing good information about transport topics that we know we just don’t have time to cover. We also all, as authors, occasionally write elsewhere on this or ...