Interesting transportation things

[202_Cyclist]

Solar-Powered Electric Vehicles are Almost Ready to Hit the Road

By Rebecca Elliott
Nov. 7, 2021
Wall Street Journal


Aptera Motors is developing several versions of a two-seat, solar-powered vehicle that will travel 250 to 1,000 miles on a single charge, according to company simulations. This prototype is called the Luna.
PHOTO: JOHN FRANCIS PETERS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

https://www.wsj.com/articles/solar-p...le-11635259950

[Lariliss]

Originally Posted by M II A II R II K

Israeli all-electric plane maker readies for 1st flight, new ‘age of aviation’

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel...e-of-aviation/

That's beautiful and might be rather exclusive or expensive or not.
But air delivery started working even on a small regions scale with drones (I have UK examples).

[shivtim]

Atlanta Beltline awarded $16.5 million from USDOT to complete the southside trail.

Purple portion on this map:



This would link the already paved portions of the westside trail, eastside trail, and southwest trail, creating an approximately 10.7 mile continuous trail circling Atlanta:

source

[202_Cyclist]

Could Roads Recharge Electric Cars? The Technology May Be Close.
But challenges await, including technical issues, regulatory barriers and many miles of highway.

By Kerry Hannon
Nov. 29, 2021
New York Times


"Electric vehicles are getting a lot of buzz. Yet sales of electric vehicles, or EVs, are expected to amount to less than 4 percent of passenger vehicle sales in the United States in 2021.

One reason: the inability to easily recharge on long trips, known as range anxiety. And the concern is valid: Range, charging time and availability of charging stations all still have a long way to go.

EVs are getting a boost, though: They are prominently featured in a $7.5 billion initiative from the Biden Administration, signed by the president earlier this month, with the goal of building a nationwide network of a 500,000 high-speed electric vehicle charging stations by 2030. (Currently, there are about 43,000 charging stations, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.)”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/29/t...tic-roads.html

[202_Cyclist]

There are going to be a tremendous number of transportation innovations over the next 15 - 20 years. This is really exciting to see. It is also great this company is located in Burlington, Vermont. I suppose I won't fault Mr. Clark for playing hockey for Harvard and not the Catamounts.

Amazon And UPS Are Betting This Electric Aircraft Startup Will Change Shipping
Harvard grad and former pro hockey player Kyle Clark’s startup Beta is on the verge of bringing workhorse battery-powered cargo planes to America’s skies that can take off and land like helicopters.


Forbes
By Jeremy Bogaisky
Dec 16, 2021


"The electric aircraft Alia has about 200 cubic feet of interior space — around the same as a Cessna Grand Caravan — enough for three standard cargo pallets. At UPS' request, Beta, the startup behind it, is stretching the fuselage 15 inches so that a fourth will fit when autonomous flight is allowed and the pilot's seat is removed. Clark says it won’t take much to adapt Alia for passenger service: The same rails used to secure cargo can be fitted with five seats." AARON KOTOWSKI FOR FORBES

"When he played minor league hockey in the early 2000s, Kyle Clark says his teammates would spend the long bus rides talking about the drugs they’d taken last night and who’d brought a hooker into their hotel room. Clark, a bruising 6-foot-6 enforcer, would bury his nose in textbooks on how to build airplanes. Pretty nerdy – but he’d even stood out as an engineering egghead in the locker room at Harvard, where his teammates had nicknamed him Beta.

Clark never made the NHL, but 20 years later, his startup Beta Technologies is valued at a billion dollars and is on the cusp of making the major leagues with Alia, a potentially groundbreaking electric aircraft.

Alia, whose gracefully angled 50-foot wingspan Clark says was inspired by the long-flying Arctic tern, is one of a slew of novel electric aircraft that aviation upstarts are building that take off and land vertically like a helicopter. Virtually all of Beta’s competitors, including billionaire Larry Page’s Kitty Hawk and the SPAC cash-rich Joby Aviation, aim to transport people, enabling urbanites to hopscotch over traffic-snarled city streets. But Clark designed Alia primarily as a cargo aircraft, betting that a big market will develop for speeding ecommerce to and from suburban warehouses long before air taxis are considered safe to allow over city streets..."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremyb...h=cb3f2072c24f

[M II A II R II K]

Giant Kite Will Pull a Ship Across the Ocean Next Month

https://gizmodo.com/giant-kite-will-...nth-1848233992

…..

- Starting in January, a huge boat will attach itself to an enormous kite in a first-of-its-kind test to try and alleviate harmful carbon emissions from toting stuff to and fro across the high seas. — About 80% of all the world’s goods are transported on around 50,000 ships, which use a particularly dirty fuel known as “bunker fuel.” It’s estimated that this cheap fuel is responsible for more than 2% of global carbon emissions, and between 10% to 15% of the world’s sulfur oxide and nitrous oxide emissions, both major public health menaces.

- Enter the humble kite. The parafoil kite that will be used is made by a company called Airseas. It measures around 5,380 square feet (500 square meters) and will be attached to a ship 505 feet (154 meters) in length called the Ville de Bordeaux. The ship is a “roll on/roll off” vessel, which refers to the fact that these ships usually carry wheeled cargo. (The shorthand term for this type of ship is, incredibly, a “Ro-Ro.”) This particular boat carries airplane parts between France and the U.S. The ship will test out the sail—er, sorry, kite—technology for six months before being used for its regular route.

…..

[mrnyc]

london to charge pay per mile for cars to get more people on public transit:


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...e-charges.html

[M II A II R II K]

Sinking 1,000 NYC subway cars in the Atlantic to create a reef didn’t go as planned

https://tribunecontentagency.com/art...go-as-planned/

…..

- The Brightliners were predicted to last underwater for more than 25 years, but they started to disintegrate only months after they were dropped. — The MTA had good reason to believe the program would succeed. Just a few years prior, it had dropped more than 1,000 Redbird trains in the ocean. They remain on the ocean floor to this day, in part because they were made of carbon steel, which helps prevent corrosion. By comparison, Brightliners were made of stainless steel.

…..

[Busy Bee]

I'm really disappointed the MTA isn't keeping one full train of R-32 cars. They could do fan trips with it, and being what is likely, and in my opinion, the finest cars ever run on the system, more than worthy of saving. I can't understand for the life of me why NYCT can't find a place to store them out of the weather. Hell, put them in the tunnel on the Dyre line where that employee hid the Lo-V's back in the day.

[M II A II R II K]

[M II A II R II K]

The world’s first "Infinity Train" can recharge itself. With gravity?

https://interestingengineering.com/i...charge-gravity

…..

- In what's been hailed as a world-first development, the train will use the gravitational energy created on the downhill loaded sections of the iron or giant’s rail network to recharge its battery power systems, eliminating the need for additional charging on the return trip to reload.

…..

[Busy Bee]

Of course the concept of energy generation from gravity driven inertia isn't new, it's just that battery technology for the first time is making is possible and practical.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by Busy Bee

Of course the concept of energy generation from gravity driven inertia isn't new, it's just that battery technology for the first time is making is possible and practical.

Yeah not really any different than regenerative braking in other vehicle including existing battery trains from what I can tell except this train would be using the regenerative braking to avoid exceeding a desirable speed rather than to stop.

[mhays]

Sea-Tac Airport had a big day today -- the ceremonial (pre)opening of its new International Arrivals Facility.

The old facility is a bottleneck, limited to 1,200 inbound passengers per hour at customs, in a cramped, inefficient facility. International-capable gates were limited to the South Satellite terminal. This became a big problem as traffic surged from about 1,200,000 inbound international passengers per year in 2010 or so to 2,869,935 in 2019. Airlines were hitting the upper limit.

The new facility includes a bridge from the South Satellite to the new entry hall alongside Concourse A, plus sterile corridors from several of the A gates so they can serve international routes. The arrival hall is huge, at 450,000 sf. Here's a tour and here's the Port of Seattle project page.

My question is how much airlines will shift to Sea-Tac as an international hub. We did 5,727,899 combined international passengers in 2019. Will that edge up slowly, or really take off? Signs suggest a real surge. We're way behind San Francisco, Vancouver, and others. But will we gain some ground? Will the 5.7m turn into 7, 8, or more?

Here are international destinations for Summer 2022 -- six in East/Southeast Asia, two on the Arabian peninsula, seven in Canada, six in Mexico or Central America, and seven in Europe, totaling I believe 43 flights per day. Some like Beijing and Bangalore are still out of commission since Covid.

[mrnyc]

why? whhyyy?




Pocket worthy

Stories to fuel your mind


Why Did America Give Up on Mass Transit? (Don't Blame Cars.)


Streetcar, bus, and metro systems have been ignoring one lesson for 100 years: Service drives demand.


CityLab
Jonathan English



One hundred years ago, the United States had a public transportation system that was the envy of the world.


Today, outside a few major urban centers, it is barely on life support.


Even in New York City, subway ridership is well below its 1946 peak.


Annual per capita transit trips in the U.S. plummeted from 115.8 in 1950 to 36.1 in 1970, where they have roughly remained since, even as population has grown.


This has not happened in much of the rest of the world.



more:

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/w...=pocket-newtab



WMATA/Shutterstock/Madison McVeigh/CityLab

[jtown,man]

Originally Posted by shivtim

Atlanta Beltline awarded $16.5 million from USDOT to complete the southside trail.

Atlanta was so smart to start the trail.

[202_Cyclist]

Starbucks wants to become the gas station of the future for EVs
With 15,000 locations across the U.S., the coffee chain is betting it can convince electric vehicle owners that it’s the perfect place to charge up. (Literally!)


By Adele Peters
Fast Company
March 15, 2024


Image courtesy of Fast Company.

"By 2030, there could be 26 million electric cars in the U.S., which means we’ll need more than 10 times as many EV chargers. Starbucks, with its 15,000 locations across the country, thinks that it could help fill part of the gap.

In a pilot this year, the company is partnering with Volvo and Chargepoint to install EV chargers in its parking lots along a 1,350-mile route from Denver to Seattle, with stops available roughly every 100 miles. “It’s one of those charging deserts, so to speak,” says Michael Kobori, chief sustainability officer at Starbucks. “There aren’t too many charging stations available there.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/90730929...future-for-evs

[202_Cyclist]

Amazon, Alphabet and Others Are Quietly Rolling Out Drone Delivery Across America
Drone companies have been cleared to expand their operations across the U.S., in cities as well as rural areas, at the same time their tech has become faster and more reliable

By Christopher Mims
Wall Street Journal
Apr 4., 2022

"Delivery drones are arriving, at last.

After nearly a decade of largely unfulfilled hype about flying robots dropping orders at your doorstep, a handful of companies have started commercial operations in the U.S. involving dozens or hundreds of deliveries a day at each location. The companies are vying to be Americans’ choice when they want a bottle of Advil, a takeout meal, or the next iPhone delivered in under 30 minutes—once federal regulators enable broader rollouts.

Zipline recently started working on deliveries with Walmart at an Arkansas location, the San Francisco startup’s first commercial delivery station in the U.S. Flytrex, an Israeli startup focused on food delivery in the U.S. suburbs, just announced a new delivery station in Texas after two years of testing in North Carolina. Wing, a unit of Google parentAlphabet, has rapidly increased its deliveries in Virginia as a result of the pandemic. Amazon. com, which kicked off the drone delivery buzz in 2013, also is still working on the technology, though it has been more reticent about its progress..."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-...ca-11648872022

[M II A II R II K]

Bus rapid transit improves property values, study says

https://news.osu.edu/bus-rapid-trans...es-study-says/

.....

- A new study reveals that while few cities in the U.S. have high-quality bus rapid transit systems, those that do see benefits to nearby property values. Researchers investigated the impact of bus rapid transit (or BRT) systems on property values near 11 BRT systems in 10 U.S. cities, noting previous research found that traditional bus services generally have a minor negative impact on nearby land values and apartment rent prices. While BRT didn’t have a negative impact in most of the cities studied, it did improve multi-family property values in some cities such as Cleveland, which may be a model that some other cities can follow, said Blake Acton, who led the study as a graduate student at The Ohio State University.

- “What we saw in Cleveland is something that's new and desirable, and people really want to live near the BRT system there,” Acton said. “That demonstrates that it's possible to build premium BRT infrastructure and stimulate transit-oriented development in the United States.” --- “Our results show that locations near BRT systems in congested, growing cities with high transit ridership can see property value increases,” said study co-author Harvey Miller, professor of geography and director of the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis at Ohio State. "But high quality BRT can have positive impacts in more cities.” --- However, most BRT systems in the United States lack key features – most importantly, dedicated bus lanes – and often are often referred to as “BRT-lite.” In contrast, high-quality full BRT systems include dedicated lanes.

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[M II A II R II K]

Can ‘Buses-As-Flights’ Get Americans Out of Cars — And Planes?

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/04/...rs-and-planes/

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- U.S. airlines are beginning to contract with bus companies to run on-the-ground “flights” between nearby cities and advocates are suggesting that the intercity bus should no longer be ignored in the conversation about curbing car and plane dependency. — Tickets for those so-called “buses-as-flights” will be sold exactly as if they were connecting flights, through sites like Kayak and airlines’ own websites, and passengers and their luggage will be ferried directly from their homes to the airport or, in some cases, directly from terminal to terminal on buses branded to resemble American’s off-the-ground fleet.

.....