Yesterday President Barack Obama announced a total of $13 billion in funding for ten high speed rail networks across the US and painted a picture of the future of transportation in America: (more…)
Last week, General Motors unvailed the Chevy Volt, gas-backup electric car. In the same week Bob Lutz, the Vice-Chairman of General Motors, recently appeared on ‘The Colbert Report’ and where he clearly stated:
I accept that planet is heated but I, like many noted scientists, don’t believe in the CO2 theory.
And one wonders how GM manages to keep its standing as the world’s most successful auto maker.
(at about 1:50 into the clip)
The venerable BBC has just begun an experiment to track a shipping container as receives and delivers goods around the world for a year.
Globally, shipping containers come in a certain number of standard sizes so that they can fit equally on trucks, trains, boats and planes. The British broadcaster hopes to visit the container as it makes various stops around the world in order to tell the individual stories interlinked by this single transportation item.
You can track the BBC Box here. You can bet that I look forward to calculating the carbon footprint of this trip.
CNN reports that Americans are drove billion fewer miles in May than they did in May ‘07.
With high gas prices and a slowing economy, Americans are now taking fewer trips by car and are starting to rely again on muscle power to get around.
If we assume that the average fuel efficiency for all vehicles is 23.1 miles per gallon, that translates to 4.3 million fewer (metric) tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s the equivalent of 2200 tonnes of coal not burned.
One of the best features on Google Maps is the ability to get directions from Point A to Point B. But as useful as it is when driving to a new city, it’s not nearly as functional if you’re trying to walk your way to a downtown lunch meeting in a maze of one-way streets.
Not any more! Google Maps recently released a beta service where they search out the best walking routes, ignoring one-way streets and even finding a route with as flat a topography as possible.
Driving:
Walking:
However, the service is not yet complete. From the Google Maps blog:
Walking directions work well for short trips in urban areas, but we don’t always know if a street has a sidewalk, or if there’s actually a special pedestrian bridge for crossing a busy street. There are still a lot of pedestrian pathways we don’t know about, and they might save you some time if you find them. We’re working on collecting new data on pedestrian pathways and on more effective ways to solicit your feedback, so that we can steadily improve this feature and get you where you need to be as efficiently as possible.
Little changes like this help us out of the mindset that The Car is the default mode of transportation. Good work to the folks at Google.