Transportation

Zero Emission and Autonomous Shipping to Start in Norway

- Adam Clare

Norway will soon see a fully autonomous ship navigating its waters. A resource company in the country presently uses trucks to transport fertilizer from one port to another, the new ship will replace 40,000 of these diesel truck journeys. The ship is battery powered meaning that it will be zero emission if electricity comes from a renewable resource. The autonomous aspect of the ship means it can run at anytime while improving transportation safety by not needing trucks to go through normal streets. Autonomous technology is already used in the shipping industry to move containers around in port, so it’s only logical that more of the shipping industry operates independently.

“As a leading global fertilizer company with a mission to feed the world and protect the planet, investing in this zero emission vessel to transport our crop nutrition solutions fits our strategy well. We are proud to work with KONGSBERG to realize the world’s first autonomous, all-electric vessel to enter commercial operation,” says Svein Tore Holsether, President and CEO of YARA.

“Every day, more than 100 diesel truck journeys are needed to transport products from YARA’s Porsgrunn plant to ports in Brevik and Larvik where we ship products to customers around the world. With this new autonomous battery-driven container vessel we move transport from road to sea and thereby reduce noise and dust emissions, improve the safety of local roads, and reduce NOx and CO2 emissions,” says Holsether.

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An App That Rewards You for Riding a Bike

- Adam Clare

Bicycle

Biko rewards cyclists with free stuff just for riding their bike! Rewards include small things like coffee to very expensive consumer items. The idea of rewarding cyclist for not killing the environment using cars isn’t new, Stockholm basically pays cyclists. When it comes to using Biko please consider that they collect marketing data from your mobile (contacts, location, and anything else that can track you). It’s just good to see that more and more people consider rewarding cyclists to be a good thing.

Biko, a free mobile app that launched in Bogota, Colombia, in 2015, has launched in Toronto today (May 10). The app tracks a user’s movements through GPS to earn digital rewards, which can be traded in for actual rewards such as discounts and freebies from local businesses. For every kilometre travelled, users earn one Biko point.

“Incentivizing cycling through rewards can help reduce Toronto’s carbon emissions, and we have the data to prove it,” says Emilio Pombo, the cofounder of Biko. “Our users have collectively reduced carbon emissions by 2,608 tonnes globally.”

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Big Brains Encouraging Bringing Bicycles into the Mainstream

- Adam Clare

Bicycle

Bicycling is a fun and healthy way to get around town, but some people still aren’t convinced that bicycling is a solid transportation solution. Outside magazine asked some rather smart people who love bicycling what would make bicycling more attractive for cities. Some answers are neat and others are very practical. I suggest you get out there and ride!

6. Solicit Public Input
Brian Wiedenmeier, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition

Pilot projects can help us learn about how treatments are applied, and we should solicit feedback from people walking, driving, and biking in and around new infrastructure. This spirit informed the design and construction of San Francisco’s first physically protected intersection at Division and Ninth Streets. Popular in Europe’s most bike-friendly cities and increasingly seen in progressive U.S. cities, protected intersections take the chaos out of crossing the street. With physical barriers and wider turns for drivers, these protected intersections reduce speeds, calm traffic, and offer bicyclists and pedestrians a clear, protected route through the intersection.

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Lower Your Risk of Cancer and Heart Disease by Cycling to Work

- Adam Clare

Bicycle

We all know that encouraging bicycles as daily transportation is good for cities, economies, and traffic flow. Cycling is really good for you too and the evidence that you should bike more is more prevalent than ever. The most recent contribution to why riding a bike to work is good for you comes from Glasgow. Researchers there found that over the course of five years people who biked regularly had lower instances of cancer and heart disease!

But, during the course of the study, regular cycling cut the risk of death from any cause by 41%, the incidence of cancer by 45% and heart disease by 46%.
The cyclists clocked an average of 30 miles per week, but the further they cycled the greater the health boon.
Walking cut the odds of developing heart disease but the benefit was mostly for people walking more than six miles per week.
“This is really clear evidence that people who commute in an active way, particularly by cycling, were at lower risk,” Dr Jason Gill, from the University of Glasgow, told the BBC News website.

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Stopping Free Parking from Strangling Society

- Adam Clare

small car

Urban planners spend the last hundred years modifying cities and policies to cater to the car – and that’s been harming us ever since. We’ve looked at how changing parking culture can save America’s economy, cities, increase transportation efficiency, and removing spaces can even make parking easier. Slowly, we are seeing change happening around the world. San Francisco, London, and Buffalo have removed their minimum parking spaces rules. Mexico City is switching their parking laws for new buildings from minimum required parking spaces to a maximum.

Municipal governments are learning that cities are for people and not for cars standing still. It’s time to end free parking and the assumption that the first mode of transportation cities should plan for is cars.

Water companies are not obliged to supply all the water that people would use if it were free, nor are power companies expected to provide all the free electricity that customers might want. But many cities try to provide enough spaces to meet the demand for free parking, even at peak times. Some base their parking minimums on the “Parking Generation Handbook”, a tome produced by the Institute of Transportation Engineers. This reports how many cars are found in the free car parks of synagogues, waterslide parks and so on when they are busiest.

The harm caused begins with the obvious fact that parking takes up a lot of room. A typical space is 12-15 square metres; add the necessary access lanes and the space per car roughly doubles. For comparison, this summer The Economist will move into a building in central London where it is assumed each employee will have ten square metres of space. In cities, such as Kansas City (see map), where land is cheap, and surface parking the norm, central areas resemble asphalt oceans dotted with buildings.
…
Once you become accustomed to the idea that city streets are only for driving and walking, and not for parking, it is difficult to imagine how it could possibly be otherwise. Mr Kondoh is so perplexed by an account of a British suburb, with its kerbside commons, that he asks for a diagram. Your correspondent tries to draw his own street, with large rectangles for houses, a line representing the kerb and small rectangles showing all the parked cars. The small rectangles take up a surprising amount of room.

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