Category: Transportation

Chicago Wants to be a World Class Bicycle City

Chicago politicians understand that people in their city commute sustainably via bicycles and that this is a great component to their transit planning. What’s more is that by building proper infrastructure for cyclists they can draw people to the city and show the world what the future looks like – again. Over at Roads Were Not Built For Cars they provide a very interesting historical perspective on the bicycle in Chicago and how it relates to cities today.

“Bicycling is an integral part of Chicago’s transportation system. Every day, thousands of people bike on our streets, whether it is to ride to work, to the store, or for recreation…My vision is to make Chicago the most bike-friendly city in the United States…Over the next few years, we will build more protected bike lanes than any other city in the country, redesign intersections to ensure they are safer for bicyclists, and improve hundreds of miles of residential streets for bicyclists, pedestrians, and the people that live on them.”

Read the full article.

Cameras Capture How Safely Cyclists Cruise

It’s clear that car drivers don’t comprehend cyclists, and often I hear drivers complain that bicyclists aren’t safe and tend to be “dangerous” on the road. It turns out that cyclists are safer than cars, cause way fewer collisions, and are amazingly great at avoiding a collision.

To reach this conclusion that bicyclists are safe riders researchers used cameras mounted on bicycles (and riders) accompanied by other observations.

In total, 127 hours and 38 minutes of usable footage was obtained. 54 ‘events’ were captured on film – two collisions, six near-collisions (where rapid evasive action by the cyclist was needed) and 46 other incidents (where some collision avoidance was required).

The cameras also recorded the road position and behaviour of the cyclists – including head checks, reactions and manoeuvres. The aim was to identify risk factors for both cyclists and motorists.

In 88.9% of cases, the cyclist had been travelling in a safe/legal manner prior to the collision/near miss.

Read more at BikeRadar.

So car drivers please remember to share the road and be conscious of what’s around you.

A Proposal to Label Gas Nozzles

warning
The overwhelming majority of personal cars use planet-killing, people-damaging, production-intesnive engines that consume a product that literally kills us. Most everyone understands this at some level, but it seems they don’t connect their fuel consumption with world hunger, polar bears dying, or even smog. A new organization in Toronto wants to change that.

Our Horizon wants to label gas nozzles at gas stations the same way that cigarette packages are labelled to warn users of potential harm.

“Imagine if we see these labels every time, how long will it be before we demand more from government institutions,” said Shirkey.
Canada led the world when it placed health warnings accompanied by images on cigarette packages, and Shirkey said that he hopes Canada can once again be a pioneer.
…
“If you’re concerned with helping people but not the environment, it’s like putting a bandage on someone sitting in a boat that has a giant hole in the bottom,” Neville said. “We’re all dependent and addicted to fossil fuels.”

Read more.

A Better Truck for Safer Driving

Trucks kill a lot a cyclists and that’s a problem. We’ve looked at ways we can make trucks more efficient, now London Cycling Campaign has found ways to make trucks safer. They have modified the layout of a truck to allow the driver to see more of the road – in particular cyclists.

London Cycling Campaign haulage expert and former lorry driver Charlie Lloyd said:

“Our Safer Urban Lorry design is a challenge to the construction industry to use vehicles that help reduce the terrible number of people on bikes and on foot who are killed by lorries.

“The restricted view from the cab of many of today’s construction lorries means the driver often has little or no idea who or what is in their immediate vicinity, which is totally unacceptable

Read more at London Cycling Campaign.

A More Efficient Truck for Shipping


A new SuperTruck is a huge improvement over current long-haul trucks that ship tonnes of goods around North America. The USA’s Department of Energy wanted to make trucks 50% more efficient through various solutions, even a marginal increase can lower gas consumption and thus pass on savings to a consumer.

The demonstration SuperTruck made a whole swath of changes (as can be seen in the image above) to make their truck way better than existing fleets. All their changes add up to a 61% improvement in freight efficiency!

This was achieved without anything too exotic: The ‘SuperTruck’ uses a higher-efficiency engine and an aerodynamic tractor-trailer that significantly reduces drag combined with a waste heat recovery system, electronic controls that use route information to optimize fuel use, low-rolling resistance tires, and weight reductions all around.

Read more at TreeHugger.

Thanks to Matt!