Transportation

Riding the Green Wave in San Francisco

- Dan Harrison 2 Comments

For the past two years, Valencia Street in San Francisco has been experimenting with a system called “The Green Wave.” By programming the timing of traffic signals, the city of San Francisco has made it possible to ride a bicycle at a steady 13 mph (~21 km/hr) without hitting a single red light. This effectively eliminates the tiresome stopping and starting for cyclists, thus making biking even more efficient! It was recently announced that the pilot project will now become a permanent feature of Valencia Street.

Although the concept of optimizing signal timing for cyclists isn’t new, the programme in San Francisco has made some improvements that make it even better than similar systems in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Portland.

San Francisco’s Green Wave is already unique because it is the first in the world to work two ways simultaneously, something Mayor Newsom calls “another example of our leadership in providing quality cycling improvements for this community.”

“Those who bike in San Francisco have seen their rides become safer and more efficient. Our continued commitment is to further the progress made and further establish San Francisco as a champion for providing multiple modes of transportation,” said Newsom.

Read more at Streetblog.org, and check out their information on cycling in cities around the US.

New Speed Record for Electric Airplanes

- Adam Clare

Electric airplanes are still rare but hopefully this will change sooner rather than later. Airplane fuel is super-dangerous for our friendly environment so if we can get planes to run off of batteries (electricity of course coming from wind or the like) than score a million for the good guys!

Cri-Cri is a small aircraft that just broke the electric plane speed record with ease and could herald the development of personal aircraft being electric!

According to Electravia, the firm who designed the Cri-Cri’s 35-horsepower motors and custom propellers, the plane was only using 75% of its total power when it broke the speed record. The engineering firm said that its engines and propellers could have taken the plane to speeds over 220 mph, however such velocity would have put serious stress on the Cri-Cri’s airframe so only 75% power was used.

Read more: The Cri-Cri Breaks the Electric Aircraft Speed Record

Good News on Airplane Accidents

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Many people have a fear of flying, yet, those same people have no fear about getting into something that is far more likely to kill them: their car. The CBC has an article that points out how safe flying is despite people’s exaggerated fears.

There have been countless in-flight incidents that that could’ve ended disastrously, but were resolved without loss of life. Here’s a look at a few of them.

Jan. 15, 2009: A U.S. Airways Airbus A320 loses power to both engines shortly after taking off from New York’s La Guardia airport when it strikes a flock of geese. Capt. Chesley Sullenberger is able to guide the crippled aircraft to a safe landing on the Hudson River, where rescue boats and ferries plucked the 155 passengers and crew from lifeboats and the plane’s wings before it sank in the frigid waters. There were no serious injuries.

August 24, 2001: An Air Transat A330-200 glides to an emergency landing in the Azores after a fuel leak shut down both engines. The plane, which was on a flight from Toronto to Lisbon, glided for about 20 minutes after running out of fuel. The plane made a hard landing, damaging the landing gear, but came to a stop on the runway. None of the 291 passengers or 13 crew members were killed, although several suffered serious injuries, including fractures and shock. A Portuguese investigation cited faulty maintenance and noted the pilots failed to detect the fuel leak.

Read more

Yes, I know that flying is horrible for the atmosphere but hey, here’s some good news on how safe planes are!

Solar Energy to Power Trains

- Adam Clare

Trains are a great transit solution and are efficient at moving people and goods. Trains are really a green way to travel.

In Belgium, they are taking this green form of travelling and making it even better by powering the trains using solar power.

More than 16,000 solar panels will be installed on the roof of the high-speed rail tunnel stretching just over 2 miles long. The tunnel is primarily used by the high-speed train connecting Amsterdam and Paris via Brussels.

The roof’s total surface area is 50,000 m2, roughly equivalent to 8 football fields. The installation should generate an estimated 3.3 MWh of electricity per year.

The installation commenced this summer on the tunnel’s northern side. Project completion is scheduled for December 2010. The total investment budget is $20.1 million.

Infrabel, the Belgian railway infrastructure manager, will use the green energy in the Antwerp North-South junction (including Antwerp Central Station) and to power both conventional and high-speed trains running on the Amsterdam-Brussels-Paris line. With this project Infrabel has re-emphasized its belief in renewable energy as a viable alternative, and complement, to conventional energy sources.

Read the full press release.

Build a City by Limiting Parking

- Adam Clare

Parking spaces for automobiles take away precious land from other uses and too many parking spaces can effectively kill a community. In Boston where they do anything to ensure cars reign supreme urban planners are turning their backs on providing parking spaces in order to revitalize the city.

The pro-car attitude is very 20th century and it’s good to see that more and more cities in North America are finding ways to ensure people can use the city as more than a place to drive and work.

City planners are in the middle of an extensive re-thinking of Boston’s zoning codes. As they work, neighborhood by neighborhood, to update the code, they’re flipping the conventional thinking about parking on its head: Instead of mandating that minimum levels of parking accompany new developments, they’re pushing to establish maximum parking caps.

Minimum parking requirements are relics of a time when urban vitality depended on developers’ ability to draw suburbanites into the city to work, shop, or live. As the suburbs boomed, cities imported suburban-style infrastructure and grafted it onto a decaying urban fabric. The result wasn’t just a landscape scarred by highways and pockmarked by monolithic concrete parking garages; this postwar shift also left reams of zoning code built on the assumption that the world revolved around the automobile.

Patterns of living, and travel, have evolved. Residents now work and shop in closer proximity to their homes. The city is no longer at the automobile’s mercy. But zoning hasn’t caught up to this new reality. Until now.

Environmental officials imposed flat parking caps downtown during the 1970s, but this new approach is surgical. The old parking cap made wide allowances for automobiles at residential developments. City planners are now arguing that residential developments should be given less leeway, not more, since many urban residents don’t need a car to get to work. That’s true in the Back Bay and downtown, and especially along the waterfront, where the BRA is trying to create a critical mass of technology and innovation firms by pushing small business incubators and cheap live-work space.

Developers aren’t huge fans of large parking requirements for urban apartment buildings, since parking garages are expensive to construct. Often, the cost of building parking spaces can make or break a project. Developers are also finding that renters aren’t demanding as many parking spots as they used to. Archstone’s Chinatown tower, for example, was built with a glut of excess parking; the last two residential towers to enter permitting in that neighborhood have been designed with dramatically lower quantities of parking. And the envelope can be pushed even further.

Read the rest at the Boston Globe.

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