Category: Transportation

NYC Copies Bogota

This August Manhattan will experience something that Bogota already does on a regular basis – main streets being turned into pedestrian and bike lanes. I like it when municipalities respect forms of transportation that don’t pollute.

“We anticipate that hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers and visitors will take advantage of streets temporarily opened for recreation,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “We hope the Summer Streets experiment will become as much a part of the New York experience as strolling the Coney Island boardwalk, participating in the 5-borough bike tour, or listening to the Philharmonic in the park.

Algae Goo FTW

*FTW = For The Win

Algae, the best goo on the planet, continues to capture the minds of people who want to transition away from oil. Entering the fray recently is a company from San Diego that promises to make algae a replacement for diesel.

A San Diego company said Wednesday that it could turn algae into oil, producing a green-colored crude yielding ultra-clean versions of gasoline and diesel without the downsides of biofuel production.

The year-old company, called Sapphire Energy, uses algae, sunlight, carbon dioxide and non-potable water to make “green crude” that it contends is chemically equivalent to the light, sweet crude oil that has been fetching more than $130 a barrel in New York futures trading.

Chief Executive Jason Pyle said that the company’s green crude could be processed in existing oil refineries and that the resulting fuels could power existing cars and trucks just as today’s more polluting versions of gasoline and diesel do.

“What we’re talking about is something that is radically different,” Pyle said. “We really look at this as a paradigm change.”

Bus + Train = Burain

Train companies use maintenance vehicles that can switch from road to rails, however, this is the first time I’ve seen bus do this. Japan Rail is testing the bus-train combo on the island of Hokkaido. The system seems to work because the mass transit there is not mass at all.

Dual-mode vehicles have four rubber tires for road use and four steel wheels for the rails, and it takes less than 15 seconds to go from road to rail and back again. It drives just like a bus on the road, and a hydraulic system raises the tires and lowers the steel wheels as the driver guides the vehicle onto the tracks.
Japan Rail provides rail service for the island of Hokkaido, and about one-third of its lines carry less than 500 people. It developed the dual-mode vehicles as a means of cutting costs on those lines without reducing service. The vehicles use a Toyota microbus body and axles built by Hino. The two companies will help Japan Rail refine the technology and increase passenger capacity with an eye toward commercial production.

Bike Sharing Starts in the USA

Bicycle sharing has been around in most of the world for quite some time, now it is hitting the land of the automobile. The program is going to start in Washington DC. The symbolism here cannot be ignored.

A new public-private venture called SmartBike DC will make 120 bicycles available at 10 spots in central locations in the city. The automated program, which district officials say is the first of its kind in the nation, will operate in a similar fashion to car-sharing programs like Zipcar.

The district has teamed up with an advertiser, Clear Channel Outdoor, to put the bikes on the streets.

“There’s a lot of stress on our transit systems currently,” said Jim Sebastian, who manages bicycle and pedestrian programs for Washington’s Transportation Department. Offering another option, Mr. Sebastian said, “will help us reduce congestion and pollution,” as well as parking problems.

Hybrid F1 Racing

I’ve always thought of F1 racing as being good research and development for car companies. That line of thinking inevitably lead me to wonder why the cars still use gas when all signs point to hybrid automobiles in the future. I’ve been wondering this for years, and my brother has taken the brunt of my unrelenting curiosity around this.

Finally, F1 will be using hybrid technology in their cars.

The hybrid system that will be phased in is know as KERS, which stands for Kinetic Energy Recovery System. KERS doesn’t store as much energy as a traditional hybrid system, but it only weighs 55 pounds and the limited energy storage capacity is well suited for Formula-style racing.

The biggest difference between KERS and a regular battery-electric hybrid is that KERS stores recovered waste energy in a rotating flywheel. Instead of converting waste energy into electricity and than back into useful energy again with an electric motor, KERS simply transfers the kinetic energy to a ~5kg flywheel in the F1 car’s transmission. The energy stored in the flywheel can then be used by the driver by pushing a “boost” button.