Transportation

The Region Of Waterloo has a cool site with animated pictures explaining roundabouts (traffic circles):

As needs in transportation spending have gone up but funding, especially from federal and state sources, have not kept pace, many places are looking locally to tax measures and bonding to fill in the gap. And as roads and suburban areas become more crowded and transit planning demands more funding, many voters are saying yes and ballot initiatives are coming at a record pace.

Don't write anything in a foreign language and leave it on an airplane, lest the paranoia overtake someone and the 'threat of terrorism' comes charging to the forefront. Heck, why don't we just raise the colored threat level, we don't know what it really means anyway...

If you thought the Segway was cool, you will love the Centaur.

Here is an interesting sequence of photos on the capacity of a street, first full of cars occupied by one person, then by denser and more varied transportation mixes. I especially like the photos of just the drivers in their positions without the cars, and the 'invisible bus' photo. Reminds me of a Monty Python skit.

Often when I am in depressed concrete highways, I imagine them filled with water and becoming new rivers flowing through the landscape. This particular maglev proponent imagines them filled with grass. Looks pretty interesting. Picture that the next time you are riding down the highway.

The Texas Transportation Institute has released the 2004 Urban Mobility Study that measures a range of congestion, travel time and traffic indicators in urban areas across the country. Not surprisingly, congestion is increasing everywhere. This year they have started measuring how mass transportation reduces congestion in various urban areas (Of the 85 very-large to small urban areas studied, removing public transit would cause an average increase of 29% in the "base travel delay"). An argument against adding singular mass transit lines in various places is that they will do little to reduce congestion, but this report shows that mass transit in most places has a significant overall effect in reducing congestion.

California builds a large amount of transit, but transit projects do not exist in a vacuum. Land use decisions must be made to maximize use of the transit investment. Cheers to the governor for reducing the hurdles that localities must jump in implementing smart land use decisions around transit stations: Gov. Schwarzenegger signs bill to spur more transit villages (Registration required)