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--- transportation:transportation [2023/05/19 04:09] – [Traffic] timb
+++ transportation:transportation [2025/08/10 22:23] (current) – [Highways] timb
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 [[transportation:Gas Scooters]]
+[[transportation:Hovercraft]]
 [[transportation:Jet Pack|Jet Pack]]
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 [[transportation:Transit]]
+[[transportation:Trucking]]
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 https://www.makeuseof.com/micromobility-is-changing-transport/
+== Electric two-wheelers are set to scoot past EVs in road race ==
+Micromobility vehicles don't carry any baggage – and that's a good thing
+Laura Dobberstein - Thu 18 May 2023 10:14 UTC
+Video Visit Asia's emerging megacities and you’ll quickly notice that scooters and motorbikes vastly outnumber cars. Before long these fleets of two-wheelers will become battery-powered, always-connected, semi-autonomous machines that offer an even more potent alternative to their four-wheeled rivals.
+The reasons powered two-wheelers dominate nations such as India, Indonesia and Vietnam – with a combined population over 1.75 billion – are simple: cars are unaffordable on local wages, few urban homes have space to store them, and warm climates make two-wheelers viable year-round. Plus, many of them sell for less than the equivalent of $1,000 apiece.
+The industry has decided many will soon be electric and it looks like drivers will buy them.
+"Electrification of micromobility can be adopted at a faster pace than cars, mainly because the motor and batteries are much smaller," Fook Fah Yap, a director at Singapore's Nanyang Technical University's Transport Research Centre told The Register.
+https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/18/electric_scooters_vehicles_asia/
+== Here are the coolest e-bikes and more we saw at Micromobility Europe 2023 ==
+Micah Toll - Jun 19 2023 9:25 am PT
+Micromobility Europe 2023 returned to Amsterdam last week for a two-day microEV extravaganza. Personal electric vehicles from all over Europe and beyond converged on the venue, bringing in e-bikes, e-scooters, e-unicycles, electric micro-cars and more. To cap off two full days of product displays, expert panels, startup pitches and more, the conference joined local cyclists in Amsterdam for a massive rave ride, complete with a DJ on a cargo e-bike blasting music along the route.
+Below is a selection of some of the many interesting things I saw at the show.
+I couldn’t include everything (and if you want to see even more, make sure to attend the US show this coming Fall in San Francisco). But I’ll do my best to feature many of the most interesting and sometimes far-fetched designs below.
+Check out my video also to get a sense of what it was like to attend the show and take in the highlights.
+https://electrek.co/2023/06/19/coolest-e-bikes-and-more-we-saw-at-micromobility-europe-2023/
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 https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-freewaytopia-paul-haddad-santa-monica-press-153036975.html
+== A Caltrans executive questioned a freeway expansion. Then she was demoted ==
+Rachel Uranga, Staff Writer - Oct. 13, 2023 3 AM PT
+For years, a California Department of Transportation executive, Jeanie Ward-Waller, said she asked tough questions about multimillion-dollar road projects at meetings where she was often the only woman.
+Male bosses criticized her for being too emotional or aggressive, she said in interviews with The Times over the last two weeks. But Ward-Waller swallowed it, seeing it as part of her job to push forward an agency undergoing seismic shifts.
+This summer, as the deputy director of planning and modal programs, Ward-Waller began raising questions about a $280 million repaving project along a stretch of Interstate 80. Ward-Waller became increasingly concerned the project was surreptitiously widening 3½ miles of the freeway — at the same time top state officials were pledging to end traffic-inducing freeway expansions to help meet ambitious climate goals.
+Under state law, such projects require environmental review and public airing, but this plan had none of it, she said — and it tapped funds set aside for maintenance. It happened to be along the same 20-mile corridor of I-80 from West Sacramento through Davis where a partially federal funded freeway lane is being proposed.
+https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-10-13/caltrans-whistleblower-says-demoted-block-freeway-expansion
+== Why Are Texas Interchanges Texas So Tall? ==
+August 20, 2024 - Practical Engineering
+[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.]
+This is the Dallas High Five, one of the tallest highway interchanges in the world. It gets its name from the fact that there are five different levels of roadways crossing each other in this one spot. In some ways, it’s kind of atrocious, right? It’s this enormous area of land dedicated to a complex spaghetti of concrete and steel; like the worst symbol of our car-obsessed culture. But in another way, it really is an impressive feat of engineering. 37 bridges and more than 700 columns are crammed into this one spot to keep the roughly half a million vehicles flowing in every direction each day.
+They say everything’s bigger in Texas, but that’s not always true when it comes to engineering projects in the US. The tallest concrete dam is split between Arizona and Nevada. The longest bridge span is in New York. The longest road tunnel is in Alaska, and the longest water tunnel, not only in the US but the whole world, is the Delaware Aqueduct in New York. The largest hydroelectric plant is the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington, while the largest nuclear plant is in Georgia.
+But one thing that Texas really does do bigger is highway interchanges. If you’ve driven from one major Texan highway onto or over another, you may have been astonished to find yourself and your vehicle well over a hundred feet or 30 meters above the ground. There’s no clearinghouse of data for flyover ramp heights, as far as I can find. Plus there’s the complexity of what a true height really means since many interchanges use excavation below grade for the lower level. Still, even the most conservative estimate puts the High Five taller than the Statue of Liberty from her feet to the top of her head. And if you do a little digging, you’ll find that many, if not most, of the tallest highway interchanges in the world are right here in the Lone Star State. Let’s talk about why. I’m Grady, and this is Practical Engineering.
+https://practical.engineering/blog/2024/8/19/why-are-texas-interchanges-texas-so-tall
+== WWII, the autobahn, Ike, the Interstates, and one-mile-in-five ==
+July 25, 2024 - jwh1975
+Earlier this summer I was talking with a fellow veteran and the subject of “one-mile-in-five” on the Interstate highways came up.
+The vague gist is that before WWII, Germany designed its famous autobahn network with war in mind. Near WWII’s conclusion, Gen. Eisenhower was impressed with the autobahn and during his later Presidency ordered a copy of it made, the USA’s Interstate system, mostly for military reasons including for US Air Force bombers to use when their bases got taken out by Soviet ICBMs – and one mile of every five is straight and level for this reason.
+Like many Americans I have heard this before and in fact, the specific highway identified by my acquaintance (a certain stretch of I-80 in Nebraska) I have also previously heard as an example location.
+This is the type of thing that enough Americans have heard that it becomes accepted through cycles of repetition. To anybody who has driven the endless straightaways of I-15 in Utah or I-70 in Kansas it probably seems reasonable that bombers could land there, and there is usually somebody in earshot to interject “yes he’s right, I’ve heard that too”.
+“One-mile-in-five” and the military on the Interstates in general, has equal portions of real fact, misconstrued things, and outright error. Mostly in wwiiafterwwii I cover weapons and equipment; for readers who prefer that I will return to that in the future. Perhaps this will be of interest however.
+https://wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com/2024/07/25/wwii-the-autobahn-ike-the-interstates-and-one-mile-in-five/
+===== Wisconsin =====
+== Alphabet Soup: Why Wisconsin’s County Highways Are Lettered, Not Numbered ==
+The State's Road-Naming System Has Been In Place For More Than 100 Years
+Jenny Peek - November 27, 2019
+If you’ve taken a drive on one of Wisconsin’s iconic scenic roads, chances are you’ve noticed a bit of alphabet soup.
+Signs with names like BB, CV, N and SS flank Wisconsin’s county roads, and Shelly from Marshall wanted to know why.
+She asked: “Why are Wisconsin’s county roads labeled with letters instead of numbers?”
+So WPR’s WHYsconsin reached out to Daniel Fedderly, executive director of the Wisconsin County Highway Association — a nonprofit organization that represents the state’s 72 county highway and public works departments — to find out.
+https://www.wpr.org/transportation/why-wisconsins-county-roads-are-lettered-not-numbered
 ====== Hoverboard ======
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 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/us/widen-highways-traffic.html
+== One car per green: Why the lights on freeway onramps can’t end traffic jams ==
+Jon Healey - August 1, 2023
+It’s hard to enter a highway in Los Angeles County without encountering a stoplight at the end of the entrance ramp — a pause that’s supposed to ease the crush of rush-hour traffic.
+But like many Angelenos, West Valley driver Liza Olson wonders what, exactly, those lights are accomplishing.
+“Have you ever sat at a freeway metering light that’s red while hardly any cars zip by? Have you ever driven through a freeway metering light that’s green only to join gridlock? What gives?” Olson asked in a recent email.
+As it happens, the lights are governed by roadside computers that rely on sensors in the pavement, as well as actual human beings who monitor the system for breakdowns and extraordinary circumstances. And according to the state Department of Transportation, the lights do, in fact, get people to their destinations faster. But you probably don’t notice the improvement because it is, shall we say, not dramatic.
+The Times asked Wahib Jreij, senior transportation engineer at Caltrans, to demystify ramp meters. Here is his explanation of how things work.
+https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-08-01/why-highway-ramp-meters-dont-seem-to-reduce-congestion
+== Why does traffic bottleneck on freeways for no apparent reason? ==
+Drivers tend to flow remarkably well as a pack — until there’s an unusual event…
-====== Trucks / Semis ======
+Peter Dunn - February 19, 2009
-== Truckers are caught on the front lines of California’s EV push ==
+When something disturbs the normal course of traffic, the effects can last for a surprisingly long time after the incident itself is gone, and affect areas far from the initial problem.
-By 2024, trucks bought for use in the state’s ports and rail yards must be zero-emission.
+“Maybe a dog runs into the road,” says Moshe Ben-Akiva, professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the MIT Intelligent Transportation Systems program. “Maybe people slow down to look at something. Maybe someone cuts someone off and they start arguing. The cars at the front get moving again after a couple of minutes, but cars behind them still have to stop and queue up. It’s like a shock wave that moves upstream.”
-Aarian Marshall, wired.com - 5/18/2023, 6:42 AM
+The phenomenon is portrayed eloquently in MITSIMLab, a traffic simulator developed at MIT in the 1990s with funding from Boston’s Big Dig highway project. During a recent demonstration of the software, graduate student Samiul Hasan set up an animated map of downtown Boston highways to simulate traffic on a typical weekday morning.
-If you live in the US, the stuff you buy—that new dining room table, bag of rice, or pair of pants heading to your home right now—may experience the all-electric future of global transportation before you do.
+Thousands of colored rectangles representing individual cars, trucks, and buses ply the roadways, each moving according to its own parameters for desired speed and driving habits, which include following distance and “gap acceptance.” The overall model reflects the distribution of driving behaviors aggregated from traffic models that are based on video studies conducted in Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other locales.
-Tens of millions of tons of goods move through California’s ports each year, proceeding from ship to port and beyond on hulking semitrucks. Forty percent of the nation’s containerized imports move through the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach alone, vital links in a global chain of commerce connecting factories all over the world to American doorsteps.
+https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/why-does-traffic-bottleneck-on-freeways-for-no-apparent-reason/
-Yet a new rule passed by California’s air regulator last month demands major changes to that supply chain, in the name of saving Earth’s climate and the lungs of people who live close to ports. By 2035, every California drayage vehicle—large trucks that move goods between ports, rail yards, and distribution centers—must be a zero-emission vehicle. From next year on, any trucking or shipping company that acquires a new truck is required to buy an electric model powered by batteries or hydrogen fuel cells.
-https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/05/truckers-are-caught-on-the-front-lines-of-californias-ev-push/