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Prank signs for the London Underground
An anonymous -- but inspired -- prankster has affixed some helpful addenda to the usual London Underground official signage on various tube-trains, as are documented in this Imgur photoset. London...
View ArticleCity buses across America now covertly recording passengers' conversations
City buses across America increasingly have hidden microphones that track and record the conversations that take place on them. It's easy to see the reasoning behind this: once it's acceptable to...
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Spooky Hungarian tram-terminus
This spooky photo appears to depict the 1970s-era Tram 58 terminus in Zugliget, Budapest, Hungary. The original source isn't clear to me (if you know it, please note it in the comments so I can...
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Performance artist frosts and shares cake on NYC subway
Performance artist Bettina Banayan has conducted a number of interventions on the NYC subway, but this one, in which she frosts, decorates, and shares a cake with her fellow commuters, is my favorite....
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Mini Metro: fun game simulates planning and running public transit system
Mini Metro is a video-game from New Zealand's Dinosaur Polo Club in which you create public transit systems in order to improve the lives of virtual citizens of an imaginary town. It does a really...
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Commie bus stops were awesome
Wired has a nice article up today about bus stops built in the Soviet Union, as photographed by Chris Herwig. Some of them look beautiful, some of them look like dead robots, and some look positively...
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Atheist ad on a bus in Madison, Wisconsin
The Atheists, Humanists, & Agnostics (AHA!) group at the University of Wisconsin at Madison has bought these rather good ads on the local city buses, inviting people for whom "religion has stopped...
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STUCK: Public transit's moment arrives just as public spending disappears
More Americans are riding public transit than ever before, and not a moment too soon, because between oil's direct and indirect costs, climate change, the expense of roadworks, and the scaling...
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Straddling buses would only work if they were made out of rubber
Chinese engineer Song Youzhou has been trying to get traction for his straddling bus, a huge elevated bus that goes over, rather than through, traffic, since 2010. (more…)
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New Yorkers *just* missing the subway
Three minutes of heartbreak from Gothamist: train a deep-learning facial recognition system on the expression of these New Yorkers as the subway doors slam in their faces and you will plumb the very...
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Hidden "anti-crime" mics are proliferating on US public transit, recording...
New Jersey public transit was forced to remove the bugs it had installed on its light rail system after a public outcry, but Baltimore's buses and subways remain resolutely under audio surveillance,...
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Patent fighters attack the crown jewels of three of America's worst patent...
Unified Patents raises money from companies that are the target of patent-trolling and then uses it to challenge the most widely used patents in each of its members' sectors: now it's going for the...
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Ransomware creep accidentally hijacks San Francisco Muni, won't give it back
A ransomware criminal's self-reproducing malicious software spread through a critical network used by the San Francisco light rail system, AKA the Muni, and shut it down; the anonymous criminal --...
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Oakland elementary school students resist Caltrans' insistence on taking...
Rogue archivist Rick Prelinger writes, "Oakland students planned to paint a mural on a dark freeway underpass in their city. The project is stalled because Caltrans asserts copyright to murals on its...
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British Columbia government forces Vancouver dad to end his kids' free-range...
For the past two years, Adrian Crook's four eldest kids (aged 7-11) have ridden Vancouver's public transit to school together, traveling as a group from the bus stop in front of his condo to the bus...
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The London Underground thinks it can sell travelers' attention and wifi data...
Since late 2016, the Transport for London has been running a pilot scheme, providing wifi to passengers while logging and retaining all the wifi traffic coming in and out of its access points,...
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This "book-lined" Beijing subway car is an audiobook library
Beijing's subway system now includes some experimental cars decorated to look like fanciful, book-lined rooms; scan the QR codes and you get free audiobook downloads for popular Chinese novels. (more…)
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The elite belief in Uberized, Muskized cities is at odds with fundamental,...
The appropriately named Jarrett Walker is the author of Human Transit, a seminal text on transportation and cities that draws on his decades of experience in urban planning; he has the distinction of...
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Learn to speak like a New York City subway conductor
As anyone who travels frequently by bus, plane or train can tell you, important service announcements are best when they're utterly incomprehensible: being able to hear and understand that your gate...
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Credit bubble a-burstin': wave of bankruptcies sweeps subprime car-lenders
The subprime car-lending industry -- charging exorbitant rates for car-loans to people least suited to afford them, enforced through orwellian technologies, obscuring the risk by spinning the debt...
View ArticleStudy blames Uber/Lyft for San Francisco traffic, Uber/Lyft blames Amazon,...
A new report from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority attributes the majority (51%-73%) of the prodigious 2010-2016 increase in San Francisco traffic congestion on Uber and Lyft; the...
View ArticleLondon cops switch off wifi in the tube to make it harder for climate...
This morning, the British Transport Police has ordered Virgin Media to switch off the wifi to some undisclosed London Underground stations in a bid to make it harder for climate protesters to organise...
View ArticleThe empirical impact of Lyft and Uber on cities: congestion (especially...
Mike Moffitt sums up the empirical work on the impact of rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft for cities: an increase in congestion, especially downtown, especially during "surges" (Uber and Lyft...
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BART map inspires poster of The Fillmore's upcoming shows
Click to embiggen image Designer Jose Garcia at Zoca Studio Inc. used a familiar Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) map to showcase the Fillmore's 50 upcoming fall concerts. Ironically, you can't take BART...
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Maps of the lost streetcar and subway systems of North America
Jake Berman writes, "I've drawn a series of maps showing the lost streetcar and subway systems of North America." He's selling them as prints.
View ArticleChinese law professor's social media denunciation of facial recognition in...
Lao Dongyan is a professor specializing in Criminal Law at Tsinghua University; on Oct 31, she posted a long, thoughtful piece to their public Wechat account about the announcement that Beijing's...
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A NYC subway ride to Coney Island in 1987
The New York Subway isn't like this anymore, but the sheer decrepitude and negligence of it in the 80s is always amazing to behold. This video shows a ride to Coney Island in 1987. Londoners like me...
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Documentary on NYC's new real-time interactive subway map
"The Map" looks at the history of the famed MTA subway map in New York City and describes their process in creating a live map that shows train locations, temporary reroutes, and other real-time...
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Actual San Francisco bus driver's fantastic tweeted review of the Shang-Chi...
Mc "Mack" Allen is a bus driver for San Francisco's Muni public transit system. Watching Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which takes place in San Francisco, Allen was compelled to Tweet his...
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Why the Sheffield stand is the best bike rack
Faced with a surplus of metal pipes, the city of Sheffield in England held a contest to decide what to do with them. Thus was born the standard bicycle rack, with two bends and perhaps a crossbar. Many...
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