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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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Toronto subway etiquette posters
Canada's National Post has created a set of printable subway etiquette posters for the Toronto Transit Commission, where, apparently, people don't know any better. A TTC etiquette campaign the TTC...
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HOWTO graft the RFID from a payment-card onto your phone
Hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang is living in Singapore, and he's finding it difficult to board the public transit system because he habitually carries so many RFID-embedded cards that the...
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Secret Brooklyn Bridge subway station revealed
Kalaisha sez, "A once abandoned (or, rather, off limits) subway station from 1908 in Brooklyn is now accessible to the public. And it is beautiful. Beautifully preserved too!" The city closed the...
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FareBot: an Android transit-card sniffer
Eric Butler's Android app FareBot uses the RFID reader built into the Nexus S Android phone to sniff RFID-enabled transit cards, some of which carry unencrypted ride histories, making them vulnerable...
View ArticleNYC subway rider with rat and spaghetti
This video highlights the colorful experiences to be had as a NYC subway commuter: in this case, it's an eccentric gentleman who rambles incoherently while eating spaghetti and petting a tame rat on...
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Wedway PeopleMover: Disney's retrofuturistic transit system
The Disney Parks blog is featuring some fine opening-year 1975 photos of the Wedway PeopleMover, a "mass transit system"-cum-ride in Tomorrowland that is affectionately called the "PeopleCrusher"...
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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...
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