Dozens of cities around the world are working quickly to move towards a goal of zero-emission transportation on their streets. Now London has just announced a plan to make half of its historic center—known as the Square Mile—car-free. According to a new transportation strategy proposed by the City of London Corporation, the city would designate half of these Square Mile streets as “pedestrian priority,” meaning that all motorized vehicles would be banned, unless they were pro

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) will undoubtedly improve road safety, with computers able to avoid collisions humans cannot. But when AVs face an inevitable crash, how do they decide whether to stay in the lane – and hit a person walking in the crosswalk – or swerve, hitting someone on the sidewalk? This question – how to incorporate morality in AVs’ algorithms – was at the heart of a new study from Germany, where researchers tried to determine which course of action AVs should tak

Memphis was in trouble. In the early 2000s, the city was at or near the top of every major negative index of urban living: obesity, violent crime, poverty, and poor education. All those negatives meant that it was nearly impossible to recruit employees and businesses to the city. And to top it off, this magazine named Memphis one of the country’s worst cities for cycling in 2008 and 2010. City and county leaders knew they needed to do something to turn the city’s fates around

In the old days, determining whether a neighborhood was walkable required physically going there. Then, Google Street View arrived, and “raters” surveying a city’s sidewalks, curb cuts, or even graffiti could survey a city from their desk. Now, according to a release from Arizona State University, walkability surveys don’t need people at all. A new tool from the university’s College of Health Solutions and School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering, can

Getting people to stop driving alone takes more than just building better infrastructure. When you wake up in the morning, you probably don’t assess every transportation option available to you. Many people just hop in their car without thinking about it. (Which explains why commuting is people’s most entrenched transportation habit, and the hardest to break.) But changing transportation habits is more important now than ever. The transportation sector is the largest source o

If you're a bicyclist, the Schuylkill River Trail could soon be the path of least resistance from Philadelphia to Reading, a network of paved and stone pathways, roadways and sidewalks far from snarled highway traffic. Currently the trail ends before you reach Berks County, stopping at Parker Ford in East Coventry Township, Chester County, and picking up again in Pottstown before heading north to Reading. A roughly 5-mile section spanning Chester and Montgomery counties is un

The rise of electric scooters in cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco has led to no small amount of debate and angry community board meetings, but it seems safe to say that the mobility toothpaste has already been squeezed out of that transportation tube. The promise of cheap, easily available, motorized personal transportation is too alluring to be legislated out of existence. So cities will have to design their way toward a solution. This is no small task, as more t

Will a new development “bring traffic”? That’s a weighty question for cities around the country facing public pressure about development proposals. In response many cities have established “mitigation” rules, that require the developers to, for example, add parking, or widen roads to “relieve” future traffic, before they can construct an apartment or office building, for example. But these “mitigation” efforts rely on pseudoscientific, and disproven assumptions, according to