A six-month pilot in West Hollywood will make the famed Sunset Strip a better place to walk, reports local news site WeHoVille. For four blocks along Sunset Boulevard, the city will install seating, colorful light poles and painted sidewalk extensions to make crossing the street easier. It’s also building a parklet at 8818 Sunset Boulevard in front of indie bookstore Book Soup, where passersby can sit, enjoy shade, and pick up or drop off a book at a Little Free Library. Wayf

It’s easy in America to think of trains with lots of nostalgia and little else. We are so firmly grounded in the culture of cars that when we envision our future of transportation, we can’t see the humble train breaking free of its roots in the past. But the train is going through a reinvention that will make it even more important to the future of transportation than it already is. How to get around a megacity The number of megacities – cities with over 10 million people – r

Is post-Thanksgiving shopping mayhem a fading American holiday tradition? This year, even as overall spending increased between Thanksgiving and Black Friday, foot traffic to brick-and-mortar stores reportedly fell by as much as 9 percent compared to 2017. That’s consistent with consumer trends since 2014, thanks to retailers widening the window for holiday bargains and more shopping migrating online. A downturn in traffic appears to be accompanied by fewer of the fistfights,

A golden carpet of leaves unfurls over the slippery mud subfloor, leading the way into the forest. As the rush of traffic fades into the purl of a babbling stream and the crunch of branches underfoot, it's easy to imagine we're in some remote wilderness — an illusion crushed as that heavy-footed rustling in the woods reveals itself as not a graceful deer but some guy with a metal detector. Then this nature hike begins showing its secrets: a patch of brick cobbles underfoot,

When people complain about dockless scooters, it’s often because the scooters are parked in the middle of the sidewalk. But a new study from the Mineta Transportation Institute found that scooters rarely block sidewalk access. Researchers from Mineta and San Jose State University observed 530 scooters in downtown San Jose, California, in June and July 2018. They found that 90 percent of these scooters “did not disrupt pedestrian traffic.” These were mostly parked on the edge

Philadelphia’s bike-share service is taking a step forward on the evolutionary tree this week, with the arrival of electric-powered pedal-assist bicycles to its fleet. Indego, the city’s bike-share service, started a two-month trial run of the new “e-bikes,” PlanPhilly’s Jim Saksa reports. “I thought they were awesome,” said Chamarra McCrorie, a city employee who regularly rides her single-speed bike to work, according to PlanPhilly. “The ride was very smooth, the speed picke

Last week I had surgery: I donated my bone marrow to a little boy with leukemia, thanks to Be the Match. I would do the surgery again in a heartbeat if it meant giving somebody a second chance at life. My only difficulty is that I can’t walk or stand for as long as I used to until my bone marrow regenerates, which will take about two more weeks. As someone whose primary transportation mode is walking, this has been a problem. Luckily for me, Be the Match is reimbursing my Ube

A lot of researchers are hitting the Uber and Lyft beat these days. And with new studies finding that ride-hailing increases vehicle miles traveled, the trend has been to chew-Uber-up-and-spit-it-out. However, a still-unpublished study from Carnegie Mellon University found that Uber and Lyft actually lower vehicle ownership rates. In fact, the companies could be responsible for reducing the total number of cars in the United States by nine million in 2015 alone, researchers J