Moving Beyond the Automobile is a series of ten short videos by
Streetfilms that highlights new directions in urban transportation. It shows how cities in the U.S. are encouraging a shift away from car dependency and making it easier and more pleasant to get around by other means.
[more inside]
posted by parudox
on Apr 26, 2011 -
36 comments
The Congress for the New Urbanism has just released
Freeways Without Future, their top-10 list of aging highways that should be demolished in favor of city-friendly boulevards.
"There's a whole generation of elevated highways in cities that are at the end of their design life," says John Norquist, head of the
Congress for the New Urbanism.
"Instead of rebuilding them at enormous expense, cities have an opportunity to undo what proved to be major urban-planning blunder." Take that,
Robert Moses.
posted by Afroblanco
on Sep 28, 2008 -
54 comments
A few years ago when I was visiting Alaska, one of the more interesting portions of the trip was the 45-minute drive from Anchorage to Girdwood along the
Turnagain Arm of Cook Inlet. This is one of the world's rare bodies of water that features
bore tides, an amazing scene. The highway is one of only 15 roads in the United States that have been designated an "All-American Road." What about some of the world's greatest highways?
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posted by netbros
on Apr 17, 2008 -
17 comments
In the U.S., motorists do not pay their way. The US government spends more on highways and other auto-related expenses than it receives from auto-related taxes, unlike almost every country in Europe. In a recent
report [pdf], Mark Delucchi calculates automobile-related costs and revenues in three different ways and concludes the subsidy is around 20-70 cents per gallon or $24-105 billion in 2002. But what are automobile-related costs, you ask?
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posted by salvia
on Oct 2, 2007 -
99 comments
Roads To Riches (or We've Got a Bridge in Brooklyn to Sell You--Seriously) -- Why investors are clamoring to take over America's highways, bridges, and airports—and why the public should be nervous.--
...a slew of Wall Street firms—Goldman, Morgan Stanley, the Carlyle Group, Citigroup, and many others—is piling into infrastructure ... Assets sold now could change hands many times over the next 50 years, with each new buyer feeling increasing pressure to make the deal work financially. It's hardly a stretch to imagine service suffering in such a scenario; already, the record in the U.S. has been spotty. ...
posted by amberglow
on Apr 29, 2007 -
107 comments
Tripcheck : Is an online service of the Oregon Department of Transportation. Zoom in on the map and click on a camera icon, and you can see a current image taken by a camera at that location.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste
on Jan 20, 2007 -
17 comments
The 1919 Transcontinental Motor Convoy — Take a
28 year old future
U.S. President on a two month long, 3,251 mile, transcontinental
road trip (where relatively
few have gone before). Wait while he shoulders a little
responsibility, add some
autobahn^ envy, and 37 years later he
signs into law over 40,000 miles of the
National Defense Highway System (later
renamed: it recently passed
50 years of growth.) About his
favorite domestic program, Ike said, "
More than any single action by the government since the end of the war, this one would change the face of America. ...Its impact on the American economy - the jobs it would produce in manufacturing and construction, the rural areas it would open up - was beyond calculation." More documents, logs, and first-hand reports from the 1919 convoy
here.
posted by cenoxo
on Jul 12, 2006 -
27 comments
Highway Route Markers collects highway signs from around the world.
The Upstate New York Roads Site lists (and reproduces) every exit sign for many of the state's freeways. Let me reiterate: Every. Exit. Sign. The net has something for everyone, even those of us with an unhealthy obsession with road signs.
posted by mcwetboy
on Oct 28, 2004 -
7 comments
One of my joys of going on vacation is to get off the interstate and
collect a bit of an old historic road. In California over the weekend
we managed to grab a bit of Hwy. 1 aka the Pacific Coast Highway past
nature preserves, resorts and neighborhoods. Another goal is to do all of
U.S. 50, the initial stages of which were reportedly surveyed by George Washington during his tour in the British Army.
Wired has a
nice
article about how a journalist and a photographer ignored the advice
of a Federal Highway Administration spokesperson to take a trip down
Route 1 from Maine to Florida.
posted by KirkJobSluder
on Oct 27, 2003 -
9 comments
