infrastructure
-
Photographer turns unrelenting boringness of suburbia into art
Jason Griffiths is an assistant professor of design at Arizona State, and apparently living in the middle of all that desert sprawl got to him after a while. In the early aughts he jumped into a car, drove all over the country, and made a discovery so banal it’s practically a tautology: Suburbia is the same everywhere.
-
Karen Luken: A one-woman waste management authority
Grist is proud to present the Change Gang — profiles of people who are leading change on the ground toward a more sustainable society and a greener planet. Some we’ve written about before; some are new to our pages. Some you’ll have heard of; most you probably won’t. Know someone we should add to the […]
-
U.S. roads are built to break
Why do we have to pour so much of our transportation money into highway infrastructure? Well, because 50 years ago, the U.S. decided to structure roads in a way that was cheap to build but expensive and difficult to maintain. It's the infrastructure equivalent of buying a cheap crappy blender and then having to replace […]
-
Why cities should destroy their highways
America has a huge transportation infrastructure deficit, which means lots of our highways are due to be rebuilt. But according to Next American City editor at large Diana Lind, we'd be better off simply knocking them down, especially the ones that blight our cities. It's been done before, reports Andrew Nusca at SmartPlanet: After the […]
-
Study: We have five years to stop climate change, or it will be too late
According to a comprehensive analysis by the International Energy Agency, the point of no return on climate change is fast approaching. Either we halt it in five years, or … well, imagine I'm drawing my finger across my throat while making a "kkkkkhhhhhh" sound. Basically, any fossil fuel infrastructure that goes up in the next […]
-
Charge your EV in 10 minutes flat
Pretty much no one wants to wait around for their theoretical EV to charge, which is one reason why people aren't buying them in droves yet. But in the near future, charging won't take more than 10 minutes, thanks to Nissan.
Along with a Japanese university, the car company developed an EV charger that takes a fraction of the time of current chargers without compromising battery life. Right now, charging an EV generally takes about eight hours, or 48 times as long as this new charger will need.
-
Tombstone, with sewage backups
New Mexico "ghost town" will give researchers room to play -- without flooding real people's basements.
-
Gaze upon the eight circles of commuting hell
Take solace, Los Angelenos, in others' pain: In the larger scheme of horrible, horrible commutes, Los Angeles barely rates as moderately painful. On IBM's Commuter Pain Index, L.A. rates a 34. New Delhi, at 72, is more than twice as torturous, and in Mexico City, which ranks the worst, the pain index hits 108.
No matter where you live, though, commuting just sucks and makes the rest of your life suck as well, Infrastructurist reports: -
Critical List: Obama called for green schools, better infrastructure; Google shares carbon footprint
In his jobs speech, President Obama called for the construction of green schools and an infrastructure bank that could help create public transportation and efficient buildings.
With an average temperature of 74.5 degrees F, this summer was the second hottest on record in the U.S. (The hottest summer was in 1936, when it was 74.6 degrees F. We're gonna beat that soon.)
Google reveals its carbon footprint, which is smaller than an oil company's and about the same as a chemical company's.