cars

Huge strides in fuel efficiency innovation canceled out by bigger cars

If, and this is true, automakers have made huge strides in fuel efficiency over the past 30 years, why aren't we all driving the 100 MPG ubercars we were promised at Epcot Center when we were but wee lads and lasses?

The answer is that our cars, like our homes and just about everything else we consume, have been supersized, says MIT economist Christopher Knittel.

Christopher Mims Technology

Mexico City cuts crime by banning cars

Banning cars from Mexico City's Centro Historico and replacing streets with pedestrian pathways has increased nighttime foot traffic and decreased crime, say local business owners. Before the street got pedestrianized, neighborhood business owners used to strike "unspoken" agreements with the local thieves, says Rogelio Murrieta, who owns a printing business on Regina. "The thieves who […]

Christopher Mims Culture

2012 will probably best record-setting 2011 for gas prices

This year broke all previous records for amount spent by the average American household on gasoline — us car-having suckers spent $4,155! As Jonathan Fahey pointed out in the Associated Press, in an unusually informative and clear-eyed look at the pedestrian impact of the planet's slow-motion oil crunch: "That is 8.4 percent of what the […]

Christopher Mims Energy

Unzipped: Car sharing takes a bite out of Americans’ drive time

Kids these days — they don’t like cars. What’s up with that? A new survey by the car-sharing company Zipcar finds that Millennials just don’t see cars as the ticket to freedom that their parents did. According to the survey, 55 percent of Millennials have actively made an effort to drive less, while 78 percent […]

Greg Hanscom Cities

Cops mock Seattle jogger nearly killed by a truck

In Seattle, a semi truck hit a jogger, nearly killing him. While the jogger lay almost dying, the police officers who responded to the accident were busy sneering at his decision not to drive a car. This being 2011, their comments were caught on video. Here's the most relevant excerpt, from the local TV station […]

Sarah Laskow Cities

Cities: Not quite as awesome as we like to think

Photo: David Graham If you Google the term “a scholar and a gentleman,” the first result to pop up is a picture of Witold Rybczynski — or it would be if there were any justice in the world. Rybczynski is an architect, author, and professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written […]

Greg Hanscom Buildings

Tighter efficiency standards may lead to bigger, more ironic vehicles

The idea behind fuel efficiency standards, nominally, is to end up with more efficient cars. But according to a new study from the University of Michigan, what they actually do is create a financial incentive for bigger cars — because bigger cars don't have to be as efficient. Fuel economy goals are stated as an average […]

Jess Zimmerman Technology

Prius is the only survivor of $3 million car crash

A car crash in Japan that's being hailed as the most expensive ever, even though it totally wasn't, totaled eight Ferraris, a Lamborghini, and three Mercedes…es. (Ugh, I just looked it up and Mercedes looks like a fifth-declension noun with the nominative plural "Mercedes," so I can't even make up a cutesy Latinate plural, WHATEVER […]