transportation

Put your money where your miles are

The Netherlands plans to start taxing motorists for how much they drive. Could this and other European innovations to reduce traffic take root here?

Revival of 117-year-old canal cuts cargo emissions 65 percent

Turns out shipping by barge is crazy efficient. It's also kind of picturesque! (According to this video from CNN there are no mules anymore, but we choose to imagine mules to up the picturesqueness factor.) 

Wall Street Journal uses infrastructure as excuse to tell Tea Party to shove it

If you thought the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal couldn't possibly become any more backward or retrograde, the good news is, you're right! Today, the editors of the only newspaper opinion section to occasionally defeat Fox News in terms of sheer mendacity finally turned the corner and found a reason to break with the Tea Party notion that government should just go away already, so the country can turn into Somalia or Pakistan as quickly as possible.

The surprisingly powerful op-ed, written by Ed Rendell (Democrat, former governor of Pennsylvania) and Scott Smith (Republican mayor of Mesa, Ariz.), advances the notion that transportation is the one thing our government should be spending money on, even in this economic climate.

The Atlanta BeltLine: The country’s most ambitious smart growth project

The Atlanta BeltLine shows some progress and much remaining potential.

Warren Buffet's crazy-like-a-fox plan to revive America's auto industry

Warren Buffett, legendary investor and one of the world's richest people, is about to leverage his part-ownership of China's largest battery manufacturer to deliver a shot in the arm to America's ailing auto industry.

'Solar highways' transform our crumbling infrastructure into something useful

Okay, we know YOU ride your bike everywhere. But the country’s 4 million miles of roads, and 50,000 miles of interstate highway, probably aren’t going anywhere any time soon. Isn’t there anything productive we can do with this giant car playground? Well, we can cover it with solar photovoltaic panels, so it’s at least providing some energy.

Trash trucks powered by trash gas reduce emissions by 80-90 percent

Waste Management Inc. owns 1,000 trash trucks that run on natural gas, plus a bunch of landfills that are constantly pumping out natural gas as a natural product of the decomposition of organic waste. Closing the loop on this cycle is a no-brainer, but it took Waste Management a decade to perfect the technology required. Now they’ve got trash trucks that run on gas from the trash they carry.

Phoenix light-rail station is cooled by the sun

Passengers using a newly retrofitted light-rail station in downtown Phoenix, Ariz., can press a button to be showered in cool air, powered by solar energy and cold water from an efficient district cooling system.

While the economy suffers, we're shipping millions of green jobs overseas

The latest numbers from the Labor Department are out, and the jobs picture is ugly-- the private sector is stagnant, and government is laying off workers in droves. Good thing we've got our Yankee ingenuity and forward-thinking leaders to help us dig out of this hole! Except, oh wait, it appears we're busy exporting jobs in the only industries that are expected to experience significant growth in the 21st century.