LeBron James made waves on Twitter when he was spotted commuting to work on a custom mountain bike.

(via StreetsBlog)

Engadget looks at the new Cordon photo-radar technology.

Developed by Simicon, this new speed sensor promises to take highway surveillance to new heights of precision. Unlike most photo radar systems, which track only one violator at a time, Simicon’s device can simultaneously identify and follow up to 32 vehicles across four lanes. Whenever a car enters its range, the Cordon will automatically generate two images: one from wide-angle view and one closeup shot of the vehicle’s license plate. It’s also capable of instantly measuring a car’s speed and mapping its position, and can easily be synced with other databases via WiFi, 3G or WiMAX.

Wired’s Autopia looks at a new app that auctions public parking spaces.

Parking Auction launched earlier this week on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The matchmaking service is beta-testing, and the folks behind it hope to expand worldwide, creating communities of relaxed, smartphone-armed parkers.

“If I’m parked on the street and wouldn’t mind moving my car to a spot half a mile away that isn’t residential, I may be happy to give it up to my neighbor that just got home from East Hampton on a Sunday night with two kids in a car she has to unload,” said founder Brian Rosetti. “We think that’s quite a neighborly and valuable service.”

To be clear, the spaces themselves aren’t for sale, nor is the right to park in it. Drivers are told they must vacate the space if another driver signals they’d like to park there, thereby voiding the transaction. What’s actually for sale information — the knowledge that a space will be opening up soon. If someone else gets the space before you do, you’re out of luck but you don’t have to pay.

“Both buyers and sellers confirm the space transfer has taken place, and then rates the other, so if the seller leaves before the buyer gets there and someone else pulls into the spot then they will lose the sale,” Rosetti said. “There’s never any interaction between drivers and all confrontation must be avoided.”

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Fast Company looks at when vehicles communicate.

Traffic is generally accepted as a necessity of modern life, but it doesn’t have to be. We don’t have traffic because there are too many cars, we have traffic because people are bad drivers and don’t have enough information to make smart decisions. If even just a fraction of vehicles could communicate and override poor driving decisions, we could virtually eliminate traffic. So regardless of whether you believe that autonomous vehicles and road trains are in our future, cars that talk to each other are coming sooner than you think–and they might just get rid of some of the most pesky (and dangerous) traffic-related problems.

Clemson’s Integrated Intelligent Transportation Platform proposes using DSRC to create a “true connected vehicle ecosystem” that leverages the technology to do everything from reporting vehicle crashes on the road ahead to notifying EV drivers that they’re about to enter a traffic jam, and their charge won’t last through it unless they turn off certain systems in the car–for example, the onboard TV in the backseat.

The Connected Vehicle Proactive Driving entry, submitted by Sakura Associates, aims to use DSRC to make the roads safer for drivers–and in turn, reduce the amount of traffic jams caused by accidents. The system would gather information on the type and location of accidents in different areas to give drivers guidance based on a so-called Accident Probability Index, which could advise drivers to avoid (or take extra care on) routes with high accident rates, “dangerous road geometry,” and adverse weather conditions.

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The Wall Street Journal looks at the debate regarding traffic cameras.

Nationwide, red-light traffic cameras have surged in popularity. More than 550 localities—including New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Chicago—have installed them since the early 1990s, according to a spokesman the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

The cameras have resulted in millions of tickets, which often carry fines of about $100. Fans call them a cost-effective tool for keeping drivers in line and intersections safe.

Critics, though, portray the cameras as Big Brother devices that allow cities to generate revenue from traffic offenses so minor that police might not have bothered to write them up if they had seen them with the naked eye. Others say the cameras raise constitutional concerns, penalizing many violators before they have had an opportunity to explain extenuating circumstances or even whether they were driving the car captured on film. Depending on the community, the cameras also can be used to detect speeders.

City officials in Los Angeles, Houston, and Colorado Springs have recently deactivated the red-light cameras.

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FastCompany.com looks at ideas to reduce carbon emissions.

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT): This is far from a new technology, as the first bus rapid transit was introduced in Curitiba, Brazil in 1974. BRT is generally associated with dedicated lanes, elevated bus stops to expedite exit and entry, and high frequency. When implemented correctly, BRT systems get awfully close to the ride, speed, and comfort of light rail or subway systems at a fraction of the cost. Currently there are approximately 120 BRT systems around the world. BRTs make a lot of sense because they provide the convenience of rail systems at a fraction of the cost and can move a lot of people on a daily basis. The Bogota Transmilenio serves nearly 1.5 million people daily. Obviously, this results in a significant reduction in carbon emissions–and in fact the Bogota system was the first transportation project approved by the UN Clean Development Mechanism as a carbon project. What’s next for BRT? How about electric, smart-grid connected buses? PerhapsProterra will enter this market soon.

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Wired.com talke about handling air traffic control from remote locations.

Air traffic control towers may someday go the way of the lighthouse. At least, that’s the goal of a system being developed by Saab with Sweden’s LFV air traffic control service in which landing instructions are barked not from a four- or five-story lookout next to the tarmac but from a tricked-out control center miles away. Starting next year, Sundsvall and Örnsköldsvik regional airports will each host an 82-foot structure topped with a camera array that beams 360-degree views to hi-def wraparound screens in a remote facility. Controllers already communicate from afar while planes are en route, but this will be a first for tower operations. A pair of movable 36X-zoom cameras will provide extra flexibility, while video, weather data, object tracking, and anomaly detection can be integrated right on the hi-def screen. The images are sent from camera to screen in less than a second over an Internet link with several layers of redundancy.

Photo credit: Peter Karlsson/Svarteld

Tom Vanderbilt’s latest Slate column discuss Diverging Diamond intersections that we have discussed before here and here at the Hub.

There is, however, a cheaper, less disruptive approach, one that promises its own safety and efficiency gains, that has become recently popular in the United States: the diverging diamond interchange. There’s just one catch: You briefly have to drive the wrong way… The DDI is the brainchild of Gilbert Chlewicki, who first theorized what he called the “criss-cross interchange” as an engineering student at the University of Maryland in 2000. (He eventually changed the name for fear of potential confusion with the singer of “Sailing.”)…

The DDI is the sort of thing that is easier to visualize than describe (this simulation may help), but here, roughly, is how a DDI built under a highway overpass works: As the eastbound driver approaches the highway interchange (whose lanes run north-south), traffic lanes “criss cross” at a traffic signal. The driver will now find himself on the “left” side of the road, where he can either make an unimpeded left turn onto the highway ramp, or cross over again to the right once he has gone under the highway overpass.

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South Carolina is cracking down on drug trafficking in Spartanburg County.

A week-long crackdown on Spartanburg County interstates is over.  Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright announced Friday that the 6^th annual Operation Rolling Thunder ended with more than 1600 traffic stops on I-85 and I-26.

The traffic enforcement operation brought together 72 law enforcement officers from 22 different agencies in North and South Carolina.  They seized more than $215,000 in cash, 11 pounds of cocaine, and eight pounds of marijuana.

“The numbers are a bit lower than in the past, I’m proud of that, meaning they are staying out of Spartanburg County, which that is our desire,” said Sheriff Wright. “I try to tell everybody that every piece of drug paraphernalia or drug you can find and get off the street, that’s one more somebody’s son or daughter that’s not having to deal with that.”

 The Transport Politic profiles the progress of public transport in Utah.

Much thanks to federal spending, the Salt Lake City metropolitan area practically doubled the size of its TRAX light rail network this weekend, adding two extensions a year early and 20% under budget. Though estimates predict relatively modest ridership on the new lines, the routes provide the city and its suburbs one of the most comprehensive transit systems in the country, with frequent bus and rail corridors spread out in a grid across the immediate urban core…

In addition to the pre-existing 15.8-mile route from downtown Salt Lake to Sandy (which opened in 1999) and the 3.8-mile corridor to the University of Utah (which began operations in time for the 2002 Winter Olympics there), the 10.6-mile, $535 million Mid-Jordan route extends southwest from Fashion Place to a major development at Daybreak and the 5.1-mile, $370 million West Valley line runs from Central Pointe to West Valley Central Station. The 3.5-mile extension south from Sandy to Draper (receiving a 60% commitment from Washington), the 6-mile link to the airport, and the 44-mile FrontRunner South commuter rail route to Provo (getting 80% of its funding from the feds) are other parts of the program and are under construction, ready to be open by 2013 and 2014.

The region, with about 1.2 million inhabitants, now has as much light rail — 35 miles of it — as far larger metropolitan areas like Denver. Total TRAX ridership is expected to reach 58,000 a day by the end of this year, up from 43,000 today; ridership could exceed 100,000 daily by 2030.

Utah’s transit system is also, arguably, built efficiently.

Compared to light rail projects around the country, the $50.5 million and $72.5 million per mile spent on the Mid-Jordan and West Valley lines, respectively, is limited. They are on the low end compared to similar projects currently under construction in Portland ($204 million/mile), Houston ($145 million/mile), and the Twin Cities($87 million/mile). But Salt Lake had the advantage of building its rail lines along existing corridors, limiting right-of-way purchase costs. In addition, it has constructed most of its projects in the midst of a recession that has hit the construction industry particularly hard, making it possible to contract out the building of the tracks and stations at comparatively low prices.

H/T Streetsblog.net

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