Category Archives: cars

cars, cities, culture mapping, history, language, suburbia, transportation, urban planning

The Invention of ‘Jaywalking’

In the 1920s, the public hated cars. So the auto industry fought back — with language.

If you travelled in time back to a big American city in, say, 1905 — just before the boom in car ownership — you’d see roadways utterly teeming with people. Vendors would stand in the street, selling food or goods. Couples would stroll along, and everywhere would be groups of children racing around, playing games. If a pedestrian were heading to a destination across town, they’d cross a street wherever and whenever they felt like it.

https://marker.medium.com/the-invention-of-jaywalking-afd48f994c05

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=jaywalking&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cjaywalking%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cjaywalking%3B%2Cc0

cars, cities, technology, transportation, urban planning

Elon Musk risks repeating history’s mistakes as he tries to reinvent transit

Through Tesla, Elon Musk has tried to transform individual vehicle ownership, while The Boring Company, his tunneling venture, is now taking aim at public transit. The company and Fort Lauderdale, Florida are close to agreeing to the first public Loop system, which will give people rides in Teslas through a new tunnel between downtown and the beach.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/23/cars/elon-musk-robert-moses/index.html
cars, cities, dystopia, government, history, politics, transportation, urban planning

Robert Moses and the decline of the NYC subway system

New Yorkers now use a transit system in a state of emergency. The past few months have laid bare the enormity of the problems currently facing the century-old subways, from aging infrastructure to a lack of federal dollars available to help make things better.

https://ny.curbed.com/2017/7/27/15985648/nyc-subway-robert-moses-power-broker
architecture, cars, cities, transportation, urban planning

Paris to build $145M cable car system

Scheduled to open in 2025, the “Cable 1” project will travel from the Parisian suburb of Villeneuve-Saint-Georges to the Pointe du Lac station in Creteil in the Île-de-France region within just 17 minutes, less than half the time the journey would take on a bus.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/paris-to-build-145m-cable-car-system/index.html
cars, innovation, retail

Starbucks wants to become the gas station of the future for EVs

In the pilot, Starbucks will test usage rates and decide whether it wants to expand the service nationally as part of its larger sustainability plan, which is aiming to eventually make the company “resource positive,” including a goal to capture more carbon than it emits.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90730929/starbucks-wants-to-become-the-gas-station-of-the-future-for-evs
cars, innovation, technology, transportation

Volvo Brings In BlackBerry Veteran to Turn Its Cars Into iPhones on Wheels

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-30/volvo-brings-in-blackberry-veteran-to-turn-its-cars-into-iphones-on-wheels

As manufacturers try to turn their vehicles into rolling smartphone-like devices, the race will revolve around the next big things in chips that upgrade infotainment and vision systems, as well as the car’s general controls.

archetypes, cars, cities, culture mapping, forecasting, generations, government, history, language, politics, sustainability, transportation, urban planning

The Radical Roots of Bikesharing

Many of the issues the first White Bicycle Plan grappled with have also returned to public conversation. Arriving decades before technologies that manage the modern industry, like smartphones and GPS, Provo’s guerrilla bikes were still harbingers of the disruptive effect wrought by dockless bikes and scooter-sharing, as well as the concerns around sidewalks clutter and vandalism that have come in their wake.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-02-26/the-dutch-anarchists-who-launched-a-bikesharing-revolution