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Feb 28, 2011
Heavy Rail, Oddities

The New York Subway As Musical Instrument

Alexander Chan is a musician, artist and and employee of Google Creative Labs in Brooklyn, New York. He’s also created one of the most magnificent interpretations of a subway map I’ve yet to ever see: ANY CHARACTER HERE

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Feb 23, 2011
Heavy Rail, Oddities

The Metro Inspiro: A Subway By BMW

Most of us can’t afford to drive a BMW everyday to work. But what if you could ride a BMW everyday? The Siemens Group recently commissioned BMW’s subsidiary Designworks USA to design a new kind of subway train. Dubbed the Metro Inspiro, it is a train the likes of which you’ve never seen: Cork floors,...

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Feb 22, 2011
Oddities, Other Transit Techs

Back To The Horse and Buggy

Gondola Project reader Sean sent me a link to the above image. It dates from the 1950’s and comes from Vancouver’s regional transit authority, Translink, and was plucked from their archives. Even 60 years ago transit authorities recognized the need for grade-separation and rights-of-way for transit: “freeing the limited street space for commercial vehicles and...

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Jan 24, 2011
Oddities

Bringing Up The Topic Of Gondola Transit…

… is bound to be fraught with perils. Lacking the sufficient pitch, people are bound to imagine whatever they feel like. And there’s a very good chance that the image they conjure in their heads will be the exact opposite of what you desire. Tell someone you can use gondolas as transit and they might...

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Jan 06, 2011
Oddities

Thinking (Differently) About Transit

I think it fair to say that most North Americans are conditioned to believe there are only a handful of transit modes in the world: Car, Bus and Train. And I’m not so sure most transit planners are any different. It’s not intentional conditioning. There’s no one brainwashing us, it’s just what we’ve grown up...

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Jan 05, 2011
Oddities

Public Transit Ziplines?

Ryan sends a link to an op-ed piece in the Waterloo Record: “Truly innovative ideas for public transit are needed to make progress. . . A zipline is a version of a ropeway. They originated to cross valleys and gorges because they are safe, easy to operate, and inexpensive to build.” The author goes on to...

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Jan 04, 2011
Monorails, Oddities

The Paradox Of Established Technologies

Quick! Hands up if you own an iPad! (Good, now hold that thought because I’ll get back to it at the end of this post.) A comment on a recent post over at Human Transit caught my eye: The post was titled All Aboard The Canadian Hydrogen Overhead Monorail Express and dealt with Canadian Inventor...

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Dec 08, 2010
Oddities

The Village & The Train

This arrived in my inbox last week and is amazing. Enjoy:

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Dec 01, 2010
Oddities

The Durie Hill Elevator

The following is a guest post by Wellington Cycleways’ Matt Thredgold. Steven asks us what we can learn from elevators. He notes that they are the world’s most used form of public transit. It is perhaps stretching the definition of public transit a bit to include elevators, but in some places in the world elevators...

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Nov 25, 2010
Oddities, Proposals & Concepts, The Solar Serpent

The Solar Serpent

I don’t know if this is insane or inspired . . . Swedish architect Mans Tham recently proposed we enclose highways with solar panels. Specifically exploring the concept as it pertains to Los Angeles’ Santa Monica Freeway, Thams’ idea “would see 24km (15 miles) of LA’s Santa Monica Freeway covered in solar panels – with...

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