You are browsing the archives of transportation.

The second place winner in the recent VisionWorks competition, which sought new ideas and technologies to help create and sustain better living conditions, was an unusual proposal by Philipp Hermes that involves using track-mounted containers to ship objects, documents and goods around the city. Though the project, dubbed Urban Mole (pictured), sounds expensive, the beauty [...]

We’d love to ride around town stuntin’ on our blinged-out bike (we’ll refrain from using the term “pimped” because we find it offensive), but honestly, the more inconspicuous your bike can be, the better. It won’t get stolen, it won’t matter when you fall (as we did, very drunkenly, on Friday) and it gets banged [...]

As General Motors continues to repurpose and shape-shift in order to remain competitive, how creative are they really getting? Presumably they’ll still be manufacturing cars, instead of shifting to bikes, trains or some other more sustainable and long-lasting solution. We imagine they’re also sticking to mostly gas-powered vehicles, instead of actually doing something new like [...]

Suitcases, surprisingly, are a very hard item to shop for. After all, they all look essentially the same, and the options seem to boil down to a few generic models that are all fairly uninspired. Then, of course, you realize that the $20 suitcase you bought is actually vastly structurally inferior to the $250 suitcase [...]

We got a little distracted on Saturday with Independence Day activities, but we’d be remiss not to mention another important July 4th celebration: the building of the first bus. We can’t really pin down in what year this feat of engineering first occurred (some say 1662, others the 1820s, an some 1895), but at any [...]

Though we’ve had conflicting reports, at least one source claims that today is UFO Day (others say July 8, the date of the original Roswell, New Mexico sighting, others say July 2 for no specific reason). At any rate, since everybody is so vague on the whole unidentified flying object thing (something we’ve noted before), [...]

When we were kids (like, two years ago) we had this amazing book of cutaways that featured diagrams showing the interior mechanisms of pyramids, submarines, opera houses, tanks, space shuttles and such. It was huge, colorful and chockablock full of facts, and we were pretty convinced it was the coolest book in the world – [...]

Bus stops are interesting street furniture items. Everybody’s got them, nobody’s are the same (although New York’s new corporate steel ones are strikingly generic) and we pretty much all use them at least a few times every year.So why do they tend to be so poorly designed and boring?
As Toxel’s listicle of 15 Unusual and [...]

Trains evoke all kinds of nostalgic memories of trips through Europe and Alfred Hitchcock movies, but as America supposedly suits up for the era of high-speed rail (great idea, but you’ll forgive us for doubting that it will ever actually happen), it’s probably about time we got our train knowledge in order.
mental_floss has the perfect [...]

On this date some years ago, research tells us, the first modern submarine was completed. Not surprisingly, it was the result of a major military research and development project, and a virtually limitless budget. What about the little guys, though? What about the toolshed handymen and wannabe mermaids (to indulge all manner of gendered stereotypes) [...]