Stanford University’s Calming Technology Lab has found evidence to support what most commuter cyclists already know: riding a bike to work instead of driving a car lowers one’s stress. Not only are you improving your own mental health you’ll be consuming less gas and save a lot of money while getting
Continue readingTag: car
Things Are Good: Paris to Spend €100m on Bike Lanes While Reducing Car Traffic
Paris has had a tough time with traffic and pollution in the city due to the number of cars. They have launched many environmentally friendly intitaves to curb the use of cars while making alternative transit solutions to cars more appealing. It’s working and is already inspiring other cities to
Continue readingThings Are Good: Toyota Releases 5,680 Patents for Fuel Cell Technology
Toyota has followed Tesla’s strategy of giving their patented technology away for free. The patent system is so obviously broken so it’s nice to see these large corporations just letting their patents go. Ultimately, this means that other car companies can now use fuel saving technology (or whatever Toyota has
Continue readingThings Are Good: London Lowered Speed Limits to Save Lives
Cars kill. Or is it like the gun debate – cars don’t kill people drivers kill people? Regardless of fault the results of car use as a primary means of transportation causes health problems and needless death. Cities around the world are taking steps to try and hold back cars
Continue readingThings Are Good: Adding Bike Lanes Reduces Traffic Delays
Bike lanes are wonderful. We’ve already seen that bike lanes create jobs, save lives, and help local economies. Now from New York City there is a transportation report that says adding bike lanes can reduce traffic delays. So what happened here to overcome the traditional idea that bike lanes lead
Continue readingThings Are Good: Helsinki Wants to Send Cars to Purgatory
The Helsinki bus station theory will change you life and now the Finnish government wants to change people’s lives by making cars pointless. In the coming decades they will make use of data and various transportations to make owning a car a pointless exercise in futility. In many urban centres
Continue readingThings Are Good: Swedes Get Free Bikes if They Promise to Drive Less
Car traffic cripples cities and destroys them. For the last hundred years the common solution to transportation issues was to cater to car drivers and this has left us with endless traffic and awful pollution. The solution today is a mixture of public transit and encouraging people to ride bikes.
Continue readingThings Are Good: Reducing Highway Size Doesn’t Negatively Impact Congestion
Nobody likes being stuck in traffic and in the recent past the solution was to build more roads (or add more lanes). Ironically this makes traffic worse as an increase in traffic capacity means more people will drive places. These narrow-minded solutions are still applied in some places like Toronto
Continue readingThings Are Good: Walking or Biking Through Neighbourhoods Makes You Like Them More
Walking or biking through neighbourhoods will increase the likelihood that you think positively of that space. A bunch of research has concluded that people have an increase tendency to positively judge an environment when exposed to it using more personal means of transportation. Whereas people who opted to drive a
Continue readingThings Are Good: 4 Theories Why US Teenagers Are Driving Less
Cars are horrible for the environment and car infrastructure can have very negative impact on local economies so it’s nice to see enthusiasm for driving diminishing in younger generations. American teens are less likely to have a license and less likely to want to own a car than previous generations.
Continue readingThings Are Good: Urban Highways Should Be Torn Down; Replaced By Useful Space
Car-dominated infrastructure is clearly bad for local communities, transit, the environment (local and global), and the economy. So why do so many places refuse to tear down crumbling urban highways? The addiction to the car is a powerful one in many parts of the world and we need to curb
Continue readingThings Are Good: The Amazing Drayson Electric Racing Car
The electric car racing league Formula E launches next year, which means that the racers need to build their cars now. The Drayson LMP 1 has 800 bhp and 4000 (!!) lb feet of torque all without a drop of petrol. This is a really impressive car and I can’t
Continue readingThings Are Good: How Racing Cars Helps Babies
For the most part, Formula 1 is just entertainment, but every now and then something really nifty comes out of it. Using models and algorithms developed to monitor an F1 car’s performance, some engineers figured out how to apply them to hospitals. During a Formula 1 race, a car sends
Continue readingThings Are Good: Formula E is the All-Electric Alternative to Formula 1
Car racing is a popular sport around the world and it used to be a great testing bed for new, more efficient, technology used in internal combustion engines. Today, the technological improvements seem to be more on material science rather than fuel efficiency (most racing leagues still allow leaded gasoline).
Continue readingmark a rayner | scribblings, squibs & sundry monkey joys: Another Day in Paradise
“Dude!” “Coko!” “Dude!” “Coko!” “Dude!” [sound of engine being gunned, squeal of tires … then the screams] Alltop also has opposable thumbs. Photo via Twisted Vintage.< Originally published May, 2010./h6>
Continue readingThings Are Good: Cameras Capture How Safely Cyclists Cruise
It’s clear that car drivers don’t comprehend cyclists, and often I hear drivers complain that bicyclists aren’t safe and tend to be “dangerous” on the road. It turns out that cyclists are safer than cars, cause way fewer collisions, and are amazingly great at avoiding a collision. To reach this
Continue readingThings Are Good: China to Build Car-Free City
The Chinese city of Chengdu will be getting a new neighbour, an entire city purpose built city for people instead of cars. China’s capital city Beijing is known for its smog problems and the Chinese government is under more and more pressure to implement environmentally-friendly policies. Creating sustainable urban centres
Continue readingThings Are Good: Urban Density Decreases Car Use
It’s well established that people living in urban areas use cars less frequently than their suburban and rural counterparts. Some argue that it is thanks to better transit services that urbanites don’t drive but there is another reason for success. Population density alone can make a striking impact on how
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Solar Powered Combustion Engine May Be in Your Future
This may sound counter-intutitive, but researches have begun a project to build an internal combustion engine (a common car engine) that runs off of solar power. Instead of using gas to ignite everything they want to heat water, add a dash of oil, to create a replacement to the overused pollution producing machine that is […]
Continue readingThings Are Good: Why Drivers Don’t Understand Cyclists
As an average cyclist I often find it confusing when drivers get their hate on for sustainable transit. Anyone who knows anything about the environment or living in an urban centre would acknowledge that bicycle infrastructure is important and creates a more vibrant city than car-dominated streets. Yet, car drivers
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