I’ve been traveling a lot the last week (currently doing the “milk run” to Australia), hence the lack of updates here, but here’s a few of the myriad things that have come across the transom (apart from those I’ve posted on Twitter):

A reminder of my own piece on Slate about London Transport posters.

London bike hire scheme data visualizations.

A “safer” way to text and drive (as a thought exercise try replacing the word “texting” with drinking as you listen to this).

Endlessly hypnotic: Bicycle rush hour in Copenhagen.

Excellent bike-related stencil art from Adelaide-based Peter Drews.

Adam Greenfield ponders the complexity of bus networks. (”You know I believe that cities are connection machines, networks of potential subject to Metcalfe’s law. What this means in the abstract is that the total value of an urban network rises as the square of the number of nodes connected to it. What this means in human terms is that a situation in which people are too intimidated to ride the bus (or walk down the street, or leave the apartment) is a sorrow compounded. Again: everything they could offer the network that is the city is lost. And everything we take for granted about the possibilities and promise of great urban places is foreclosed to them.)

New standards dictate 3.5 FPS average pedestrian walking speeds.

Forget trashing hotel rooms — today’s indie rockers spend their time twittering about parking tickets!

Recalls media friendly but distort true road safety picture, via the WSJ.

The Chinese used car market.

How about an “ignition interlock” for habitual speeders in Australia?

The always good Carl Bialik on “traffic math.” (and I liked this bit: Nicholas Taylor, a research fellow at the consulting company Transport Research Laboratory in Wokingham, England, says that adding road capacity can be effective if it isn’t perceived as adding capacity. Opening a highway’s shoulder to traffic during peak hours appears to work, Mr. Taylor says, because it is “not seen as a whole new provision of the road. There’s a psychological element to it.”)

Driver distracted by sex toy.

Driver who thought (fatally) he was piloting the Star Trek enterprise ruled “insane.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 29th, 2010 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Etc., Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.