Automobiles

Healthy Travel Modes: Correlations, Causality and Caution

Driving makes people fatter and less healthy, right? Fanis Grammenos warns planners and urban designers that the answer is not so simple, and misusing the statistics will weaken effective debate.

13 October 2011 - 7:58am

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A Reality Check for Driverless Cars

For autonomous vehicles to roam the freeway, infrastructure and the law will need to accelerate and catch up with innovation, experts say.

21 June 2011 - 9:00am

The Infrastructurist

The Car as Protector, and Prosthetic

Asrai Ord explicates Rebecca Solnit's belief that "the car has become a prosthetic… for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale."

25 September 2010 - 7:00am

The Planning Pool

From Idyllic Nature to the Hip, Urban Landscape

Ads for automobiles have depicted their vehicles swooping through dramatic natural landscapes, but as Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez note, car ads have moved into the city.

5 June 2010 - 7:00am

The Huffington Post

The End of the Automobile Era?

Could this be the end? Two recent events signal a dramatic shift in American attitudes towards transportation and the proper role of transportation in making American cities, says Norman Garrick.

12 April 2010 - 5:00am

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In U.S., More Cars Thrown Away Than Sold

13.6 million car registrations were filed in the last 15 months, and 14.8 million were disposed of in that same period.

9 April 2010 - 11:00am

BNET

The Car Reconsidered

When most people use their cars in urban settings, what sort of vehicle is optimal? MIT's Media Lab asks the question, in their quest to invent the next generation of personal mobility.

18 March 2010 - 12:00pm

Metropolis Magazine

"In the early days of his development, man realized that certain members of the animal kingdom could be made useful to him." So begins a rumination by architect Victor Gruen on the process of domestication and why we can't seem to domesticate the automobile.

15 March 2010 - 5:00am

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Traffic Accidents Poised to Become the 5th Leading Cause of Death by 2030

The Infrastructurist examines a new infographic published by the World Health Organization (WHO) as part of their Global Status Report.

13 March 2010 - 1:00pm

The Infrastructurist

Michael Dudley

New Books Depict Car Culture at a Turning Point

Mon, 02/08/2010 - 07:26

Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster
By Paul Ingrassia
Random House, 306 pages, $32

Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on Our Lives
By Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez
Palgrave, 272 pages, $34

Automobiles dominate our economies, our cities and our popular culture. As these new titles make abundantly apparent, they also tend to imbue their makers and owners with either delusions or arrogance that can lead to dangerously misguided decision-making, both behind the wheel and in corporate boardrooms.

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older posts

Clash of Subways and Car Culture in Chinese Cities

The question is whether the burrowing machines can outrace China’s growing love affair with the automobile.

27 March 2009 - 1:00pm

The New York Times

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2 comments

The American Car

On an unexpected joyride in a souped-up BMW, a group of environmentalists ponder the past and future of cars.

7 October 2008 - 10:00am

Culture11

Three Cheers for the Automobile

Former Congressman Ernest Istook discusses why the automobile is the ultimate manifestation of freedom, mobility, and personal choice, and argues for a re-allocation of public spending away from mass transit and other alternatives.

11 August 2008 - 12:00pm

WorldNetDaily

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7 comments

Racers Battle Civil War Buffs in N.C.

Banker Dave Ridson wants to build a racetrack on a site preservationists say is an historic Civil War site. But where the battle actually fought is a matter of debate.

11 June 2008 - 11:00am

The Houston Chronicle

Samuel Staley

Are transit ridership numbers more pomp than substance?

Wed, 06/11/2008 - 09:38

The American Public Transit Association reports that transit ridership climbed to 10.3 billion trips during the first quarter of 2008, the “highest number of trips taken in fifty years.” That represents a 3.3 percent increase overall over the previous year while vehicle miles traveled, a measure of demand for car travel, fell by 2.3 percent, they observe.

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Rural U.S. Hit Hardest By Gas Prices

Gas prices have just surpassed the $4 mark, but the impact is far from uniform throughout the nation- poor, rural counties, particularly in the south and west, suffer disproportionately.

11 June 2008 - 10:00am

The New York Times

The Connection Between Gas Prices and Car Choice, Explained

The cartoon strip 'This Modern World' looks at how gas prices have influenced motorists' selection of motor vehicles in the United States - from the 1970's to 'five minutes from now'.

7 June 2008 - 1:00pm

Salon.com

The ROI of Hybrids

With gas prices as they are, does it make sense to ditch your SUV and buy a hybrid? Count on the Wall St. Journal to break it down a discussion of your return on investment.

5 June 2008 - 9:00am

Wall St. Journal

Canadians Also Confused By Traffic Circles

Americans are notoriously bad at navigating European-style traffic circles, but it seems Canadians are also confounded.

31 May 2008 - 9:00am

The Edmonton Sun

Samuel Staley

Horsepower vs Horse Power and Sustainability

Wed, 10/24/2007 - 04:47

How sustainable is the internal combustion engine? The answer depends, in part, on your historical perspective. This point becomes startlingly evident in a recent article by UCLA doctoral student Eric Morris in the most recent issue of Access magazine. The magazine publishes accessible versions of academic research and is published by the University of California Transportation Center at Berkeley.

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