Technology

A number of innovative new bicycle designs were on display at this year's International Bicycle Design Competition, including a bike that folds into its own backpack carrying case -- making it easy to take on public transit.

In an incredible recycling operation that reduces global warming, a waste hauler is building a facility to produce Liquefied Natural Gas from methane emitted from its California landfill to fuel its garbage trucks.

Despite naysayers, Masdar City is moving forward. The goal: to be the world's first modern-day carbon-free city.

Transportation Secretary Mary Peters (or, more likely, her communications team) has taken up blogging, but the new PR outlet comes with a title that's not so friendly to all modes of transportation.

$153 million in congestion reduction funds that had been awarded to New York City will now go to Chicago to apply congestion pricing to street parking spaces. Funds will also go toward developing pilot Bus Rapid Transit routes on dedicated lanes.

Officials in the United Kingdom are looking at a new technique to deal with frozen winter roads -- by collecting and saving summer heat.

A 17-story condominium tower in Boise, Idaho is being built on a 32-foot-wide footprint. Workers talk about the challenges of constructing such a skinny building.

A new interactive mapping website launched by the Center for Neighborhood Technology in partnership with The Brookings Institution shows how affordability changes from neighborhood to neighborhood based on housing and transportation.

Responding to the growing backslash against cell phone chatter, the city of Graz, Austria has banned cell phone use on its public transit system.

Using laser technology, two artists have created a new type of "temporary graffiti" -- light shows that use public places as canvasses for their laser art.

Variable parking rates and online parking availability are features of a pilot program meant to increase convenience and cut congestion on the road.

Avoiding traffic congestion may soon be as easy as surfing the web, thanks to new web software that maps out congestion and calculates the best and most efficient driving routes.

Forget slogans and fancy trains. If transit agencies just focused on getting people where they need to go in a consistent, reliable (and preferably quicker) way, more people would abandon their cars.

As the site adds more transit systems to its database, some hope that Google's transit route planner could become as useful as its car route mapping software.

Hot technologies like blogs, mashups, YouTube, Flickr, and social networking are among the most notable of new Internet technologies that are collectively known as Web 2.0. These technologies offer great possibilities for planners.

Some transit agencies are hoping to woo riders by providing internet access on bus and rail vehicles, allowing commuters to check email and surf the web on the way to work.

The City of Oak Harbor, Washington is giving residents a chance to sound off about planning and development issues on several blogs.

Pittsburgh couple sues Google for invasion of privacy after photos of their home are published on Google's "Street View" mapping feature.

The city has outfitted more than 1,000 parking meters with new technology to allow motorists to pay over the phone. Yet most of them haven't noticed.