The Hub 6/7/19: Clean Air Council’s Weekly Round-Up of Transportation News
“The Hub” is a weekly round-up of transportation related news in the Philadelphia area and beyond. Check back weekly to keep up to date on the issues Clean Air Council’s transportation staff finds important.
PlanPhilly: $2.73 million later, Philly realizes street sweepers are too wide for city’s narrow blocks – The City of Philadelphia recently purchased street sweepers for its upcoming street cleaning pilot. The vehicles purchased were too large for many of the narrow streets planned for the pilot. The city hopes to keep the vehicles and purchase additional smaller ones, but in the meantime workers will blow trash down narrow streets and onto wider ones to accommodate the vehicles.
Next City: Madison Says No to Pod-Based Transit – City officials in Madison, Wisconsin rejected a proposal to build an elevated pod monorail from Boston based startup Transit X. The network would have been placed so that 95% of Madison residents could walk to a stop in 5 minutes or less. One of the main reasons the proposal was rejected is the solar pod design remains untested, though Transit X is working on a test track outside of Atlanta.
Smart Cities Dive: How tech could help avert ‘public health crisis’ of rising road deaths – Traffic deaths, and pedestrian deaths in particular, are both on the rise worldwide. Smart technologies both onboard vehicles and at intersections could help to reverse that trend. Some studies suggest that lane keep assist, collision warning, blind spot detectors, and other advancements could reduce traffic fatalities by 40%.
City Lab: How to Cut 10,000 Parking Spaces Without Anyone Complaining – Amsterdam has been receiving attention in the American media for transforming street parking into green space and bike lanes on a huge scale. The Dutch media, however, seems unphased by the plan. Dutch transportation is far less auto-centric than that of the United States, enabling planners to create a city for people, not cars, without fear of reprisal.
Image Source: Next City
