Category: Infrastructure

Arup’s Rail Resiliency Framework protects transport infrastructure from global warming

Global warming has had disastrous consequences for the world’s transport infrastructure, hurting trade and quality of life. Just this week, New York’s Third Avenue Bridge connecting the Bronx and Manhattan literally stopped working because of an ongoing heatwave, creating dramatic complications for the region’s commuters. Continue reading on The Architect’s Newspaper   The post Arup’s

Electric charging roads for EVs might just be the next new thing

Believe it or not before the proliferation of the gasoline powered car, electric vehicles (EV) were the norm. The first crude EV was introduced in 1832 by Robert Anderson, and became widely popular before the  Model T in 1908. EVs saw a resurgence in the 1990’s, became a stereotype vehicle for environmentalists, and now after

Waymo launches its fully driverless taxi service in Phoenix

Two years after the Alphabet-owned Waymo launched a limited self-driving taxi service in the Metro Phoenix, Arizona, area (and two years after people started attacking the autonomous cars), the company has kicked off a fully driverless car service in and around Phoenix. Whereas in 2018 passengers would be assuaged by the site of a human

Michigan will build a city-connecting highway for self-driving cars

A 40-mile-long corridor reserved for autonomous vehicles may soon connect Detroit and Ann Arbor. Last Thursday, on August 13, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced the creation of the Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Corridor, which will be established through a public-private partnership. Mobility company Cavnue has been selected as the project’s Master Developer, and will help

The pandemic put a strain on our digital infrastructures, especially in under-served communities

Much has been made about the physical separation necessitated by the novel coronavirus. But the pandemic has also laid bare the digital divide separating communities across the country. Over the past few months, millions of Americans have had to shift their daily activities online with the help of web-based applications, productivity tools, and videoconferencing platforms.

Firms turn to school buses, shipping containers for speculative COVID-19 testing hubs

Despite all the news of re-openings, lifted restrictions, al fresco options dining, and a return to something more closely resembling “normal,” COVID-19 is still very much with us. And despite the defeatist/downplayed/nothing to see here stance embraced by the current presidential administration, the United States is still in the midst of an unprecedented public health

URBAN-X 6 showcases new tech solutions at A/D/O

This past Thursday, URBAN-X hosted its sixth demo day in Brooklyn at A/D/O, where startups that were showing what Micah Kotch, the startup accelerator’s managing director, called “novel solutions to urban life.” URBAN-X, which is organized by MINI, A/D/O’s founder, in partnership with the venture firm Urban Us, began incubating urban-focused startups back in 2016.

A collaboration of Dutch companies wants to 3D print an entire pedestrian bridge

Three Dutch organizations—the materials company DSM, the engineering firm Royal HaskoningDHV, and the 3D printer manufacture CEAD—have teamed up to create a printer capable of printing continuous glass- or carbon-fiber-reinforced thermoplastics. Currently, they are demonstrating the capabilities of printing structural elements, and even, they hope, entire pedestrian bridges, with CEAD’s CFAM Prime printer which can create

Robot boats autonomously bridge a gap in Amsterdam

A joint team of researchers at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolis Solutions (AMS) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Senseable City Lab have developed what they’re calling “the world’s first dynamic” bridge. Powered by a fleet of autonomous electric boats, roundAround will connect the Amsterdam City Center with the developing Marineterrein Amsterdam, a partly decommissioned

New 3D-printed, crash-proof benches debut in Times Square

This May, designer Jou Doucet x Partners, working with the Times Square Design Lab (TSqDL), debuted a 3D-printed concrete alternative to the now-common heavy concrete planters, bollards, and more traditional “Jersey” barriers that surround public places and prominent buildings across the country. Anti-terror street furniture is the often ugly urban peripheral that plugs into our

GXN thinks the future of construction could be flying 3D printers

Most 3D printers, no matter their size, operate in a pretty similar way: they move along a grid to deposit material, sliding on axes in a fixed manner within a frame. Even those with more flexible arms remain fixed at a point. GXN, the research-focused spinoff of the Danish architecture firm 3XN, is looking to

Brooklyn-based startup is using robots for rebar assembly

Two Brooklyn-based construction entrepreneurs began their business with a simple observation: steel rebar, used in concrete construction throughout the world, isn’t always easy to work with. Ian Cohen and Daniel Blank noticed this when they were watching wind turbines being erected. “Watching the process of people manually moving these huge, heavy objects looked dangerous and

Chicago-based start up wants to make a digital clone of a city

In Jorge Luis Borges’s 1946 one-paragraph short story “On Exactitude in Science,” a fictional 17th-century individual, Suarez Miranda, tells of a time that the “Cartographers Guilds” made a map of their empire so accurately that it matched it entirely, at 1:1 scale, point by point. Of course, this map was utterly useless. This meditation on

A team of researchers thinks autonomous electric cars could outdo the subway

A partnership between the state-owned Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE), the London-based architecture and technology firm PLP Labs (the research spinoff of PLP Architecture), and LogistikCentrum have released a new study and report proposing a new direction for public transit. Called NuMo, for New Urban Mobility, the proposed technology allows for highly efficient, electric-powered home-to-destination

Bendable concrete could make infrastructure safer—and cheaper

Bendable concrete is one step closer to hitting the market. Bendable concrete or Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC) were originally developed in the 1990s by Victor C. Li at the University of Michigan, whose research was in part inspired by how animals like abalone produce the inner nacre of their shells. However, cost, supply chain concerns,

Virgin Hyperloop One hits major bumps in the wake of Saudi controversy

One of the world’s most dogged transportation professionals—and former head of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA)—will now head up Virgin’s venture into high-speed rail service. The Verge reported that Jay Walder has left his role as CEO of bike-sharing company, Motivate, in order to lead Los Angeles–based Virgin Hyperloop One, which appears to be in financial trouble after it

Federal government shuts down self-driving school bus program in Florida

The dreams of a fully autonomous school bus are on hold for a little while longer, at least in Babcock Ranch, Florida. On October 19, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) ordered a complete halt to the self-driving school bus program in the Florida town, which had been transporting kids to-and-from school along a three-block stretch. Transdev North America had

UNStudio unveils flexible hyperloop hub designs for Europe

UNStudio recently unveiled plans for a series of flexible and modular “Stations of the Future” that would service a massive hyperloop railway network throughout Europe. The Dutch architecture firm, founded by Ben van Berkel, proposed a concept station made from “tessellating” modules that can flex, adapt, and expand to fit into various locations, such as a crowded city center, the

Lyft buys Citi Bike owner, is now America’s largest bike-share business

  Lyft has gone multimodal and acquired most of bike-share company Motivate, supplementing its car-for-hire business model with ownership of the country’s largest network of docked bicycles. The purchase means that Lyft is now the owner of New York’s Citi Bike program and will continue to maintain Motivate’s existing bike-share programs across eight cities. Lyft’s purchase, coming in at a rumored $250

MX3D’s robot fabricated bridge wins the European Commission’s STARTS PRIZE

Amsterdam’s MX3D-printed bridge, designed by Joris Laarman Lab in collaboration with ARUP, has been awarded the STARTS Prize 2018. The STARTS Prize recognizes innovative projects built along interdisciplinary principles combining art, science and technology. Crossing Amsterdam’s Oudezijds Achterburgwal, the stainless steel pedestrian bridge is approximately forty feet in length and over twenty feet wide. The

Elon Musk wants to turn the Hyperloop’s “excavated muck” into housing materials

Hot off of a flamethrower fundraising sale for Elon Musk’s side project, the Hyperloop tunnel digging The Boring Company, Musk has announced that the muck, rock, and detritus produced by the company’s tunneling would be turned into usable bricks. The first announcement from Musk came on March 26, when he tweeted that the rock mined from the company’s California test tunnels would be

Electric scooter companies receive cease-and-desist letter from City of San Francisco

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera has filed a cease-and-desist order targeting the privately-operated dockless scooters that have seemingly taken over downtown San Francisco streets in recent weeks.  In a letter sent to the three dockless scooter companies currently operating in the city, Herrera decried the upstarts for “continu(ing) to operate an unpermitted motorized scooter rental

Elon Musk to bypass environmental review for test tunnel in L.A.

Billionaire Elon Musk and his Boring Company are moving forward with plans to build an underground network of personal vehicle tunnels below the streets of Los Angeles. After drilling a preliminary tunnel below the Tesla and SpaceX company headquarters in nearby Hawthorne, California, the company is now moving forward with an additional 2.7-mile “proof-of-concept” tunnel

Elon Musk does a 180 on mass transit and makes Hyperloop buses his first priority

The Boring Company, Elon Musk’s Hyperloop tunnel-digging side company, may have a new mission after Musk claimed that he would be shifting towards expanding mass transit. Although research into digging a traffic-bypassing “urban loop” under Los Angeles will continue, Musk tweeted that instead of moving cars and personal pods, the Hyperloop network would focus on moving 150-mile-per-hour buses before anything

Winners of MTA’s first genius award announced

The winners of the MTA’s Transit Genius Challenge, which was first announced last spring, have been selected. The award, which set aside $3 million to be split among winners in three categories, is part of the city’s plan to modernize the aging subway system, which has been experiencing ever increasing delays and other issues affecting its

Patricia Urquiola Talks Self-Driving Cars, Technology, and the Future of Design

Last week, Spanish designer Patricia Urquiola was awarded the Design Excellence Award from Collab, an affiliate group of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in conjunction with the opening of the first solo exhibition of her work. Known for her inventive and playful approach to both architecture and design, Urquiola shared her experiences studying under Achille Castiglioni, integrating new technologies,

Michigan’s Mcity selects startups to test self-driving technologies

A tech haven located on the northern campus of the University of Michigan is redefining Michigan’s ‘Motor King’ reputation. Mcity is a 32–acre complex designed to mimic urban and suburban city environments. Complete with painted building facades, dummy pedestrians, bike lanes, roads and highway ramps, the controlled laboratory environment eliminates real-world risks and serves as a unique testing

How sensing technologies can reshape architecture, public health, and cities

Carlo Ratti is the founder of the Turin, Italy-based firm Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) and director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab. In both roles, he explores how technology can improve the built environment and, it follows, our lives. Recently in Turin, CRA completed the Agnelli Foundation headquarters, which employs a smartphone app to let occupants set personal temperature

Sidewalk Labs may develop its own district to test smart city tech

This May 3 to May 6, the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s Duggal Greenhouse is hosting the inaugural Smart Cities NYC conference and expo. Smart Cities NYC is ambitious in its scope, with a global selection of speakers whose backgrounds include government, the tech industry, academia, real estate/development, and design. Autonomous vehicles, public health, construction technology, resilient urban landscapes,