tingilinde

ford's 1967 electric city microcar

Just a concept, but for urban and some suburban use cases something this small could work.

 

 

looking deeply into montreal's subway tickets

Ken Shirriff looks at the super simple/super cheap disposable chip in a subway ticket.

when ship owners abandon ships

and crews...

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Shipowners often abandon crew members when they are hit by rising fuel costs, debt or unexpected repairs they can’t afford. Some owners vow to pay when their finances turn around. But those promises can mean little to the men on board, who often resort to handouts for food and basic supplies. Many are also supporting families back home and risk losing everything if they step off their ships.

Crew members or the countries where the ships are registered or docked can pursue the shipowners in court. But recovering past wages can be a yearslong battle that often fails.

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a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

some tips if you fly with expensive and fragile kit

A photographer's bad experience with United and some tips if you fly with fragile gear.

 

on radial flux motors for cars

Non-supercars that is.

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Axial-flux motors won't necessarily offer more power, but they are so much lighter and smaller that their proponents say they have the potential to transform almost every other key measure of an EV's performance—and the entire architecture of a car designed around them.

By fitting axial flux motors into the wheels, the spaces in a car's body currently occupied by motors could be largely vacated, clearing the way for more batteries, people, or stuff, and permitting the sort of design exuberance that EVs have long promised but never quite delivered.

More importantly, this new design of motor might help address the growing public backlash against overweight, expensive EVs. They might reduce the weight of a typical EV by around 200 kilograms (440 pounds)—half in the motors themselves, and half from the mass-compounding effect which allows you to reduce the weight of other systems such as batteries and brakes as a result

By sending mass into a virtuous downward spiral, carmakers could increase range, decrease cost, and perhaps even preserve the agile handling of lightweight cars, which enthusiasts also worry might disappear with the advent of the EV.

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gm and spying on customer's driving behavior

They harvested information on how cars are driven without permission and sold it to insurance companies. This sounds like the basis for a big lawsuit.  Other companies that make connected cars may well be doing the same thing.

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Automakers have been selling data about the driving behavior of millions of people to the insurance industry. In the case of General Motors, affected drivers weren’t informed, and the tracking led insurance companies to charge some of them more for premiums. I’m the reporter who broke the story. I recently discovered that I’m among the drivers who was spied on.

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Not a good way to build brand and dealer loyalty. 

 

a history of the lirr

I used it a lot when I was living on Long Island.

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Walt Whitman imagined Long Island as a fish; for Robert Moses, it was a whale, with its head at the Narrows and its tail flukes in the Atlantic Ocean. For territorial reasons, New York State insists Long Island isn’t an island at all, but a peninsula; the U.S. Supreme Court agrees. But in truth, ever since most people stopped getting around by boat, Long Island has operated like an increasingly crowded railroad apartment: Suffolk County residents can’t go anywhere without traveling west through Nassau County. And from Nassau, the only way out is through Queens.

The Long Island Rail Road’s tracks connect Manhattan physically with an island that was sundered politically when Brooklyn and the western half of Queens became part of New York City in 1898. Its barrier beaches and terminal glacial moraines are still there, but ever since the consolidation, Long Island’s name has inspired double vision. Long Island is most commonly understood to refer to Nassau and Suffolk counties — but the majority of New York City’s residents live on it.

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the jones act

Every once and awhile we're reminded of this old and extremely stupid piece of protectionism that comes at a big cost to the economy.  Here's a nice piece on it.

    among other things..

   

 

 

chinese with a swedish accent

A path to take on everyone else.

And Ford announced they lost well over $100k for each EV they sold last quarter.

 

are we there yet?

A New Yorker piece on recent doings with flying cars.

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Most responsible urban planners believe that public transit is a political problem, not a technological one. The tools to improve urban mobility—trains, trams, bicycles, sidewalks—have been around for a long time. The issue isn’t that we were promised flying cars and got a hundred and forty characters; it’s our attachment to a nostalgic kind of gizmo-first futurism, one that speaks to a profound failure of the national imagination. There’s something a little dismal about the fact that the mid-century dream of the future might, if everything goes perfectly according to plan, come to fruition in the form of saving half an hour en route to J.F.K. Then again, that isn’t too far from the initial vision. In an age of abundance, the promise of the future sold to affluent suburbanites was one of ever-greater consumer ease. George Jetson was not dizzyingly free; he had a flying car that folded up into a briefcase, and he used it to get to work quickly.

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tl;dr:  don't get too excited yet