…But the good times were over nearly as soon as they began. Complications involving the drift arctic sea ice—precisely the sort of complications that makes such an operation so treacherous in the first place, and so opposed by environmentalists and local residents—forced the operation to cease mere hours after it had gotten underway.
The problem with cycling in a big city is that many maps are outdated, and certain routes aren’t exactly ‘cyclist-safe’. With this in mind, BMW Guggenheim Lab and Lab City Project have created ‘Dynamic Connections’ – a crowd-sourced bike map of information for cyclists in Berlin. The map was created for German cyclists in order to “enable cyclists to mark the routes they frequently ride on a Google-based map”. Users are also able to answer a number of questions about that route regarding traffic flow, number of parked cars, visibility, topography, and the density of amenities along the route.
Good news! Mexico City’s Ecobici bike sharing program is set to get bigger. Much bigger! The plan is to increase the number of bikes from about 1,000 to around 4,000 over the next few weeks.
By some estimates, a single container ship can cause as much pollution as 50 million cars on the road. That is because until recently, these ships have been largely unregulated. But new emissions laws mean the shipping industry has to clean up its act, and some companies are looking to hydrogen fuel cells to lower their environmental impact.
There seems to be a subtle shift underway in the cultural valence of climate change. If the pendulum swung toward hyper-polarization and looney-tunery in 2009-2011, it seems to have reached its apogee and begun swinging back.
The PDF rules for the just-made-official new Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for model year 2017-2025 vehicles that was officially finalized at 54.5 miles per gallon recently are, as previously noted, over 1,200 pages long. We’ve been reading through them, and found some interesting tidbits regarding the fate of better, cleaner trucks.