citystrides.com

www.nature.com

Urban congestion relief experiments through routing-app interventions

Traffic congestion remains a persistent challenge for urban mobility, increasing travel delays and elevating CO2 emissions. The widespread use of smartphones and GPS navigation creates new opportunities to mitigate congestion through routing optimizations in apps, yet real-world evidence for the effectiveness of such interventions is limited. Here we report large-scale empirical experiments evaluating routing-based traffic interventions on ~100 highly congested road segments across 10 major US cities. By rerouting a small share of Google Maps trips from targeted congested highway and arterial segments to less congested alternatives of equivalent road-classes with comparable travel times, we observe a city-average 2% increase in vehicle speeds on the intervened segments, along with improved travel times 0.7% and potential annual reductions exceeding 1,000 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions per city in the majority of studied locations. These findings provide evidence that marginal routing interventions involving a small proportion of vehicles can measurably enhance overall road network efficiency, offering a practical pathway to easing congestion and advancing urban sustainability.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-026-00443-x social preview image

digitalcommons.lmu.edu

TreeKIT: Measuring, Mapping, and Collaboratively Managing Urban Forests

As cities across the United States expand their stock of street trees to address a range of environmental sustainability goals, municipal foresters are increasingly turning to volunteers to supplement their tree care efforts. TreeKIT is a small non-profit organization that helps city dwellers collaboratively measure, map, and manage urban forests. Using TreeKIT’s mapping methods, volunteers are able to create spatially accurate inventories of street trees. In the process, volunteers learn to identify street trees and develop an effective appreciation for their local urban forest. The following article describes the TreeKIT mapping methods and ongoing efforts to scale these techniques for large, synchronous street tree census initiatives.

backroadstatus.com

Service Road Atlas

Service roads are an integral part of accessing the wilderness, but they're constantly changing over time. Use the Service Road Atlas to find the latest community driven updates on the roads you wish to access.

https://backroadstatus.com/ social preview image

clod.city

CLOD CITY

A procedural city where every building and pedestrian is a real Bluesky account.