Speedcam Anywhere

'Step back' - air pollution at pedestrian crossings

Every busy road produces a cloud of pollution you can't see. Where you stand in it matters more than most people might realise.

Paris said au revoir to cars. Air pollution maps reveal a dramatic change.

Air pollution fell substantially as the city restricted car traffic and made way for parks and bike lanes.

The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and S.U.V.s

The vehicles on American roads have grown larger — and they are killing thousands more pedestrians, a Times investigation found.

Yohan on Twitter / X

For six months, Google Maps sent a slice of drivers in ten American cities down deliberately slower routes.About 30 seconds slower on average, and under 2% of trips were touched. The experiment ran on roughly 100 of the most congested road segments in each city, switching on… pic.twitter.com/5cshNdmWU2— Yohan (@yohaniddawela) August 28, 2026

Reducing car dependence: benefits, strategies, unintended consequences, and future directions of post-car urban transitions

This paper presents the state of the art of post-car urban transitions. It begins with an overview of the impact of automobility on planetary and human well-being. The benefits of post-car cities a...

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.

Speed: How It Explains the World - Vaclav Smil

In a world that feels like it’s moving faster than ever, Smil examines how our relentless pursuit of speed – in areas such as production, travel and communication – shapes not only our technological landscape but also our social and environmental realities. And through engaging anecdotes and striking statistics, Smil challenges the assumption that faster is always better.

Britain’s cars and SUVs are growing bigger – but there is a way to stop this deadly ‘carspreading’ | Christian Wolmar

Larger vehicles crowd our roads and are far more dangerous to pedestrians. Let’s curb them before they do even more damage, says says transport commentator Christian Wolmar

"Cars are parked 95% of the time". Let's check!

"Most people in transportation focus on the five percent of the time that cars are moving. But the average car is parked 95 percent of the ...

Americans’ love affair with big cars is killing them

New analysis shows that the heaviest vehicles kill more people than they save in crashes

Global Warming Is Rapidly Accelerating, New Paper Finds

A new study found the first statistically significant evidence that global warming is ramping up at a horrifying rate.

Reflections from the Alpine Trail | Offprint

The unfulfilled promise of Bay Area slow and leisurely cycling.

Cycling like the Dutch would slash the world’s carbon footprint

If everybody cycled like the Dutch, we could offset the UK or Australia’s entire carbon footprint.

‘No plate? No problem’: High-tech cameras capture more than license plates

Flock Safety’s high-tech cameras capture many identifying details about cars and other vehicles.