transportation

28 Articles

The Pontoon Bridge Being Floated As An NYC Transit Fix

March 8, 2018 by 96 Comments

New York City’s L train carries about 400,000 passengers a day, linking Manhattan and Brooklyn and bringing passengers along 14th Street, under the East River, and through the neighborhoods of Williamsburg, Bushwick, Ridgewood, Brownsville, and Canarsie. About 225,000 of these passengers pass through the Canarsie Tunnel, a two-tube cast iron rail tunnel built below the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn in 1924. Like many other New York City road and subway tunnels, the Canarsie Tunnel was badly damaged when Hurricane Sandy’s storm surge inundated the tubes with million of gallons of salt water. Six years later, the impending closure of the tunnel is motivating New Yorkers to develop their own ambitious infrastructure ideas.

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Train Time Ticker Will Save Your Morning Commute

October 27, 2016 by 13 Comments

The fatal combination of not being a early riser and commuting to work using public transit can easily result in missed buses or trains. Frustrated with missing train after train while fumbling with a complicated transit schedule app, [Fergal Carroll] created a Train Time Ticker to help his morning routine run right on time.

A Particle Photon hooked up to a 2.2″ TFT screen — both mounted on a breadboard with a button — fit the purpose tidily. Weekday mornings, the Ticker pulls — from a server he set up — the departure times for the specific station and platform along [Carroll]’s commute every three minutes; at all other times, the Ticker can be manually refreshed for any impending trips.

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Hackathon Alert: Clean Tech At TVCoG

October 13, 2016 by 2 Comments

At Hackaday, we get notified of a lot of the cool events going on in hackerspaces all around the world. We’d like to keep you informed too, just in case there’s something going on in your neighborhood.

So we’re going to start running a weekly column on Saturdays that groups together all of the upcoming week’s exceptional events and noteworthy gatherings. If your hackerspace has something going on, tell us about your event on or around the preceding Wednesday. We’ll see your space in on Hackaday!
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Trailblazing Artisans Of Road Building

November 17, 2015 by 28 Comments

A lot of us take roads for granted, at least until they are icy or torn up by construction. The concept of creating fixed paths seems to be in our firmware. Finding the shortest distance to food or water and marking a trail to it from home base has always been its own reward.

Roads have come a long way from the simple paths beaten by man and beast. But the basic configuration of paved roads hasn’t changed all that much since the Roman empire. Whatever they’re made of, they need to be able to drain water and support heavy loads.

New issues arose as modes of transportation shifted in favor of the automobile. Road surfaces needed to provide friction against tires. But how did we get from the stone-paved roads of Rome to the asphalt and concrete roads of today?

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Making A Mobility Scooter Drastically More Mobile

November 3, 2015 by 25 Comments

Do you have a spare mobility scooter sitting unused in your garage? Or, maybe you’ve got a grandmother who has been complaining about how long it takes her to get to bingo on Tuesdays? Has your local supermarket hired you to improve grocery shopping efficiency between 10am and 2pm? If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, then the guys over at Photon Induction have an “overclocked” mobility scooter build which should provide you with both inspiration and laughs.

They’ve taken the kind of inexpensive mobility scooter that can be found on Craigslist for a couple hundred dollars, and increased the battery output voltage to simultaneously improve performance and reduce safety. Their particular scooter normally runs on 24V, and all they had to do to drastically increase the driving speed was move that up to 60V (72V ended up burning up the motors).

Other than increasing the battery output voltage, only a couple of other small hacks were necessary to finish the build. Normally, the scooter uses a clutch to provide a gentle start. However, the clutch wasn’t up to the task of handling 60V, so the ignition switch was modified to fully engage the clutch before power is applied. The horn button was then used as the accelerator, which simply engages a solenoid with massive contacts that can handle 60V. The result is a scooter that is bound to terrify your grandmother, but which will get her to bingo in record time.

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Retrotechtacular: Fantastic Backyard Inventions Of Yore

July 28, 2015 by 9 Comments

News corporation [British Pathé] created many newsreels and documentaries throughout their 60-year history. Recently, the company released scores of films from their archives and put them on the internet. Here is a delightful collection of short films they created that highlight strange and wonderful inventions in various fields, including transportation and communication.

One of the standout inventions is the Dynasphere, a mono-wheeled vehicle that probably deserves its own week in the Retrotechtacular spotlight. There are a couple of pedal-powered planes that may have inspired the Gossamer Condor, and a hover scooter that resembles an air hockey striker and doubles as a leaf blower. In another film, a man drives a Vespa to the banks of the Thames and parks it. He pulls a fin down from each side of the scooter, turning it into a seafaring craft. When he snaps his fingers, a cute girl appears from somewhere just outside the frame. She climbs on the back, and they take off across the water.

The average running time of these films is about two minutes. Some of them are much shorter, prompting many questions. Fortunately, most of the video descriptions have links with more information about these marvelous inventions. Almost all of the inventors in these films show a complete disregard for safety, but nearly everyone involved seems to be having the time of their lives.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Light Electric Utility Vehicle

June 7, 2015 by 32 Comments

[Chris] lives in South Sudan, where there are a lot of poor areas with terrible infrastructure. One of the bigger challenges for this area is getting people and materials over roads that are either bad or don’t exist. Normal vehicles aren’t built for the task, and a Hilux or Land Cruiser is much to expensive. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Chris] is building a rugged low-cost utility vehicle platform for the developing world.

This battery-powered, four-wheel cart is made out of what [Chris] could find. The frame is made out of 50x50mm angle iron that’s welded together, with the body panels fabricated out of 1200x2400x1.2mm sheet that’s sourced locally. While [Chris] would like better wheels, the cheap Chinese motorcycle wheels are everywhere and cheap – $65, which includes the bearings, breaks, and sprockets. It even has higher ground clearance than the Land Cruiser.

[Chris] already has a prototype of his project built and it’s rolling around. You can check out a video of that below.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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