New York City is making life easier for bikers and pedestrians.

Douglass Rushkoff at Boing Boing reports that the MTA buses in New York are replacing their flat, touch-sensitive strips with the more physically interactive pull cords as the new way to signal the driver to stop.
[via Boing Boing]

Delta will soon be implementing new seats in their coach class cabin, collectively called “The Cozy Suite”, Thompson Solutions‘ new seat configuration intended to give passengers a more comfortable, snoozable ride. The seats’ design is the result of a nearly 7 year process of research, experimentation, and testing by Thompson Solutions. According to Wired:
[Thompson] started by observing passenger behavior on both short- and long-haul flights. Thompson’s Brian Rogers says the design team came away with two main findings: passengers trying to sleep on long flights tend to position themselves at an angle, and those sitting at the window seat generally [...]

If you ever thought you heard echoes under the high heels of women on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, it’s possible you weren’t just hearing things. In 1981, Brooklyn native Bob Diamond confirmed the existence of a massive tunnel that stretches some 1,600 feet under Atlantic Ave. Recently, there has been a flurry of renewed interest in the tunnel, including a documentary currently in production about Diamond’s search. In fact, the story of Diamond’s quest nearly rivals the excitement of his discovery.
In the late 1970s, Diamond was an engineering student with a taste for New York transit lore. He first heard [...]

ArtificialOwl.net is a photographic collection of the abandoned material objects and places in our world. The images are both hauntingly beautiful and a disturbing reminder of wasted possibilities. A wide variety of abandoned subjects are explored, including man-made homages like the Cadillac Ranch. Dormant buildings are shown that are slowly being reclaimed by nature, or being reclaimed as graffitti canvases. Surreal caches of mammoth airplanes and cargo ships also highlight the tail end of the industrial life-cycle. Well worth a browse to understand the magnitude of our throw-away culture.
[via Adfreak]

Mark Gorton, creator of the Lime Wire file sharing software is now using his talents to improve urban transportation design. Using an open source software program he’s created along with data gathered from the collective population, Gorton aims to make urban transportation safer, more efficient and sustainable.
Wired reports:
The top-down culture of public planning stands to benefit by employing methods he’s lifting from the world of open-source software: crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open-source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people’s needs. Such modeling software and data existed in the [...]

High speed bullet trains are eclipsing airplanes as the preferred method of intercity travel in Spain. Traditionally, air travel was the way to traverse the long distances (typically 300 miles apart) between cities in the large country. Barcelona and Madrid are 410 miles apart, which previously helped create the busiest air travel route in the world. But in February of 2008 the new 220 mph train system linked up the two cities, and ridership has boomed. With a faster travel time, less delays and a lighter ecological footprint, more people are getting on board the train system.
Wired reports:
Airlines carried 72 [...]