Personal rapid transit (PRT), also referred to as podcars or guided/railed taxis, is a public transport mode featuring small automated vehicles operating on a network of specially built guideways. PRT is a type of automated guideway transit (AGT), a class of system which also includes larger vehicles all the way to small subway systems. In terms of routing, it tends towards personal public transport systems.
Traffic lights, traffic signals or stoplights – also known as robots in South Africa – are signalling devices positioned at road intersections, pedestrian crossings, and other locations to control flows of traffic.
Traffic calming uses physical design and other measures to improve safety for motorists, pedestrians and cyclists. It has become a tool to combat speeding and other unsafe behaviours of drivers in the neighbourhoods. It aims to encourage safer, more responsible driving and potentially reduce traffic flow. Urban planners and traffic engineers have many strategies for traffic calming, including narrowed roads and speed humps. Such measures are common in Australia and Europe, but less so in North America. Traffic calming is a calque of the German word Verkehrsberuhigung – the term's first published use in English was in 1985 by Carmen Hass-Klau.
Traffic congestion is a condition in transport that is characterised by slower speeds, longer trip times, and increased vehicular queueing. Traffic congestion on urban road networks has increased substantially since the 1950s. When traffic demand is great enough that the interaction between vehicles slows the speed of the traffic stream, this results in some congestion. While congestion is a possibility for any mode of transportation, this article will focus on automobile congestion on public roads.
The Tren Urbano is a 10.7-mile (17.2 km) fully-automated rapid transit system that serves the municipalities of San Juan, Guaynabo, and Bayamón, in Puerto Rico. The Tren Urbano consists of 16 stations operating on 10.7 miles (17.2 km) of track along a single line.
Bus rapid transit (BRT), also called a busway or transitway, is a bus-based public transport system designed to have better capacity and reliability than a conventional bus system. Typically, a BRT system includes roadways that are dedicated to buses, and gives priority to buses at intersections where buses may interact with other traffic; alongside design features to reduce delays caused by passengers boarding or leaving buses, or paying fares. BRT aims to combine the capacity and speed of a metro with the claimed flexibility, lower cost and simplicity of a bus system.
A bicycle-sharing system, bike share program, public bicycle scheme, or public bike share (PBS) scheme, is a shared transport service in which bicycles are made available for shared use to individuals on a short-term basis for a price or free. Many bike share systems allow people to borrow a bike from a "dock" and return it at another dock belonging to the same system. Docks are special bike racks that lock the bike, and only release it by computer control. The user enters payment information, and the computer unlocks a bike. The user returns the bike by placing it in the dock, which locks it in place. Other systems are dockless.
The Amsterdam Metro is a rapid transit system serving Amsterdam, Netherlands, and extending to the surrounding municipalities of Diemen and Ouder-Amstel. Until 2019 it also served the municipality of Amstelveen but this route has been closed for conversion into a tram line. The network is owned by the City of Amsterdam and operated by municipal public transport company Gemeente Vervoerbedrijf (GVB) which also operates trams, free ferries and local buses.
Provo was a Dutch counterculture movement in the mid-1960s that focused on provoking violent responses from authorities using non-violent bait. It was preceded by the nozem movement and followed by the hippie movement. Provo was founded, on 25 May 1965, by Robert Jasper Grootveld, an anti-smoking activist, and the anarchists Roel van Duijn and Rob Stolk. The term was used for the movement as a whole and for individual members. Provo was officially disbanded on 13 May 1967.
Sustainable transport refers to ways of transportation that are sustainable in terms of their social and environmental impacts. Components for evaluating sustainability include the particular vehicles used for road, water or air transport; the source of energy; and the infrastructure used to accommodate the transport. Transport operations and logistics as well as transit-oriented development are also involved in evaluation. Transportation sustainability is largely being measured by transportation system effectiveness and efficiency as well as the environmental and climate impacts of the system. Transport systems have significant impacts on the environment, accounting for between 20% and 25% of world energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. The majority of the emissions, almost 97%, came from direct burning of fossil fuels. Greenhouse gas emissions from transport are increasing at a faster rate than any other energy using sector. Road transport is also a major contributor to local air pollution and smog.
Cabinentaxi, sometimes Cabintaxi in English, was a German people mover development project undertaken by Demag and Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm with funding and support from the Bundesministerium für Forschung und Technologie. Cabinentaxi was designed to offer low-cost mass transit services where conventional systems, like a metro, would be too expensive to deploy due to low ridership or high capital costs.
Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit is a personal rapid transit (PRT) system in Morgantown, West Virginia, United States. The system connects the three Morgantown campuses of West Virginia University (WVU) and the city's downtown area.
Shared space is an urban design approach that minimises the segregation between modes of road user. This is done by removing features such as kerbs, road surface markings, traffic signs, and traffic lights. Hans Monderman and others have suggested that, by creating a greater sense of uncertainty and making it unclear who has priority, drivers will reduce their speed, in turn reducing the dominance of vehicles, reducing road casualty rates, and improving safety for other road users.
Transportation demand management, traffic demand management or travel demand management (TDM) is the application of strategies and policies to reduce travel demand, or to redistribute this demand in space or in time.
A subway, also known as an underpass, is a grade-separated pedestrian crossing which crosses underneath a road or railway in order to entirely separate pedestrians and cyclists from motor traffic or trains respectively.
Laurens (Luud) Maria Hendrikus Schimmelpennink is a Dutch social inventor, industrial designer, entrepreneur and politician. As of 2007 he is Managing Director of the Ytech Innovation Centre in Amsterdam. Schimmelpennink first came into public view in the early 1960s through his association with the Dutch Provo counterculture and the White Bicycle Plan.
The ACT, acronym for Automatically Controlled Transportation or Activity Center Transit, was a people mover system developed during the 1970s. One feature of the ACT is that it allowed bi-directional travel on a single rail—cars passed each other by switching onto short bypass lanes on the track, distributed where space allowed. ACT was a contender in the Urban Mass Transportation Administration's plan to deploy three or four systems in cities in the United States, as well as the GO-Urban project in Toronto, Canada. One ACT system was installed as a part of a Ford-funded real estate development near their headquarters in Dearborn, MI, and although they proposed to install ACT in several other locations, no additional systems were ever installed and the project was put on indefinite hold.
Cycling infrastructure refers to all infrastructure permissible for use by cyclists, including the network of roads and streets used by motorists, except where cyclists are excluded, along with bikeways from which motor vehicles are excluded – including bike paths, bike lanes, cycle tracks, rail trails and, where permitted, sidewalks. Cycling infrastructure also includes amenities such as bike racks for parking, shelters, service centers and specialized traffic signs and signals. Cycling modal share is strongly associated with the size of local cycling infrastructure.
With 139,000 km of public roads, the Netherlands has one of the most dense road networks in the world – much denser than Germany and France, but still not as dense as Belgium. In 2019, the World Economic Forum also ranked the quality of Dutch road infrastructure as the best in Europe, and second only to Singapore, out of 141 countries in the world – bypassing even the famous German roads with a 6.4 versus 5.3 score on a 7‑point scale used.
The Elandsgracht is a street and former canal in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It runs between the Prinsengracht and the Singelgracht in the Jordaan neighborhood of the Amsterdam-Centrum district. Bridge 169 over the Singelgracht and Bridge 107 over the Lijnbaansgracht connect the Elandsgracht in the direction of the Kinkerstraat. The Elandsgracht is in the west of the Grachtengordel. The Elandsstraat runs parallel to the Elandsgracht. There are houses, shops, cafés and restaurants on the former canal, with parking spaces in the middle.
