Issues & Insights

More than 20,000 trucks travel the network of roads in the U.S. Northeast corridor every day, many delivering goods from the harbors of New York, New Jersey, and Boston to factories and consumers throughout the country. Several signs now point to these trucks beginning the electric transition.

Wherever Charles Marohn travels in America, he finds a similar type of road, lined with strip malls, fast-food joints, gas stations, car dealers and dying malls. Marohn calls these arterial roads “stroads”—a mix of a neighborhood street, where people want to live and shop, and a road, which is designed to move traffic quickly between two places. Stroads are trying to do two things at once, he says, and failing at both.

As bike lanes have expanded across Massachusetts, Transportation Secretary Monica Tibbits-Nutt said safety concerns are cropping up along the new public ways — but, perhaps surprisingly, not just with cars. Cyclists moving quickly are dangerous for pedestrians, she said, and crashes could even endanger their lives.

The city will take control of 120 acres from Brooklyn Bridge Park to Red Hook to develop a neighborhood around a modernized port.

Infill stations are an increasingly popular solution in cities whose rail transit systems were originally designed to shuttle suburban commuters to and from downtown. At a time when laying new tracks can be prohibitively expensive, they’re an affordable way to make the most of infrastructure that’s already in place.

As federal agencies ramp up their AI work, observers say the FAA is taking a “cautious” approach as it wrestles with safety questions.

The Biden administration on Tuesday released rules designed to speed up permits for clean energy while requiring federal agencies to more heavily weigh damaging effects on the climate and on low-income communities before approving projects like highways and oil wells.

There’s a new housing development in Tempe, Arizona, that’s getting a lot of attention for something it excludes. Culdesac offers more than 700 apartments — and zero parking spaces. Its developers say they’re striving to make Culdesac Tempe “the best place to live car-free in the U.S.” It’s a great goal, but is it a realistic one

On a three-lane test track along the Monongahela River, an 18-wheel tractor-trailer rounded a curve. No one was on board. The self-driving semi, outfitted with 25 laser, radar and camera sensors, is owned by Pittsburgh-based Aurora Innovation. Late this year, Aurora plans to start hauling freight on Interstate 45 between the Dallas and Houston areas with 20 driverless trucks.

Low-slung station wagons are all but extinct on American roads, and even sedans have become an endangered species. (Ford, producer of the iconic Model T a century ago, no longer sells any sedans in its home market.) Bulky SUVs and pickup trucks — which have themselves steadily added pounds and inches — now comprise more than four out of every five new cars sold in the US, up from just over half in 2013, even as national household size steadily declines.