Steve pointed me to this Consumerist post about a new “superstreet” design:
Left turns increase the potential for an accident and also waste fuel1. So traffic engineers have come up with a new street design, called “superstreets” that get rid of all left turns. And a new study says they are both faster, and safer.
The design uses dividers to force all turns to be right hand turns. Want to go in the opposite direction? Use the U-turns located just down the road from the intersection.
Superstreets have been around since the 60′s but now the North Carolina State University study finds that superstreets reduce travel time by 20%. See, the U-turns are actually faster because drivers aren’t stuck at the light trying to wait for traffic to clear enough to turn. Not only that, but the superstreets studied had 46% fewer reported car collisions and 63% fewer collisions that ended in personal injury.
Of course, this doesn’t really help established cities or encourage mass transit use, but it’s a cool idea.
Update: Scott points out that the “Michigan left” has been been a fixture of the state since the ’60s.
This week’s “Jevons Paradox1 object lesson” comes in the form of wirelessly charging a Tesla Roadster:
In short, sending power through air (a good insulator) is infinitely massively2 less efficient than copper (an excellent conductor). This negates a lot of the fuel-efficiency advantages of electric cars, to say nothing of what happens when those giant battery packs need to be replaced. However, because they’re marginally more convenient, newer, and cooler, I fully expect wireless charging to be commonplace soon.