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Check this out http://mashable.com/2013/02/10/high-speed-rail-map/

Read more: http://westislandgazette.com/news/32511#comment-17239 All I can say is, these people should just buy some earplugs. It will cost the city of Beaconsfield nothing, instead of building a sound barrier or costing people of Montreal and Quebec, to slow down cars / trains. They are the morons for buying a home, that should have never been built so close to the highway / railway. The city is to blame for zoning those areas as residential. I am so going to town hall meetings from now on. Time to put these senior NIMBYs in their place. Sort of on topic, but not really, the highway speed should be increased to a maximum of 140 and a minimum of 100. Boulevards / Service roads should be 70, instead of 50. The whole transport rules/regulations in this province have to be worked on.

http://spacingmontreal.ca/2011/05/01/saint-pierre-river-site-to-become-montreals-first-woonerf/ Definition of a woonerf: A woonerf (Dutch plural: woonerven) in the Netherlands and Flanders is a street where pedestrians and cyclists have legal priority over motorists. The techniques of shared spaces, traffic calming, and low speed limits are intended to improve pedestrian, bicycle, and automobile safety.

Traffic management APPlied logic Sep 13th 2011, 16:10 by The Economist online TRAFFIC lights are crucial tools for regulating traffic flow. They are not, however, perfect. Drivers exchange the gridlock that would happen at unmanaged junctions for a pattern of stop-go movement that can still be frustrating, and which burns more fuel than a smooth passage would. Creating such a smooth passage means adjusting a vehicle’s speed so that it always arrives at the lights when they are green. That is theoretically possible, but practically hard. Roadside signs wired to traffic lights can help get the message across a couple hundred metres from a junction, but such signs are expensive, and have not been widely deployed. Margaret Martonosi and Emmanouil Koukoumidis at Princeton University, and Li-Shiuan Peh at the Massachussets Institute of Technology, however, have an idea that could make the process cheaper and more effective. Instead of a hardwired network of signs, they propose to use mobile-phone apps. For a driver to benefit, he must load the team’s software, dubbed SignalGuru, into his phone and then mount it on a special bracket attached to the inside of his car’s windscreen, with the camera lens pointing forwards. SignalGuru is designed to detect traffic lights and track their status as red, amber or green. It broadcasts this information to other phones in the area that are fitted with the same software, and—if there are enough of them—the phones thus each know the status of most of the lights around town. Using this information, SignalGuru is able to calculate the traffic-light schedule for the region and suggest the speed at which a driver should travel in order to avoid running into red lights. Tests in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where five drivers were asked to follow the same route for three hours, and in Singapore, where eight drivers were asked to follow one of two routes for 30 minutes, revealed that SignalGuru was capable of predicting traffic-light activity with an accuracy of 98.2% and 96.3% respectively, in the two cities. This was particularly impressive because in Cambridge the lights shifted, roughly half-way through the test, from their off-peak schedule to their afternoon-traffic schedule, while in Singapore lights are adaptive, using detectors embedded under the road to determine how much traffic is around and thus when a signal should change. In neither case was SignalGuru fooled. Fuel consumption fell, too—by about 20%. SignalGuru thus reduces both frustration and fuel use, and makes commuting a slightly less horrible experience.

We happen to know of a housing development in Southern California that recently had its central road repaved. Out went the crumbling asphalt and nasty old speed bumps, and in went shiny new black pavement... and an additional helping of nasty new speed bumps. The paving company had actually doubled the number of bumps, presumably in an attempt to slow down traffic through this residential area. What actually resulted was cars now speeding up even quicker and slowing even faster between the bumps, wasting gas, wearing out brakes and putting out more emissions in the process. Too bad they didn't know about these new speed bumps from the fertile minds of designers Jae-yun Kim and Jong-Su Lee. These sleeping policemen actually flatten when the vehicle is traveling the speed limit, but stay upright when someone is speeding. The new design uses a small damper inside to flatten out when a car drives over it at low speed, but higher forces from a faster vehicle keep it upright, causing a nasty jolt. To make them more visible than your typical speed bump, they're outfitted with LEDs all around. The designers say their goal was to encourage drivers to maintain a constant slow speed, reducing the amount of stops and starts made, and thereby the amount of exhaust pollution from the car. The world's first green speed bumps? These are just a concept for now, but hopefully someone will put them into production soon, and bring them to So. Cal.

(Courtesy of CTV News Ottawa) February 4th, 2010

Obama : "The days where we’re just building sprawl forever, those days are over" President Obama was back on the road today to garner support for the economic stimulus package that passed the Senate early Tuesday morning. He was speaking today at a town hall forum in Ft. Myers, Florida, and near the end of his hour-long session, a city councilwoman asked him about transportation and infrastructure in the stimulus. Here’s how he responded: It’s imagining new transportation systems. I’d like to see high speed rail where it can be constructed. I would like for us to invest in mass transit because potentially that’s energy efficient. And I think people are a lot more open now to thinking regionally… The days where we’re just building sprawl forever, those days are over. I think that Republicans, Democrats, everybody… recognizes that’s not a smart way to design communities. So we should be using this money to help spur this sort of innovative thinking when it comes to transportation. That will make a big difference. Watch the full session from C-SPAN here. The section begins at around the 55 minute mark. If we can track it down, check back with us later for a more detailed transcript. One way to ensure that we’re not throwing stimulus money into something whose “days are over” would be to ensure that highway funding in the stimulus goes first to reduce the massive backlog of desperately needed maintenance and repair before building new roads and highways. Which would steer funding into projects that can be bid quickly, will create more jobs than new construction, and won’t come with the hidden cost of future maintenance like new construction does. Another smart use of stimulus money would be making sure that the bill maintains the House’s funding level of $12 billion for public transportation. Look back here in the next day or two for more detailed information on weighing in and taking action while the bill is in conference committee. We’ll have a full breakdown of the differences between the two bills and which areas in each version should be supported. Click through to see the full transcript, albeit with possible inaccuracies until we get an official one. Thanks to Jay Blazek Crossley of Houston Tomorrow for sending it over. Speaker: I am now an elected official myself. I serve on the City Council in ? Springs, Florida. My mayor is here as well. Cities throughout Florida are having a difficult time because of the mortgage crisis. Growth has slowed. We fund our transportation infrastructure needs through impact fees. Now that we’re not getting that, we’re falling behind in our ability to keep up with road work, municipal water projects, being able to bring solar panels down here to an inland port. We need commuter rail. We need lots of things for infrastructure in this state. If we ran out of oil today, we would not be able to move in this state, to get around. And I hope that you turn that thing around in the Gulf, we don’t want to drill for oil in the Gulf. We’ve got a beautiful pristine state, so I am asking you, how will we get our state going again in transportation? I’m very worried about our dependence on foreign oil and I don’t want to drill in our Gulf. I want some commuter rail and I want to improve our transportation. President Obama: Well, We have targeted billions of dollars at infrastructure spending and states all across the country are going through what Florida’s going through. there was a study done by the American Association of Engineers - that might not be the exact title, engineers from all across the country. We get a D for infrastructure all across the country. We saw what happened in Minneapolis where a bridge collapsed and resulted in tragedy. Not only do we need to rebuild our roads, our bridges, our ports, our levies, our damns, but we also have to plan for the future. This is the same example of turning crisis into opportunity. This should be a wake up call for us. You go to Shanghai, China right now and they’ve got high speed rail that puts our rail to shame. They’ve got ports that are state of the art. Their airports are you know compared to the airports that we - you go through beijing airport and you compare that to miami airport? Now, look, this is America. We always had the best infrastructure. We were always willing to invest in the future. Governor Crist mentioned Abraham Lincoln. In the middle of the Civil War, in the midst of all this danger and peril, what did he do? He helped move the intercontinental railroad. He helped start land grant colleges. He understood that even when you’re in the middle of crisis, you’ve got to keep your eye on the future. So transportation is not just fixing our old transportation systems but its also imaging new transportation systems. That’s why I’d like to see high speed rail where it can be constructed. That’s why I would like to invest in mass transit because potentially that’s energy efficient and I think people are alot more open now to thinking regionally in terms of how we plan our transportation infrastructure. The days where we’re just building sprawl forever, those days are over. I think that Republicans, Democrats, everybody recognizes that that’s not a smart way to build communities. So we should be using this money to help spur this kind of innovative thinking when it comes to transportation. That will make a big difference. http://t4america.org/blog/archives/661

Les turbulences économiques actuelles provoquent la réalisation à grande vitesse de fusions et d'acquisitions (F&A), malgré la multiplication d'échecs que cela risque d'engendrer. Pour en lire plus...

(Courtesy of CBC News)