You read me right. The newest transit technology proposed in China is something called a “straddling bus” which actually travels over the tops of cars.
This bus doesn’t have to stop traffic to pick up passengers and can hold as many as 1,200 passengers at a time.
Fast Company recently posted on some great telecommuting tools to make it easier to get work done without being in the office. Check out the post here.
Want to go to Top of the Park or a Summer Fest event but don’t want to deal with driving and parking?
This year, instead of driving to the Summer Festival, you can take the BTB Party Bus.
Click here for all the details.
From the BTB website:
BTB Party Bus is proud to partner up with the Ann Arbor Summer Festival to provide GREEN transportation for groups of all sizes to and from all Summer Festival events.
Besides giving you a carbon-neutral way to get to Top of the Park (BTB Party Bus runs on waste vegetable oil from your favorite Ann Arbor area restaurants), riding the buses will also give you a way to donate back to the festival – $.50 will be donated for every person that rides the bus!
Want to know about Traffic Detours? One place to check is AnnArbor.Com with the tag traffic detours.
In honor of Bike to Work Day, check out this calculator that shows you how much you could save if you biked to work instead of drove to work and parked your car.
For the past several months, riders of the #6 Ellsworth Bus could see the real-time route of their bus and receive text alerts about when the next bus would be come. This service was provided by Shepard Intelligence Systems and was done as a pilot project.
At this point, according to the AATA, they have completed the pilot and were pleased with the results. In the future, they are looking to go through the competitive procurement process (e.g. putting out bids to a number of companies for the service) to try and implement real-time bus information fleet-wide.
This just in: now when you search for directions in Ann Arbor on Google Maps you can choose to see suggested bike routes! This is great.
I did see what it might say for my normal bike commute, and it was pretty good. I come from the West Side and normally bike on Washington, which is the first suggested route it gave me. However, what Google doesn’t know is that there are some non-motorized paths I take that make the trip a little nicer for me. Still, it’s really cool that these directions are now available.
If you take the bus to work in downtown Ann Arbor, you might be looking for some ideas of how to pass the time.
A recent blog post from Suite101.com gives some good suggestions of ways to both get things done and have some fun while on the bus. Here’s a rundown of the suggestions. Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments section:
Ideas for getting things done and having fun while busing to work
Any other suggestions/ideas?
Get your bike road ready in 5 easy steps. Learn some walk safety tips. Check out how to use Zipcar.
Drive Less. Save More. is an Oregon-based program to encourage people to–well–Drive less and save more!
One of the neat things they have on there website are how-to videos related to different modes of transportation.
In the olden days, if you had a suggestion for bike parking in downtown Ann Arbor, it wasn’t very easy to figure out how to get that request considered.  Starting today, the DDA is making is easier for anyone to request bike parking downtown. The DDA now has an online bicycle parking request form.
According to the DDA, you can use this form for the following reasons:
If you know of a downtown location that could benefit from additional bicycle parking, you have noticed a hoop in need of repair, or an abandoned bicycle – we want to hear from you. Please use the following form to make requests related to bicycle parking in the DDA area.
So consider yourself empowered to request more downtown bike parking.
