The guy who invented the wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius! So the saying goes. What shall we call the three-wheelers, then?
There is no written record of the first mention of the wheel, but an illustration of a wheel was found in the Sindh Province of India dating from about 4,000 BC. The Bible and other old scriptures have many references to chariots, perhaps the most famous being those of the Egyptian pharoas. And while the movies depict the glory of ancient Roman chariots, those were horse-drawn. The first mention of [more...]

When English inventor Richard Trevithick introduced the steam locomotive on 21 February 1804 in Wales, it achieved a speed of 8 km/h (5 mph). In 1815, Englishman George Stephenson built the world’s first workable steam locomotive, commissioned by the Killingworth colliery. In 1825, he introduced the first passenger train, which steamed along at 25 km/h (16 mph). Today, trains can fly down the tracks at 500 km/h (311 mph). And fly they do, not touching the tracks.
Need for rail speed: Rail travel at 500 km/h (311 mph)
The need for rail speed escalated when Japan introduced the shinkansen Bullet Train [more...]

Always wanted your own chauffeur? The bus or train driver not quite fitting the idea? Then you need an electronic chauffeur. The Ultra taxi might just do.
Ultra is an on demand system of driverless automatic taxis traveling on their own guideway network. Developed at the University of Bristol, UK, it is promoted by Advanced Transport Systems Ltd to work with cities throughout the world to provide effective and sustainable transport.

An Ultra guideway has the same capacity as a motorway lane (1800 vehicles per hour) but whereas the average speeds in city centers are 13 km/h (8 mph) the Ultra [more...]

It is estimated that world traffic volume will increase from the current annual 24 trillion kilometres (15 trillion miles) to in excess of 100 trillion kilometres (62 trillion miles) by 2050. Travel by car will drop from 53% of total transport use to 35%, with high-speed transport such as air travel increasing from 9% to more than 40%.
The increase will put further pressure on inflight tension as airlines scramble for more capacity per trip in an effort to keep operating costs down. The often cramped seating arrangements, specifically in economy class, has led to an increase in passenger violence. The [more...]

The VentureStar is envisioned to be the space delivery system of the 21st century. As a fully reusable, single-stage-to-orbit vehicle, it will deliver a wide range of payloads to orbit more reliably and less expensively than today’s launch vehicles. By dramatically reducing the cost and improving the reliability, VentureStar will open the vast frontier of space to privately financed operations of space transportation systems.
Image by RoundTable Media Inc.
The goal is to lower to cost from $10,000 per pound of payload to low earth orbit to $1,000 per pound to low earth orbit. “Single-stage-to-orbit” means that VentureStar does not drop tanks [more...]