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November 27, 2018
Future Commute: Transportation or Teleportation?
Andisheh Ranjbari I vividly remember that night about nine years ago, when four friends and I were stuck in one of Tehran’s crazy evening traffic jams, our car moving only about an inch every five minutes. We were griping about the congestion, and one of my friends desperately said that he wished we could convert…
November 18, 2018
Solid-state Battery Technology
Moein Khaloei Charging time and range are among the biggest problems faced by most of electric car users. These two problems are highly related to the most expensive component of electric cars, the battery. Modern electric cars such as Tesla Model S can usually travel around 300 miles between charging times, with their lithium-ion battery packs taking…
November 13, 2018
Some lessons for Seattle on shared e-Scooters
At the end of the 2017, we started to hear the news about e-scooters coming to major cities in the U.S., with Bird pioneering the trend. Soon videos of people riding e-scooters and flying by pedestrians and traffic emerged in social media. e-Scooters were on the streets before cities had enough time to come up with regulations…
October 22, 2018
My Experience at Geohackweek 2018
Tianqi Zou Right before the beginning of this quarter, my first at the UW, I attended the third annual Geohackweek workshop. Hosted by the University of Washington’s eScience Institute, Geohackweek 2018 was a five-day hackweek on geospatial data science, where participants came from all over the world with diverse backgrounds, academic and working status. It…
October 11, 2018
Did BC’s speed limit increase lead to more deaths?
Don MacKenzie I spent Wednesday driving in my home province of British Columbia (BC), Canada, and I noticed something that had also struck me on my last visit: the speed limits on many of the province’s rural highways seemed surprisingly high relative to the physical design (geometry, sight lines) of the roads. Apparently this…
July 13, 2018
The Outlook of Electric Airplanes
Fueling with electricity offers some advantages not available in conventional internal combustion engine vehicles. Because electric motors react quickly, they are very responsive and have very good torque. While electric cars can replace conventional gasoline cars, why do not we replace conventional planes with electric planes for the same advantages?…
June 25, 2018
Blockchain for EVs
With most talk about blockchain in transportation focused on freight and logistics, I want to explore the potential applications of blockchain for electric vehicles (EVs). To fully understand the implications of blockchain for EVs, let’s look at a brief overview of the blockchain, an engineer’s view if you will, characterizing the blockchain from its application…
June 15, 2018
Can we really save the climate by turning air into gasoline?
Last week The Atlantic picked up a story about a Canadian company that is reporting significant progress in reducing the costs of direct air capture (DAC) of CO2 from the atmosphere. Under the rather provocative headline “Climate Change Can Be Stopped by Turning Air Into Gasoline,” The Atlantic‘s coverage was rather credulous and missed some…
June 8, 2018
Reflecting on the 2018 Eno Future Leaders Development Conference
With the support of the Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium (PacTrans), I recently attended the Eno Center For Transportation (Eno) 2018 Future Leaders Development Conference (LDC) as the University of Washington College of Civil and Environmental Engineering representative. Eno is a D.C.-based, non-profit foundation which supports its mission of “cultivating creative and visionary leadership for the…
June 1, 2018
Do Seattle’s dockless bike sharing policies support equity of access?
When evaluating how the City of Seattle’s policies affect the social equity of the bike sharing system (mostly in terms of racial and income factors), we need to consider (1) how the city requirements are defined and what the intention behind is, (2) how bike sharing companies work and what they want to achieve and…
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