Technology

Transportation leaders from across the nation convened last week in Chicago to celebrate the launch of the Shared-Use Mobility Center, a nonprofit that will work to maximize the potential of car-sharing, ride-sharing, and bike-sharing services to benefit the public. The new organization will promote collaboration between the different services, and encourage cooperation between the growing industry and city governments, transit agencies, and community groups.

Here’s the latest in wishful thinking about distracted driving. A new application called “Drivemode” wants to make it easier for you to use all your mobile apps while you’re behind the wheel — but don’t worry it’s safe! Because, at least theoretically, you don’t actually have to look at your phone.

The City of Chicago's automated speed enforcement system continues to succeed in reducing dangerous speeding around parks and schools. The Chicago Department of Transportation issued a press release earlier this month, stating that the number of speeding cars observed by its 51 speed cameras has fallen an average of 43 percent ever since the first week of the cameras' operation. At some locations, the number of speeders dropped as much as 99 percent.

Researchers at the MIT Media Lab published an interactive map this week that shows a new way to measure access across Chicago via different transportation modes. Instead of assessing how far one can travel by a certain mode, like a previous online map has shown, or showing the cost of travel, this map looks solely at relative travel time across four modes.

The number of transportation choices available to Chicagoans continues to grow, particularly as shared options like car-sharing and Divvy bikes become ever more popular. Yet these options can turn the simple act of planning a trip across town into a complicated exercise that requires weighing multiple factors, like cost, convenience, time, and ever-changing availability. RideScout, a new app that was recently updated to include Chicago, presents numerous transportation choices all within a single smartphone screen. After factoring in your origin, destination, and the time of day, RideScout compares choices like walking, bicycling, Divvy bike-sharing, Metra, CTA trains and buses, taxis, Zipcar, and SideCar shared rides.

Strava may be making the leap from feel-good gadget for hard core exercise buffs to serious planning tool for cities looking to improve active transportation.

A Portland woman whose son was killed by a drunk hit-and-run driver has proposed a new method to apprehend motorists who flee the scene of a deadly collision. She hopes to bring an Amber Alert-like notification system to Portland to help nab the bad guys. The proposal is based on a system that's already up and running in Denver, reports Michael Andersen at Bike Portland:

Last week CDOT released data for all Divvy trips taken by members and 24-hour pass holders in 2013, and the agency is looking for the public's help in uncovering any patterns. The data includes the station where the trip began, the station where it ended, start time, end time, and whether the user had a membership or 24-hour pass.

In its first weekend of operation, Divvy bike-share saw 4,123 trips. Annual members accounted for 78 percent of the trips from Friday to Sunday, with the rest coming from people who purchased 24-hour passes (which cost $7). The five most popular starting stations were all downtown and near the lakefront and coincided with the five most popular destination stations, just in a different order. They were: