The magic room was a community effort, maintained by many residents volunteering their time to keep it well organised and running smoothly. I often saw my neighbour, Wendy Showyin, when I stopped by.
"Over the last year, our committee set out to learn about asset management and the state of one of our most important assets, which is our streets and our roads. We learned that our streets are riddled with potholes, and many of the streets are failing. The condition has worsened over the last five years. We learned that if we do not act now to address the degradation of our streets, it will continue to worsen."
Alejandra Ferrera emphasizes that the security-driven design, while functional at the time, has led to a fragmented urban experience where streets serve only as transit voids, lacking social engagement.
Emmanuel Grégoire wants to undertake the complete redevelopment of the ring road by 2050 to transform it into an urban boulevard, following the long-term project of his predecessor Anne Hidalgo.
The DLR first opened in 1987, it had two lines: Red - Stratford to Island Gardens and Green - Tower Gateway to Island Gardens. Within just a few years, as the DLR extended out to Beckton and later Lewisham, they turned the whole map green.
The larger share of the order consists of 200 Scania intercity buses equipped with CNG fuel systems designed for extended range, allocated to services within the Paris region.
The real problem is infrastructure, not vehicle safety. Roadways are open systems with infinite variables—weather, pedestrians, distracted drivers, and aging infrastructure. Communication between vehicles is minimal, and infrastructure is largely silent—and in that gap lies the potential for deadly collisions.
The delivery follows an initial batch of 10 buses introduced in August 2025, bringing the total number of vehicles supplied under the programme to 100. The buses have been integrated into the NTC fleet, which has historically operated an ageing vehicle base.
Intercity bus transport in Europe is characterized by a fragmented operator landscape, including a high number of small and medium-sized companies, alongside less standardized operational patterns and frequent dual-use vehicle profiles.
It's tempting to frame autonomous driving as a single leap. In public transport, adoption tends to be incremental - because the system is built for reliability, and new capabilities have to fit into daily operations without disrupting service. That is why a practical strategy is evolution, not revolution: introduce autonomy in a defined domain, learn safely in real operations, and expand capability step-by-step.
In the 1950s, the Air Force designed cockpits for the average pilot by measuring thousands of pilots and calculating the average for ten key physical dimensions-height, arm length, torso size, etc. They assumed most pilots would be close to average in most dimensions. When researchers actually checked, they found that out of 4,063 pilots, exactly zero were average on all ten dimensions.
Cities around the world share a common goal: to become healthier and greener, supported by civic infrastructure that restores ecosystems and strengthens public life. The question is how to reach this. Global climate targets, local building codes, and municipal standards increasingly guide designers and planners toward better choices. Still, many cities struggle to translate these frameworks into everyday, street-level comfort and long-term ecological protection.
Every city contains two transportation systems. One is the visible network of roads, rail lines, sidewalks, and bus routes mapped in planning documents. The other is the invisible geography of privilege and exclusion embedded within it: the neighborhoods that received highways instead of parks, the communities whose bus routes were cut, the sidewalks that abruptly end at the edge of a district.
