SMART

Author: Lora Kolodny

Hertz Rent A Car is set to offer electric vehicles at an hourly rate starting December 15th in New York City, with expansion of the service to San Francisco, Washington D.C., London, up to 50 college campuses in North America, and markets in Texas and China by the end of 2011.

For what it calls the ConnectByHertz “car sharing” service in Manhattan, the company aims to make 20 electric vehicles (EVs) available by the second quarter of 2011. In total throughout the U.S. next year, Hertz plans to have 500 to 1,000 all-electric cars available.

The number of EVs that Hertz purchases for its rent-by-the-hour fleets will depend upon the availability of the cars, many of which have not begun to ship yet the company’s head of communications, Rich Broome, said Sunday.

Hertz has committed to purchase: the Nissan Leaf, the Mistubishi i-MiEV, the Chevy Volt, and electric cars from Coda and Smart, Broome verified.

Read the full article at http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/05/hertz-ev-plans-2011/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+hackernewsyc+%28Hacker+News+YC%29

Texxi is a dynamic, (primarily) SMS-based, real-time passenger grouping transport system that works for at least seven distinct modes.

We have results from 3 deployments to show that we got dynamic, real-time ridesharing by SMS + Social Networking running. We made it work to move 700 people in Ryde, Isle of Wight, UK for example. For some reason, we could not get any attention from the US academic community until very recently. I did two presentations in 2007 and 2010 at UWE Bristol and Plymouth University in the UK.

The Texxi system evolved from a series of research projects over a 12 year period. In summary:

1992 – 1993 : National Grid Technology and Science Laboratories, Overhead Lines Division, Plant Technology.
1995 : Sponsored summer project (“The Role of Computers in Transportation Technology”) – Royal Academy of Engineering / Royal Aeronautical Society.
1997 : Ecole Centrale De Lyon project on RideSharing using groupware technologies, Professor Christian Vial, oversaw. We dubbed it Project Lugh, after the Celtic deity for whom Lyon is named.
1998 – 2003 : Various exposures to financial systems front-office, back-office and middle office computer systems at investment banks and multinational firms
2003 – 2004 : Project at Xaraf LLC / Paloma Partners on credit default swap / convertible bond trading and capital structure arbitrage trading strategies. It is here I came up with my credit contagion ideas which turned out to be so prescient.
2004 – Present : Texxi

For more information: http://bit.ly/9ANIIG

Author: J. David Goodman

As Lauren Statman made her way along Calvert Street in Washington on Sunday, she stopped to investigate a new phenomenon on the sidewalk near her home: a large, empty bike share station.

From just 10 stations and about 100 bikes downtown, one of the first municipal bike sharing programs in the country is ballooning by a factor of 10: 100 stations and about 1,100 bikes are to spread around Washington and across the river in Arlington, Va., by the end of October.

The system officially opens to the public on Monday with 400 bikes at 49 stations. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty plans a morning news conference on the program.

“It seems cool because you don’t have to commit,” Ms. Statman, 23, said. She does not own a bike, she said, but will consider using the city’s bikes now that she has become interested in riding again.

Read the full article at: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/bike-sharing-expands-in-washington/?scp=1&sq=Bike%20Sharing%20Expands%20in%20Washington&st=cse

Read the story at http://planetgreen.discovery.com/tech-transport/bike-sharing-is-coming-to-london-soon.html