Explore the Mobility section of The Pulse for coverage of electric vehicles, public transport and next-generation mobility.
The beans were ordinary cargo. Hoppers on a westbound freight, rolling a corridor that links the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest. Twelve cars tipped off the…
The road closes at night, and nobody driving past would guess why. A line of flashing cruisers blocks both lanes. Somewhere ahead, a flatbed inches forward…
The permit ran to several pages, and most of it was about avoidance. Go around this bridge. Around that one. Six structures on the same highway,…
The river bend near Portsmouth, Ohio looks wide and open from the wheelhouse of a towboat after dark. Below the waterline, two stone fingers reach out…
The tanker was alongside in Las Palmas before anyone saw them. It was the twenty eighth of November, 2022, and the ship had left Lagos eleven…
A 499 ton steel hull settled on the seafloor off Noonu Atoll, upside down, nothing like the plan on paper. Nobody was aboard. The water was…
The boat that carried them out was small enough to be ignored. It crossed the harbor at Lagos after midnight, pulled in under the stern of…
The launch idled in gray water beside a wall of painted steel. David Raglin had just finished a routine visit aboard an anchored ship. He turned…
The first number out of the sheriff’s office was almost too strange to repeat. Two hundred and fifty million bees, loose on a farm road a…
A freighter built to push through Arctic ice met something ice could never explain. It was rock. The ship had an ice pilot aboard and a…
A pilot keys the microphone, says a few words, and lets go. In the quarter second after the button releases, the radio should settle back into…
A loud bang cracked over Shockoe Bottom on a July afternoon. A resident walking his dog looked up just in time. Three rail cars were falling…
High over the Indonesian islands, an Airbus A320 hums along on autopilot at cruising height. In the cockpit, both seats are still. Air traffic control calls the…
A tugboat backs out of a stone lock chamber in upstate New York with only half its tow. Behind it, a loaded barge sits alone inside…
A tugboat’s hull tears open against a tanker’s spinning propeller in a Texas ship channel. Five crewmembers feel the deck lurch as water works into two…
The water off Bohicket Creek had a problem in it for four years. A 120-foot torpedo retriever sat wedged in the South Carolina marsh, leaking oil…
Before dawn, a forested slope above the McKenzie valley swallowed a tanker whole. The truck left the highway, rolled the embankment and came to rest in…
The curve on Highway 101 west of Port Angeles looks unremarkable from the road. Below it runs Indian Creek, a small tributary of the Elwha River…
The wheelhouse instruments glowed on an otherwise dark bridge, and the skipper was the only person watching them. Two crew members worked the deck below, sorting…
The blades were too long for the road. Not slightly too long. Highway clearances ruled trucking out entirely, so the only way out of the factory…
Shortly after 5 in the morning at Byneset, on the shore of the Trondheimsfjord, a 443 foot container ship rode up onto land. The homeowner, Johan…
The ship was still dark and the water was calm when the anchor went down off Monuriki Island. By the time the squall had passed, the…
An oily film crossed the asphalt before most of the neighborhood was awake. It found the curb, then the slot in the grate, then the dark…
The Elwha River had become one of the great American comeback stories. Two dams came down, the river ran free again, and salmon returned to gravel…
The only entry into Dregerhafen, on the northeast coast of Papua New Guinea, is deep but narrow. At its widest navigable point it is about 395…
The storm came through the anchorage before dawn. Dozens of container ships were riding it out off the Southern California coast, queued for berths at two…
The night was flat and the lights of Port Said were already visible on the horizon. A 1,092-foot aircraft carrier was pressing south through the congested…
The rope ladder hung wet against the hull, the pilot boat idling below in the dark. For as long as ships have needed guiding into port,…
The blizzard hit Newfoundland’s west coast before dawn, winds near 75 miles per hour and seas around 20 feet. About twelve nautical miles offshore, a 679…
The breakfast tray looked the same in seat after seat. Ham and omelette, prepared in an airline catering kitchen in Anchorage and loaded during the stopover.…
The water arrives without drama. It creeps across the flat Lancashire saltmarsh so quietly you barely notice until the road edge disappears. Within an hour, long…
A ship at sea holds its deck cargo with every piece of gear it owns. Rods are tensioned, corner locks are turned, and the whole stack…
A container stack is a column, and a column cares about where its weight sits. Loading rules exist to keep the heavy boxes low, so the…
A recall repair is supposed to close a file. For hundreds of owners of one full size truck engine, it did not. What came back was…
A grounding in most of the world is an expensive inconvenience. Tugs arrive within hours, a salvage contract is signed by lunchtime, and the hard part…
An autopilot at sea and an autopilot in a river are the same box doing two different jobs. Offshore it holds a compass heading for hours…
Stand on the shoulder and look up. There is daylight coming through the bridge. Not a crack, not a spall. A ragged opening with severed rebar bent downward…
A farm road in the far northwest corner of Washington, a few miles short of the Canadian line. Before dawn on a Friday in late spring,…
A brown river running high on a spring afternoon, somewhere below the Yazoo. A towboat is pushing 22 barges downstream in five strings, most of them…
The channel markers are one boat length away. That is the detail people kept coming back to. Deep water, marked and buoyed, right there, and the…
A Tuesday morning in late October on Interstate 59 in southeastern Mississippi, near mile marker 117. A truck leaves the road and turns over. Neither man…
A freeway trench west of downtown Houston, eight lanes of traffic, an overpass carrying a city street across it. On the underside of the steel, a…
The rain was already heavy when the approach began. An Embraer 145 regional jet was inbound to Roanoke-Blacksburg Regional Airport in Virginia, carrying 50 passengers and…
The part of a fuel spill you can see is almost never the part that kills anything. A sheen on the surface looks like the disaster.…
The wall gave way like a cardboard box. Wooden siding, tar paper, a layer of insulation, and then a white composite tip standing inside a working…
The jet bridge is empty except for two people and a clipboard. One of them is in a vest. The other is in four stripes and…
The truck was serviced yesterday afternoon. This morning there is a patch on the concrete the size of a dinner plate. The dipstick has barely moved,…
A blade is not really cargo. It is a long stiff beam that has been persuaded to sit on a trailer, and it stays there because…
A ship has less room under it than people imagine. Not fathoms of clear water, but a gap you could measure with a yardstick and still…
It starts as a smell. Hot oil in an enclosed cockpit, which means oil is reaching something it should never touch. Then the gauge confirms it,…
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