Explore the Mobility section of The Pulse for coverage of electric vehicles, public transport and next-generation mobility.
Concrete does not bend before it fails. A steel beam struck hard enough will deform and hold, but a prestressed concrete girder takes the blow, cracks…
The suitcase comes off the belt looking exactly as it did at check in. Inside, the packing cubes have been moved and the clothes are not…
It moved at night, and slowly. A rural highway in south central Washington, closed to everything else, with escort vehicles ahead and behind and a crew…
Coral does not grow back onto something that moves. That is the problem at one stretch of seafloor off the southwest corner of Oahu, in about 40…
The bag was already in the compartment when the latch stopped answering. Press the release and the lid lifts about an inch, then settles back down.…
Around two in the morning a tug is pushing north through the Straits of Mackinac with a deck barge on a long wire behind it. On…
A loaded tanker points north toward the Black Sea, holding a steady heading against the flow. Under its keel the water is going the other way.…
A fire engine turns into a narrow street and stops, because something is already sitting in the lane. On any ordinary day this is a thirty…
Somebody in a yard runs a tape up the side of a load and writes the number down. That number goes on the permit, and from…
The permits were in order. The route was cleared, the paperwork done. Then the mast of a forklift riding on a lowboy trailer met the girders…
The train leaves Volcán without a sound. No diesel rumble, no exhaust — just the soft hiss of electric motors as the two-car Tren Solar de…
Parked, it reads as a low wide car with an oddly deep body. The whole upper surface is mesh. Look through the perforations and there are…
At twelve minutes past four in the morning the strait is black water and shore lights. The tanker sits high in ballast, empty, ready to leave.…
The island was already behind them. The whole trip is a short hop, the kind of leg a crew flies several times in a morning without…
A heavy lift ship came into Kingston Harbour with two gantry cranes standing on its deck. Not folded, not split, not laid flat. Standing, exactly as they would…
On a Sunday morning in June, a semitrailer eases into a sleepy neighborhood in Orange County, Texas, hauling a flatbed stacked with wooden hive boxes. The…
Two hundred miles from anywhere over the Arabian Sea, the air is smooth and there is not a cloud in it. A small jet is at cruise on…
On the outer edge of a concrete beam over an upstate highway there is a fresh scar. Pale aggregate shows through where the weathered face used to…
Just after eight in the evening a turbine stands in the dark off the German coast, doing what it does. A small cargo ship is coming…
On a narrow road in Durham, a squat black bridge crosses low over the traffic. A white rental truck rolls toward it, a foot too tall and the…
The sound arrives before anything else does. Not a horn, but a low beat under your feet, four exhausts a second, still a mile out of sight.…
The wheel was ripped from the crew’s hands without warning, a hard jolt from below, and then the stern swung free. That moment off Galicia has…
The female hauls herself up the slope and starts digging with her back flippers. She works by feel, throwing sand behind her, until the chamber is deep…
Somebody had to unbolt the street signs first. Then the lamp brackets came off, and steel plates went down over the roadway, because the thing that…
Every flight you have ever taken, someone armed a door that could have leveled anyone standing nearby. Most passengers never think about it. The announcement comes…
Picture a machine the size of a two story house rolling down a highway in northern Alberta. An escort truck runs ahead with its lights flashing,…
Late on a rainy night, a truck hauling a huge steel machine rolls west on Interstate 90 near Cle Elum, Washington. Taped in the cab is…
A tanker came around a corner outside Elgin, Oregon, at about half past ten in the morning. Dew still on the road, a sharp bend ahead. It…
On May 27, a Wisconsin State Patrol trooper pulled over a semi and trailer for a routine spot check and got a number nobody hauling legally…
Seven loaded coal trains rolled across Inner Mongolia in a single line. They started and stopped together. They held their spacing through curves and grades as one machine. Nothing physical…
On June 10, 2024, a Boeing 777 sat baking on the Athens tarmac for three and a half hours without air conditioning. Outside, Greece was in…
A motorcycle rolls out of the pit lane at Suzuka. There is no smell of gasoline. There is no battery whine either, and none of the exhaust…
For years, a 10 year old in New York could legally ride a 600 pound machine down a public trail, alone. All it took was a short safety course.…
A striped shell the size of a thumbnail turned up on a rock in Lake St. Clair in the late eighties. It had crossed an ocean…
The I-81 viaduct has run through the middle of Syracuse for more than half a century. It is coming out, and the figure attached to that…
On a wide open highway, the traffic slows to a patient crawl. A flashing escort truck blocks the fast lane up ahead. Ahead of it, a…
Before dawn in a quiet Norwegian village, a man lay fast asleep in his bed. Just outside, a 443 foot container ship was bearing straight down on…
In the summer of 2001, a small research boat drifted in the Bay of Fundy. On board, a team watched for one of the rarest animals…
At Conrad Shipyard in Morgan City, Louisiana, workers just finished a 346 foot machine. They named it the Amelia Island, after a barrier island on Florida’s coast.…
On a winter night in February 2024, a Virgin Atlantic jet climbed out of Washington Dulles and did something almost nobody noticed. The cabin stayed calm. The…
In a brown coal pit in western Germany there is a machine that stands 315 feet tall and stretches 738 feet from end to end. It…
At about half past five on an August morning, a tractor trailer came up Route 1 in coastal Maine carrying one turbine blade. The blade was 240…
The call came in around four in the morning on a farm road outside Lynden, Washington. A commercial trailer had gone over on its side, carrying…
It looked like an ordinary December afternoon on the turnpike. A semi truck ran northeast out of Tulsa, keeping pace with traffic, and nobody watching it…
A freight train pulls out of a yard at Coatzacoalcos with the Gulf of Mexico behind it, and hours later the same cars are running within…
Stand on any American port dock and watch a container ship move in, and you already think you understand what you are seeing. A steel box,…
Just after midnight, a state trooper blocks the intersection at the bottom of a Colorado mountain town. Behind him, a truck creeps through at walking speed.…
Every American driver rolls over miles of it every week and never thinks twice. It is black, flat, and so familiar it has become almost invisible.…
More than 100,000 Florida vehicles carry the same small image: a sea turtle crawling across sand toward open water. Most drivers chose the plate for the…
Picture a machine that acts like the world’s largest vacuum cleaner, dragging its nozzle across the ocean floor at depths where sunlight never reaches. It does…
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