Leonard

Elon Musk’s tunneling startup, aptly-named The Boring Company, recently held an information session. The event, which was held Thursday night at the Leo Baeck Temple in 1300 N Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles, CA, provided a number of insights about the Boring Co.’s initiatives in the LA area

• The Boring Co.’s tunnel boring machines are all-electric, making them 3x as powerful then conventional TBMs. Tesla batteries are used to power the machines, which eliminates the need for cabling.
• The Boring Company is aiming to drill and lay tunnel walls simultaneously while transporting dirt out. Battery electric locomotives, which are equipped with two Model 3 electric motors, are tasked to haul the dirt from the tunnels.
• Musk and Davis also discussed the Boring Bricks, interlocking bricks made from tunneling rock. Musk noted that the Boring Bricks, which could be used for affordable housing, are better than cinder blocks. Egyptian model kits, featuring designs like the Temple of Horus, will also be sold.
• The Urban Loop transit — electric pods that are designed for commuters — will cost $1 per ticket. The speed of the Urban Loop will be 150 mph, and will enable travel from DTLA to LAX in 8 minutes. Each pod can carry a maximum of 16 people.

• The Boring Co. tunnels will support Hyperloop technology as well. Just like the Urban Loop’s pods, Hyperloop pods will carry a maximum of 16 people. Hyperloop pods, however, will be much faster, traveling at 700 mph.
• The 2.7 proof-of-tunnel under Sepulveda Blvd. in LA will not be used for public transportation. There will be no street closures, nor any tunneling beneath any homes or businesses. Residents won’t “see, feel, or hear” any of the startup’s activities. Utility lines will be untouched by the project as well.
• The Boring Company will be working closely with Metro and LA. Musk stated that overall, “we want to connect with, and supplement transport systems” that are already in place.
• Rocket technology is being used to develop and build the Boring Co.’s tunnels, considering that a number of SpaceX engineers are working on the tunneling startup’s projects.
• Line-Storm, the company’s second tunnel boring machine, features improvements over Godot, its first TBM. According to Musk, Godot is a conventional tunnel boring machine. Line-Storm, however, is “essentially a hybrid between conventional boring machine and the Proof-Rock, which is the fully Boring Company-designed machine.” Proof-Rock will be 10-15x faster than current TBMs. Line-storm will be at least 2x faster than a conventional boring machine.

La petite reine prend des allures de corbillard aux Pays-Bas. Du jamais vu dans le royaume, les pistes cyclables ont été responsables d'un plus grand nombre d'accidents mortels de la circulation que les routes en 2017. Au total, un nombre record de 206 cyclistes ont trouvé la mort sur leur chemin l'année dernière, contre 201 automobilistes, selon les chiffres du Bureau central des statistiques (CBS).

Alors que les accidents mortels sur les routes ont chuté de 30 % entre 2016 et 2017, ceux des cyclistes ont augmenté de 9 % (189 décès en 2016). « La réduction du nombre de décès de la circulation automobile provient en grande partie des progrès techniques rendant les véhicules plus sûrs, comme les airbags », indique le CBS.

Last year, bike sharing took off in China, with dozens of bike-share companies quickly flooding city streets with millions of brightly colored rental bicycles. However, the rapid growth vastly outpaced immediate demand and overwhelmed Chinese cities, where infrastructure and regulations were not prepared to handle a sudden flood of millions of shared bicycles.

Riders would park bikes anywhere, or just abandon them, resulting in bicycles piling up and blocking already-crowded streets and pathways. As cities impounded derelict bikes by the thousands, they moved quickly to cap growth and regulate the industry. Vast piles of impounded, abandoned, and broken bicycles have become a familiar sight in many big cities. As some of the companies who jumped in too big and too early have begun to fold, their huge surplus of bicycles can be found collecting dust in vast vacant lots.

Bike sharing remains very popular in China, and will likely continue to grow, just probably at a more sustainable rate. Meanwhile, we are left with these images of speculation gone wild—the piles of debris left behind after the bubble bursts.

Réduire les coûts de construction nécessite que l'ensemble des acteurs travaillent en transparence, en bonne intelligence et le plus en amont possible pour résoudre les problèmes et non les complexifier en se perdant dans des débats contractuels destructeurs de valeur.

Philippe Dewost est le directeur de Leonard, la plate-forme de prospective et d'innovation du groupe Vinci. Avant le débat organisé demain, il fait le point sur une technologie qui va bouleverser notre quotidien et répond aux questions suivantes :

• Comment les citoyens débatteurs, réunis demain à Toulouse, ont-ils été choisis ?
• La voiture sans chauffeur est-elle vraiment l'avenir ?
• Peut-on résoudre la question de la sécurité ?
• Les automobilistes cèderont-ils facilement la responsabilité de la conduite ?
• La ville de demain hyperconnectée ne risque-t-elle pas de se déshumaniser ?

A little over a week ago, Techcrunch’s Jon Evans made a boldly suggested that “big businesses and executives, rather than startups and entrepreneurs, will own the next decade.”

Why? The average entrepreneur lacks the specific domain expertise and access to huge pools of capital necessary to bring new, more high-tech ventures involving AI, virtual reality, and other domains to fruition. The level of technical sophistication required to build a mobile app or website is much lower than building a drone delivery network. But those massive technological movements have now lost their head of steam.

If the twin booms of the internet and mobile devices were the steam that maintained the velocity of U.S. venture capital investment for over a decade, then the cooling of those markets would presumably result in a gradual slowdown in deal-making. And that’s what the data suggest.

The world’s first 3D-printed concrete cycle bridge has opened in the Netherlands.

The structure was created at the Eindhoven University of Technology (EUT) and installed as part of a new road around Gemert village, constructed by BAM Infra.

A video of the bridge being made is mesmerising, as a huge computer-controlled ‘printer’ squirts out layers of concrete to build up the components of the bridge. The concrete sections are reinforced with steel cable.

In total, the bridge is eight metres long and 3.5 metres wide. It was tested with a five-tonne weight – far more than will ever cross it in everyday use.

Toyota Motor Corp. laid out plans to start putting short-range communications chips in U.S. vehicles in the next three years, staking out its position in a battle to make cars safer by getting them to “talk” with one another.

The third-best selling automaker in America will put the chips in Toyota and Lexus models in the U.S. starting in 2021, said Andrew Coetzee, group vice president of product planning for North America. The technology will enable cars to send data on their location and speed to surrounding vehicles and roadside infrastructure to curb crashes.

By making the plan public, Toyota is escalating a campaign to get the rest of the auto industry -- and regulators -- to embrace the technology. It’s also headed for a clash with phone companies that would rather see carmakers embrace 5G cellular networks to accomplish the same task, and with tech giants and cable providers that are angling for access to the same airwaves.

The dedicated short-range communications systems Toyota will start using, known as DSRC, send information back and forth to one another several times a second and can alert drivers to potential collisions before they happen. A broad coalition of auto companies, including Toyota and General Motors Co., urged U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao in November to support a “talking cars” mandate for all new passenger vehicles by 2023.

Faire revivre l'Aérotrain de l'ingénieur Bertin en le propulsant dans le 21e siècle : telle est l'ambition de la startup Jacques Vaucanson.

Afin de gagner du temps, le SpaceTrain pourrait profiter de la ligne expérimentale de 18 km de son illustra aïeul, construite entre Saran et Ruan, dans le Loiret, et désaffectée depuis 40 ans. D'après l'entreprise Jacques Vaucanson, les essais sur voie pourraient débuter dès la fin de 2020. Rappelons que la voie de béton présente un profil en T inversé, large de 3,40 mètres et haute de 90 cm, qui guide les trains sur coussin d'air. Mais si l'infrastructure a (presque) été préservée - elle est à l'abandon et un tronçon a été démoli pour laisser passer l'autoroute A19 - d'importants aménagements seront cependant nécessaires. Puisque là où l'Aérotrain évoluait à l'air libre, générant d'ailleurs d'importantes nuisances sonores liées à ses gourmandes motorisations issues de l'aviation, le SpaceTrain évoluera dans du vide. Enfin, dans des tubes où la pression atmosphérique sera diminuée de 80 %, ceci afin de limiter les frottements d'air et d'annihiler les nuisances sonores.

Technically, in transportation engineering, the price of anarchy describes the difference between what happens when every driver selfishly picks the fastest route and what the socially optimal traffic outcome would be.

In the pre-mobile-app days, drivers’ selfishness was limited by their knowledge of the road network. In those conditions, both simulation and real-world experience showed that most people stuck to the freeways and arterial roads. Sure, there were always people who knew the crazy, back-road route, but the bulk of people just stuck to the routes that transportation planners had designated as the preferred way to get from A to B.

Now, however, a new information layer is destroying the nudging infrastructure that traffic planners built into cities. Commuters armed with mobile mapping apps, route-following Lyft and Uber drivers, and software-optimized truckers can all act with a more perfect selfishness.

In some happy universe, this would lead to socially optimal outcomes, too. But a new body of research at the University of California’s Institute of Transportation Studies suggests that the reality is far more complicated. In some scenarios, traffic-beating apps might work for an individual, but make congestion worse overall. And autonomous vehicles, touted as an answer to traffic-y streets, could deepen the problem.

“This problem has been vastly overlooked,” Alexandre Bayen, the director of UC Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies, told me. “It is just the beginning of something that is gonna be much worse.”

Bayen and a team of researchers presented their work earlier this year at the Transportation Research Board’s annual meeting and at the Cal Future conference at Berkeley in May 2017. They’ve also published work examining the negative externalities of high levels of automatic routing.

In the Cal Future talk, Bayen walked through a simulation created in the commercial-transportation simulator Aimsun. The video below shows how the flow of a freeway changes in response to an accident under two conditions: when no drivers use routing apps and when only 20 percent of drivers use routing apps. When there are more app-using drivers, congestion builds up at off-ramps, creating more traffic on the freeway.

RealWear has raised $17 million for its AR wearable device aimed at workers in construction and other heavy industries.

Vancouver-based RealWear is already shipping its hands-free HMT-1, which is mounted via a band that goes around your head or safety helmet. It’s a wearable device, but RealWear CEO Andy Lowery calls it a “head-mounted tablet,” since it lets you view the equivalent of a seven-inch Android tablet while you’re working.

The funding will help the company ship more of the devices to customers around the world whose workers toil in extreme environments. Columbia Ventures led the round, with participation from Realmax.

“We have targeted this for industrial use,” said Lowery, in an interview with VentureBeat. “We have architected a wearable computer that fits into different protective equipment, like snapping into a hard helmet. It’s similar to [the now-discontinued Google] Glass, but designed for outdoor usage.”

You can arrange the HMT-1 so that you can view it with your dominant eye. You adjust the viewing pod so that it is just below your line of sight, which allows you to see everything in front of you with both eyes. In contrast to glasses, you only look at the display with one eye, and you can control the device with voice commands.

Développer un projet innovant, avec les ressources et l’appui de son entreprise : c’est la promesse de l’intrapreneuriat, une pratique née aux Etats-Unis dans les années 1970. Contraction des termes « interne » et « entrepreneuriat », il consiste à transformer une idée en activité rentable au sein de son organisation. Ces profils hybrides, à la fois entrepreneurs et managers, doivent permettre à l’entreprise de faire émerger des projets innovants depuis sa base.

« L’intrapreneuriat me permet de sortir de ma zone de confort, des choses que je maîtrise au quotidien. Pour moi, c’est une vraie bouffée d’oxygène », reconnaît Samir Bengelloun, HR Business Partner chez VINCI Construction Grands Projets. Il a été sélectionné cet été, avec dix autres salariés de VINCI, pour rejoindre le parcours intrapreneurs proposé par Leonard, la plate-forme de prospective et d’innovation de VINCI. Ce parcours vise à soutenir une nouvelle idée de business, inspirée le plus souvent par l’activité quotidienne des intrapreneurs. La première phase de l’incubation porte sur 4 mois, avec un engagement à 20 % du temps de travail. Étape-clef du parcours, la « Rush Week », a eu lieu du 13 au 16 novembre dernier, à Paris. Retour sur ces quatre jours de formation intensive, orientée business.

Concilier technique et business, le défi des intrapreneurs

La « Rush Week » débute dans les locaux de Leonard, près de la Gare de Lyon, à Paris. Devant les coaches et l’ensemble de la promotion, les candidats présentent une première ébauche de leurs projets. La plupart des pitchs sont encore imprécis. « Je l’ai préparé ce matin dans le train, en 10 minutes », glisse un candidat à son voisin. En début d’après-midi, enthousiastes, les intrapreneurs se dirigent vers la Station F, le campus de start-up créé par Xavier Niel à deux pas des locaux de Leonard.

Self-driving cars would one day take over Interstate 5 to the exclusion of human drivers under a proposal aired out before Washington state transportation advisers Tuesday.

High-tech investors in the Seattle area hatched the idea to gradually convert Interstate 5 into a corridor for autonomous vehicles. Their proposal envisions smoother, safer travel between Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia, with the possibility to expand south to Portland later.

Consultant Scott Kuznicki of the Transpo Group and Cascadia Center think tank Director Bruce Agnew on behalf of Madrona Venture Group Managing Director Tom Alberg presented a tentative timeline to the Washington State Transportation Commission.

They said autonomous cars should first get to use the carpool lane and then get their own lanes beginning in 2025.

“If this technology goes the way that leading experts are predicting, we could see the entire corridor as a freeway could be autonomous by 2040,” Kuznicki said.

At that point, human drivers would only be allowed on low traffic nights and weekends.