The speed of change is a constant in our lives. Sometimes it’s worth slowing things down, to look at what might be changing without us even considering it. To celebrate the efforts of innovators, change-makers and dreamers who are reimagining the future, TED has partnered with BMW i. In a special session of talks hosted by TED […]
Five months ago, BMW i and TED laid down a challenge. What would the future of mobility look like? There were no constraints on time frame or existing technology. The Next Visionaries project was conceived as a free form exercise in innovation and ideation with the goal to surface some truly breakthrough concepts. Ideas poured […]
A three-wheeled half-motorcycle half-car, the Toyota i-Road is imagined as a future for urban transportation — tiny, battery-powered and hyper maneuverable, perfect for zipping along tightly packed urban streets. The concept car was launched in March 2013, but there are only three i-Roads in North America right now, and all of them are at TED2015 this week. Which is why I found myself down in the loading dock of the […]
Two days before TEDGlobal 2012, Will True found himself on a train, trekking across Scotland on a mission. See, one of six cases sent by our video team from New York City to Edinburgh for the conference was stuck in Scottish customs. Its contents: hundreds of terabytes of high-speed hard drives. TED Talks are filmed […]
By Kate Torgovnick May and Thu-Huong Ha In the past 30 years, 300 million people in China have left rural areas and moved to cities. Which means that a lot of thinking about the future of cities is happening here. At the TEDCity 2.0 Salon — an event held in Chengdu, China, on November 12, in […]
The Maxi Taxi is Port of Spain’s answer to the subway. In the capital city of Trinidad and Tobago, this network of mini buses shuttles commuters along set routes—a red line, a yellow line, a green line—bringing them from neighborhoods to business districts and back. Like commuters in many cities, Maxi Taxi riders generally avoid […]
“I don’t think protected bicycle ways are a cute architectural feature. They are a right, just as sidewalks are,” says Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogota, Colombia, in today’s talk. “Protected bikeways also are a powerful symbol of democracy, because they show that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally important to one […]
Is sharing the solution to our global challenges? Twice, Robin Chase has stood on the TED stage and offered powerful visions for a green, and shared, transportation future. At TED2007, the Zipcar founder suggested that car sharing could be the solution to global warming, while also helping drivers without cars. She also posited an even […]
“It doesn’t need to be a zero-sum game between moving traffic and creating public space,” says Janette Sadik-Khan in today’s TED Talk, filmed at TEDCity2.0 earlier this month. Sadik-Khan tells the story of how she and her team — quickly and cheaply, but not without controversy — changed New York from a city designed for […]
City planner Jeff Speck has a big idea for how America can be more economically resilient, more environmentally sustainable, and a whole lot healthier: make our cities more walkable, and the people in them less dependent on cars. In today’s talk, Speck takes a close look at suburban sprawl — and the many unexpected effects it’s […]
In his TED2013 talk, Robert Gordon points out that in 1900, human beings could only travel as fast as a horse could pull them in a buggy, but by 1960, we could travel at 80% of the speed of sound, thanks to the Boeing 707. Since 1960, though, the needle on how fast we can […]
When engineering grad students Sanjay Dastoor, John Ulmen and Matthew Tran met at Stanford University, they lamented the fact that there was no good way to get around campus. And so, they invented one: a longboard skateboard fashioned with an electric motor. In today’s talk, given at TED2013, the three give demo their Boosted Boards […]
On March 1 — just two days after Elon Musk appeared on the TED2013 stage — a SpaceX CRS-2 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral on a resupply mission for the International Space Station. Two days later, after the righting of a glitch, its Dragon capsule delivered a half-ton of supplies for the astronauts on […]
The cofounder of PayPal, Elon Musk has become one of his generation’s most aggressive, not to mention successful, entrepreneurs. As CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors and CEO and CTO of SpaceX, his interests clearly lie in transforming transportation and creating an economy built on sustainable energy. Now he takes the TED stage to tell us more. First, he talks about […]
TED playlists are collections of talks around a topic, built for you in a thoughtful sequence to illuminate ideas in context. This weekend, three new playlists are available: “Ancient clues,” “Planes, trains and automobiles” and “Are we alone in the universe?” Ancient clues Five fascinating talks by archaeologists and evolutionary biologists about humanity’s beginnings and […]
[ted id=1620 width=560 height=315] It’s an experience that can inspire road rage in even the calmest person: an urban traffic jam where cars crawl along at a pace of inches per hour. As Jonas Eliasson, a professor of transportation at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), explains in today’s talk, traffic congestion occurs in almost […]