Transport & Infrastructure News and Discussions

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Trump officials unveil designs for president's controversial 250-foot arch

Source: Washington Post

The Trump administration on Friday unveiled new renderings for President Donald Trump's planned 250-foot triumphal arch, his most significant effort to remake Washington's skyline, as officials begin the process of seeking formal approval for the controversial project.

The renderings prepared by Harrison Design feature a golden inscription reading "One Nation Under God" on the arch, which is topped with a winged Lady Liberty statue and flanked at its base by statues of four golden lions. The project is slated for Memorial Circle, a traffic roundabout near Arlington National Cemetery, which city planners have eyed for more than a century as the site of a potential monument.

The project is intended to commemorate the United States' 250th anniversary. Built to Trump's specifications, it would transform a small plot of land between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery into a dominant new monument. Architects and historic preservationists have warned that the planned arch, which would be more than twice the size of the roughly 100-foot Lincoln Memorial and tower over the nearby cemetery, would distort the intent of the existing memorials and obstruct pedestrians' views.

The renderings were filed Friday by the Interior Department with the Commission of Fine Arts, a panel of advisers on the city's architectural matters that Trump has stocked with allies. The commission is set to review the White House's proposal at a meeting Thursday.

Read more: https://wapo.st/4eeTIsY

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Bright idea? UK firm pioneers data centres using lampposts

1 May 2026

There have been many attempts to put data centres in unusual places over the years - Microsoft put a data centre under the sea, Elon Musk has suggested putting them in space.

Now a UK firm is betting on data centres using thousands of connected smart lampposts, and has signed a formal agreement with a Nigerian state to deploy 50,000 of them.

Warwickshire-based Conflow Power Group Limited (CPG) says networked together its solar-powered iLamp units "double as a revenue-generating distributed AI data centre".

[...]

Each iLamp has batteries which are charged by a cylindrical solar panel. These supply the energy used by a low-powered computer suitable for AI tasks.

"NVIDIA is the company that's created a small enough chip, powered with 15 watts of power, so it can be powered by solar, and we can put that inside a street light", CPG chairman Edward Fitzpatrick told the BBC's Tech Life programme. The firm's plan, according to Fitzpatrick, is that scaled across thousands of units, a network of iLamps would deliver the collective processing power of a data centre with the environmental benefit of not drawing energy from the grid.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98r4e594p7o



Conflow Power Group

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Taiwan officially opens the world's longest single-mast bridge
By Abhimanyu Ghoshal
May 27, 2026

https://newatlas.com/architecture/taiwa ... aha-hadid/
This week, Taiwan cut the red ribbon on a giant infrastructure project its own construction team once deemed "impossible:" the 3,000-ft-long Danjiang Bridge.

The structure features a single-tower asymmetric cable-stayed design courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), and is the longest of its kind in the world. Its form is said to minimize its visual impact and impedance of sunset views over the Tamsui River from popular spots nearby – and it's engineered to withstand severe earthquakes too.

This bridge spans the mouth of the Tamsui River near northern Taiwan, and connects Bali in New Taipei City with Tamsui district. ZHA noted that it would shave off 25 minutes of travel time between the two as commuters crossed the river.

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[Yuli Ban]

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[caltrek]

Next Stop for California’s High-speed Rail: Finding Private Investors
By Benton Graham
July 28, 2026

Introduction:

(Grist) California has spent nearly two decades relying on taxpayers to finance its high-speed rail project. Now it’s looking to private investors.

Additional Extract:

The California High-Speed Rail Authority recently announced a $25 million agreement with a consortium of companies that will explore ways to advance the project. Over the next six months, it will develop funding strategies to expand the project beyond the state’s Central Valley, potentially into San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Most of the construction is focused in the Central Valley, where the first phase will connect the cities of Merced and Bakersfield. The rail authority chose to start there because it offered the quickest and cheapest path to getting trains running. It is also an opportunity to bring a state-of-the-art transportation system to a region long overlooked by the state. Crews have completed dozens of bridges and viaducts and laid almost 90 miles of guideway. Their efforts will soon shift to laying track.
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Linking San Francisco and Los Angeles is expected to cost $126 billion, with service slated to begin in 2040. Even the first phase alone will likely require tens of billions of dollars. Last year, the state committed $1 billion annually to finance the project through 2045.

Read more here: https://grist.org/transportation/next- ... vestors/

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Morocco Has High-Speed Rail. California Has Excuses
By Joe Mathews
July 28, 2026

Introduction:

(Zócolo) I am sitting in a plush green seat, watching the digital speedometer at the front of the carriage climb. Outside, the landscape blurs into a familiar tapestry of scrub, yellowing grasses, eucalyptus trees, low-slung oaks, and waves from a west-facing seacoast. If I could cover my ears and ignore the French and Arabic conversations on the double-decker railcar, I might think I’m on a California high-speed train cutting through the Inland Empire or the Central Coast.

But this isn’t the Golden State. And I haven’t yet figured out how to travel through time to the distant decade, or century, when California might have high-speed rail.

I am riding (early this summer) the first and only high-speed railway on the continent of Africa. It’s called Al Boraq (“The Lightning” in Arabic), and it’s operated by Morocco’s national rail company, ONCF.

My trek runs the length of the line. I board at Casablanca’s pristine, 10-track station, which has a Starbucks, a McDonald’s, and glowing arrivals screens. I disembark at the terminal in Tangier, a few hundred meters from the mouth of the Mediterranean. The schedule says the train will arrive in 2 hours and 17 minutes. Before Al Boraq first opened service in 2018, the same route took 5 hours.

Yes, you read that right. Morocco has high-speed rail. And California has excuses.

Read more here: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/mor ... -excuses/