Transport

Ellen is reported to be the world's largest all-electric ferry, and made its first commercial trip earlier this month between two Danish islands.

Ector Hoogstad Architects is behind the creation of the world's largest bicycle parking center, which is part of a grand scale redevelopment of the Utrecht Centraal Railway Station in the Netherlands and boasts an innovative layout that manages the flow of both pedestrians and cyclists.

Monowheels are kind of ridiculous, largely pointless and far from a practical way to get around. On the other hand, they're also pretty fascinating – and never more so than in this short, seven-minute video detailing how the Make it Extreme team went about building one.

Pedal-powered paddle boat (pedalo) designs tends to swing between cutesy kitsch and blandly pragmatic, which is why Beau Lake's Runabout – a paddle boat that actually looks like a boat – is the most ironically out-there thing to happen to these little leisure craft to date.

The City of Chicago has just selected Elon Musk's Boring Company to design, build, pay for, operate and maintain the Express Loop, which will see a network of electric pods carry up to 16 people from downtown Chicago to O'Hare Airport in as little as 12 minutes.

The Swedish Transport Administration has just opened a 2-km (1.2-mi) stretch of electrified road that works like slot cars. The project, dubbed eRoadArlanda, involves embedding electric rails into the road surface to power electric vehicles through a contact arm hanging down from under the car.

The realm of transport is a particularly good place to see some of humankind's odder creations in action, and while the seven presented here might not be the most effective in getting you where you need to go, they will certainly turn some heads along the way.​

​The Tesla Semi electric truck is officially in for some competition. This week, Los Angeles-based Thor Trucks announced its ET-One. Capable of hauling 80,000 lb (36,287 kg) with instant torque at zero RPM, it has a claimed range of 300 miles (482 km) per charge of its lithium-ion battery pack.

Hydrogen-powered vehicles are slowly hitting the streets, but mass producing, distributing and storing hydrogen is still a major roadblock. But new work out of UCLA could help lower the barrier to entry for consumers, with a device that uses sunlight to produce both hydrogen and electricity.

​​Bikes are everywhere in the Netherlands, which can make finding somewhere to park a problem. Cyclists​ in Utrecht started using a parking garage under the train station last week, ahead of an August 21 official opening. When complete, it will be the world's largest parking facility for bikes.​​

If Amazon’s drone delivery service is to get off the ground, it’ll need some major infrastructure upgrades to support it. A new patent awarded to the retail giant could see drones being patched up and launched from mobile maintenance facilities carted around on the back of trains, trucks and ships.

​We hear a lot about the coming of driverless transport trucks, but where might they first enter common use? Well, perhaps in Sweden. That's the home country of Einride, a startup that recently announced development of a sort-of-driverless electric vehicle known as the T-pod.