Olugbenro Ogunsemore via Esquire

When you hear the term “transportation commissioner,” you probably picture someone whose job it is to make sure a city’s planes, trains, cars, trucks, and subways get where they need to go. But for Janette Sadik-Khan, who oversees New York City’s staggeringly complex transportation system, vehicles are only a part of the whole: She’s working to give the streets back to pedestrians.

On Monday, April 8, Sadik-Khan announced the city’s new bike share program, which will launch in May (after long delays, largely due to damage caused by Hurricane Sandy) and will ultimately feature 600 docking stations and 10,000 shared bikes. “In just the last five years,” she wrote in the commission’s report, “New York City has made huge strides in creating modern, safer streets,” noting that in keeping with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s PlaNYC sustainability agenda, the city has “established more than 300 miles of bike lanes, 30 plazas and made expansive street safety redesigns to accommodate all street users citywide.” Read more!

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Peering down a long, dark, empty tunnel from a subway platform while waiting for the train can be agonizing—especially when you’re stuck underground in a drab, dreary station. But the best metro stations not only provide a means to get to your final destination; they transport you to another world through hypnotizing design or beautiful art.  For this week’s roundup, we scoured the web for the sleekest, best-designed, and sometimes bizarre subway stations—and with over 160 metro systems in the world, there were plenty to choose from. Click through to see our 12 favorites! 

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This project won the 2013 Architizer A+ Popular Choice Award in the bus and train station category. See the full list of winners here.

You’re driving on a vast open highway surrounded by nothingness after spending hours in your cramped car, and suddenly, you need a place to eat, use the john, and catch a catnap. You rush into a banal rest stop off the exit ramp, and the sterile interiors, smells of acrid industrial cleaners, and overhead fluorescent lights send you running back to the car. This may be your typical, unpleasant experience at a roadside rest area, unless you pull into this otherworldly Rest Stop in Gori, Georgia. Read more!

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This project won the 2013 Architizer A+ Jury Award in the bus and train station category. See the full list of winners here.

A operations building for a railroad yard—sounds kind of boring right? The words alone call to mind images of drab, gloomy façades with no architectural distinction other than being unremarkable. Luckily, when designing a new operations facility in Melbourne’s Southern Cross Rail Yard, architects McBride Charles Ryan treated the project as though it were a new monument to the city.

As described by the architects, the Yardmaster’s Building is a jewel in a junk heap, confidently presenting itself as a “public entity” that would otherwise be regarded as insignificant and overlooked. The Yardmaster’s Building is realized as an exquisite box of pre-cast concrete embellished with an eye-catching pattern of repeating star-like shapes. A rational system of glazing was integrated into the pattern so that each interior room could have a unique, exotic window. This intricate façade combined with the building’s isolation by way of surrounding rail tracks give the Yardmaster’s Building a notable monumentality compared with the conventional surrounding structures. Read more!

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This project won the 2013 Architizer A+ Jury and Popular Vote Award in the Architecture + Mobility category. See the full list of winners here.

As home to the Institut Galilée, the prestigious polytechnic science institute at the University of Paris North, the French commune of Villetaneuse seems an appropriate site for an inspiring work of engineering. French firm DVVD has delivered precisely that with its Footbridge Over the Railways, a 155-meter-long pedestrian bridge designed to connect areas of Villetaneuse and introduce an aesthetically spectacular work of infrastructure to a growing Parisian suburb. Click through to see more.

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Between Facebook, Twitter, online streaming, and even 2-Day Shipping, it’s easy to feel like all earthly boundaries and impediments—time, space, geographic features, inconvenience—have been finally transgressed. But your morning commute would very quickly tear you away from any such delusions. Despite all our finger-swiping savvy  and invisible cloud infrastructures, we have yet to achieve similar powers of apparition/disapparition that would instantly propel our bodies from place to place. Meaning, there’s still very much a need for planes, trains, and automobiles—and all the architecture that corresponds to each.

These are the finalist from the A+ “Transportation” typology. We’re not only talking airports and bus/train stations here, but also parking structures, port facilities, and boat piers, too. Click through to see them all!

Spot a favorite? Make sure to vote for it over at the A+ Public Voting site!

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Go gold or go home. That’s what Austrian architects Zechner & Zechner did with their 90 million euro upgrade to Graz’s international central station. The firm constructed a massive circular canopy—nicknamed “The Golden Eye” by locals—that functions as the project’s centerpiece and which makes a bold urban statement about the station’s renewed vibrancy. Continue.

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Urban cycling is cheap, healthy, and awesome for the environment. But it’s also really dangerous–particularly when a driver fails to see you approaching and cuts you off as he makes a right-hand turn. Indeed, according to the UK Department of Transport, 79% of cycling casualties have resulted from these kinds of oversights. If your bright orange vest or glow-in-the-dark gear just aren’t cutting it, the BLAZE bike light may do the trick. The attachment projects a symbol 13 feet to 20 feet ahead of bike, enhancing presence for oncoming traffic and lane mergers. Read more!

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There is always that moment, mid–traffic jam, when your eyes dart around in search of an escape route and land, longingly, on the sky. Urban air travel may sound like a utopian fantasy (and “skywalker” everyone’s favorite whining Jedi), but Frog Design‘s mass-transit proposal for Austin makes airborne gondolas look like the most obvious and economical solution we’ve never thought of. Conceived as an enclosed ski lift large enough for bikes, the “Wire,” as it’s known, would create shortcuts for pedestrians and cyclists by floating them above motorists. Read more!

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There’s nothing worse than waiting in a stuffy, stinky train station for your next connection. Unless you’re in Spain! Morphosis has designed a beautifully integrated public plaza with a roofdeck for the country’s Vialia Vigo train station. The new public area is a relaxing and bright roof deck that allows visitors to take in the gorgeous mountain view while waiting for the next train. And the sunlit, four-story atrium at the plaza’s center has enough shopping, rest areas, and dining options to keep even those with the longest layovers entertained. Read more!

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