PopEater gave me a heads up about David Byrne of the Talking Heads designing bike racks in Manhattan in order to promote bike riding. The bike racks are finished and in place. Each reflect its location. For example, head to Wall Street and you'll find one shaped like a dollar sign. Here is a link to his Web page that shows the racks and where they are located.

The video is a clip from this past July. The rack on Wall Street is one of them shown. Plus, you'll get a feel for Byrne and the experience of bike riding in Manhattan. If you do bike ride, watch out for vehicles.

A taxi driver opened his car door without looking first which caused someone near and dear to me to fly over the door and break his collar bone.

After reminding themselves that three-and-a-half dollars is still a lot to pay for a gallon of gas, many Americans have decided to stay near home instead of hitting the road during the Labor Day holiday.

The staying at HQ thing is nothing new. The number of people on the road was significantly down during both Memorial Day and July 4th. AAA did the math and predicted a 1% drop in auto travel over Labor Day and an even more significant 4.5% drop in air travel compared to last year. But there was good news for train and bus companies, the new dynamic duo of travel. According to AAA's survey, the ridership on these modes of transit will rise more than 12%.

Many people will just be staying at home, opting for a barbecue and a soak in their kids' inflatable pool.

I guess people will just have to look towards Thanksgiving and the New Year for a better travel climate. Right?
According to Farecast, airline tickets will be 35% more expensive this holiday season than the 2007 holidays. Looks like the trend of staying home isn't going to go anywhere.

Amtrak is seeing a real boom in passengers these days, thanks to the high cost of gas throughout the country and the onslaught of airline fees.

But if you were on one routine run from L.A. to San Diego yesterday, you might have been wishing that you'd coughed up the extra money for a flight.

An Amtrak train from L.A. to San Diego ran out of gas about two hours into the trip Sunday.

The train stood stranded for about two hours before another engine showed up to push it to San Diego, according to the Los Angeles Times.

It arrived early this morning.

Amtrak officials were quick to emphasize that one of its trains losing gas was an unusual occurrence. No word yet on how this actually happened.

Ed Robertson, the lead singer of popular Canadian band Barenaked Ladies, survived a crash of his Cessna 206 yesterday, in an accident that involved Robertson and three others. The plane, piloted by Robertson, was traveling over a rural area of southeastern Ontario when its engine stalled unexpectedly.

Robertson managed to set the plane straight and land it among some trees. The four passengers were forced to exit through a window but were not injured.

Robertson hosts a show on the Outdoor Life Network called "Ed's Up," which documents Robertson's plane trips.

This should make for an interesting episode, huh?

More here.

As Grant reported earlier this month, JetBlue is in the final stages of construction for its brand new home at Terminal 5 of New York's JFK airport. This morning Gadling had the chance to take a sneak peak of the new facilities in advance of the building's official opening on October 1st.

Although there's still much to be accomplished in the next 6 weeks, the building is already shaping up as a winner. JetBlue has built a showpiece home for its growing brand - a building that in many ways looks poised to usher travelers into a new era of domestic air travel. It was equally refreshing to find a totally new (dare I say revolutionary?) approach to the airport culinary and concession experience - one that is sure to please the palates of picky New Yorkers and fellow travelers from across the U.S.

With a project this ambitious, JetBlue has also built themselves very high expectations for their new terminal's success both in the press and with their passengers. But as we saw with the opening of London Heathrow's new British Airways terminal earlier this year, there are inevitably some kinks that need to be worked out. Here's hoping everything goes smoothly for JetBlue at launch.

So what exactly did we find during our visit? Follow the link below to get the full overview, and make sure to check out our gallery too for the full Terminal 5 experience.

Ever get sick of carrying around a huge guidebook with ten different maps of your favorite city, with each pertinent map flagged so you can flip all over the place when you're searching? Urban mapping thinks that they have the solution for you.

Remember that 2d-3d technology that they created 60 years ago where you can print on various angles on a document and see a different image when you look at the picture from a different angle? Apparently it's good for more circus tricks and cracker jack prizes.

Urban mapping has used the technology to overlay multiple maps onto one canvas -- neighborhood, street, subway, what have you -- look at the map from a different angle and you'll see a different layer. Sound useful? Check out the map in action below:

If you kept up with Gadling this week, you've probably gathered some tips to help you plan your next trip whether you're looking for the practical or the extravagant. For example,

1. Aaron says that almonds make perfect travel snacks, something he knew about even before he read about it at the Happiness Project website that recently offered up vacation tips.
2. Jerry found out from Mark Jolly, editor of globorati, that train travel is one way to go to travel green, and that train travel is having a comeback. There are other travel tidbits besides. If you missed this post, check it out.
3. Scott pointed us towards a High Sierra luggage deal at Amazon.com
4. Meg told us how to have the ultimate diamond and jewelry shopping experience in Manhattan
5. And Anna pointed us towards environmentally friendly cities for a vacation. It may surprise you that Bangkok is on the list. It has a well-deserved spot.

Have a great weekend and enjoy watching the rest of the Olympics. I'm loving learning more about China from all of the side stories.

Some people seek out golf courses and gated communities for their retirement; others choose the ocean. That's exactly what Beatrice Muller, an 89 year-old widow from New Jersey, did. She's spent the last nine years living the life on the high seas, cruising around the world on the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2. Muller finds this much more pleasant than any old retirement home and she plans to keep up her worldly accommodations, except for one problem: the 41 year old QE2 is retiring in November. What is an old, sea-loving woman to do? Find another ship of course.

Muller says despite her preferred ship's retirement, she refuses to return to land. "What would I want to do that for?" she was quoted asking The Times. Her cabin costs about $7,000 a month, and according to her estimates, that's about the same as a retirement home in Florida, just "far more pleasant."

Actually living on the sea isn't as strange as it sounds. Magellan offers a Residential Cruise Line, where for $4 million and up you can buy your own on-board condo. The World is another "seagoing community" popular with the financially secure crowd.

We'll just have to wait and see what Muller chooses as her next home. As for the QE2, it's headed to Dubai to become a floating hotel.

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Car rental giant Hertz says it will enter the car-sharing market in a big way later this year.

A senior vice president at Hertz tells the Boston Globe that the company will unveil a new car-sharing program in several major U.S. cities, an effort, in part, to draw more business to Hertz's 1,600 locations that are not at airports.

Hertz is not saying exactly when it will begin its car-sharing program, or just how fast it might grow to include so-called second tier cities like Boston and St. Louis. Also, it has not released rates.

The company has been testing rentals by the hour for some time now, the Globe says.

Hertz would be the first major car rental company to step up and attempt to cut into the market share of Zipcar, currently the car-sharing leader, with more than 200,000 members in 50 North American cities.

UHaul and Enterprise are also said to be contemplating entering the car-sharing market.

Whack me but I found this funny more than anything else: A Spanish couple traveling in Norway wanted to go to Olden to catch a cruise they had left to sort out some health issues. Traveling by taxi, due to a mispronunciation of their destination, the taxi driver took them to Halden instead, which is 560km away. Their fare came to 15,000 Kroners ($2765).

Still oblivious to the mistake, they tipped the driver 1000 Kroners ($184!) and spent the night in a hotel, only to find that there was no cruise ship waiting for them -- that's when they realized that they were in the wrong city. They jumped back into a taxi and and head towards Olden which was 610km away and the taxi ride cost them another 15,300 Kroners ($2,820).

So their pronunciation error cost them over 30,000 Kroners (over $5,300), the approximate cost of 2 round the world tickets.

Funny thing is, Spaniards don't pronounce "h"; so they would pronounce Halden as "Alden" -- which sounds more like Olden than Halden. When they try to pronounce the "h" it's very strong and sounds like a "khhhhh", so I'm not quite sure how they ended-up going to Halden. Perhaps the driver saw they were rich and decided to dupe them.