Neither high-tech nor fancy, Apple

This bike is the Apple campus bike. The photo above, taken by designer Everaldo Coelho, shows one of the bikes apparently used to get around at Apple’s headquarters at One Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California.

If you were expecting a high-tech machine that looks more like Eve from Wall-E than a silver mixte that could come from any decade in the past 50 years, then you will obviously be disappointed. But take a closer look and you’ll see that this bike is as well suited to its task as an iPad is to its own market.

First, it looks great. Everything is silver,...

Many things come to mind when you think about transportation: Traffic, congestion, mass transit and the cost of fuel, to name a few. You might also think about the economy, urban planning and the environment. Yet one thing often is left out of the discussion: civil rights.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights lays out the case for transportation as a civil right in a report, Where We Need to Go: A Civil Rights Roadmap for Transportation Equity.

The way the conference sees it, access to transportation is key to connecting the poor, seniors and those with disabilities to jobs,...