Here is a look at some of the transportation headlines gathered by us and the Metro Library. The full list of headlines is posted on the library’s blog.

With L.A. style carpool lanes, will safety be sacrificed for convenience (San Jose Mercury News)

The 680 freeway in the Bay Area is adopting new rules for its carpool lanes: instead of being able to move in and out of the lane at anytime, drivers will now have to enter and exit at fixed points. In other words, just like it’s done here in the Southland. There has, however, been debate over which way is safer because of the difference in speeds between carpool and general use lanes. The Bay Area is making the change to allow single drivers into the carpool lanes for a toll. The Merc has a good graphic with the story that shows why fixed entry/exit points make it easier to implement the tolls.

Dude, where’s my flying car (Primary Resources)

Metro’s Library has a smart entry on a recent paper showing the history of transportation in the U.S. over the past 200 years. In short, it goes like this: there was the era of canals, then railroads and then roads. But road-building has tailed off, raising the question of what’s next? And that, it turns out, is not an easy question to answer.

Vast ice ‘island’ breaks free of Greenland glacier (New York Times Dot Earth blog)

A chunk of ice four times the size of Manhattan broke off from Greenland on Aug. 5 but scientists aren’t sure that global warming can be blamed. Overall, Greenland has been shedding ice in recent years. The blog entry has a good aerial pic of the ice chunk in question.