Chances are, even if you’re a lifelong resident of a particular city, you don’t know every nook and cranny, every food truck location, or the lore of every interesting local building. Apps for smartphones, tablets and other gadgets are making big urban centers feel smaller than ever, making it easy to catch a ride, find cheap eats, check out street art and make new friends.

Eat Cheap – Roaming Hunger

Find out where your next meal is parked with Roaming Hunger, an app that shows real-time food truck locations in your area. The app not only displays the trucks on a map, with their hours at that location, but also allows you to sort results by meal, and browse menus. Additional apps are city-specific, like Street Food App, which currently shows schedules for Boston, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver.

Maps and Travel Guides – City Maps 2Go

Want access to maps while traveling abroad, without gobbling up roaming data or lurking in a spot that offers wi-fi? City Maps 2Go downloads maps for the cities of your choice for offline use, including millions of POI (restaurants, bars, hotels etc.), 500,000 Wikipedia entries for sites and attractions, and travel guides. It’s avaiable for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

Connect – MeetMe

Among the most popular apps to show you who’s nearby and looking to meet new people, MeetMe gives both social butterflies and the shy an easy way to connect. You’ll probably find more people looking to date than to make new friends, and it might be easier to just walk up to someone and introduce yourself than spend your time scrolling through photos, but hey – whatever works.

Avoid Your Friends – Hell is Other People

Maybe, instead of making new friends, you want to avoid the ones you already have. There’s an app for that, too. Hell is Other People will show you where your friends are based on check-ins on Foursquare, Facebook, Instagram and other networks, and provide ‘safe zones’ where you can hang out without being recognized. Of course, it only works if your contacts are avid users of social media, and you might find yourself relegated to unexpected places in the city.

Find Street Art – 1AM Mobile

This free photo app called 1AM Mobile lets users pinpoint, share and discover street art in their own communities before it’s gone, as it often is within days or weeks of completion. Shoot photos of street art and the app will map them, date them and credit you as the photographer before sharing them worldwide.

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Watch the frenetic motion of urban scenes around the world in mesmerizing time lapse videos created using thousands of still photographs. Often captured from some of the highest vantage points in the city, these city time lapse videos take us on tours of Shanghai, Dubai, New York, Melbourne and more, showing off monuments, street scenes, sunsets and city lights.

Melbourne

Tilt-shift techniques make Melbourne look miniature in this entrancing time-lapse video.

Chicago

Over 30,000 still photographs taken by filmmaker Eric Hines in a span of four months around the bustling downtown areas of Chicago become a dizzying trip through the city in this time-lapse video.

London

New York

Animator and director Philip Stockton created this film, ‘New York: Night and Day’, to show the transitions between light and dark in the city using a mix of time-lapse and animation.

Moscow

Using a tripod, taking a small step forward with each photo, the creator of this time-lapse video of Moscow gives a feeling of sweeping movement through the city.

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Once the Berlin Wall came crashing down in 1989, many surrounding nations – including Bulgaria – began to escape the grip of communism. But the ability for Bulgarian people to start businesses of their own in the capital city of Sofia was hampered by the high rents of urban storefronts. That’s when these enterprising people began opening ‘klek’ shops – small pop-up stores organized around basement windows.

Artist Ivaylo Getov has documented many of these fascinating little storefronts in a series on DeviantArt. The photos depict a variety of cases displaying examples of the wares found inside, or simply posters printed with their images. Customers crouch to view the selection of drinks, snacks, cigarettes and other small items.

Twenty-three years after klek shops were borne of necessity, they’re beginning to disappear, remaining in small numbers mostly for the benefit of tourists. While visitors from other countries, including America, are likely accustomed to vendor carts and other sidewalk shops in their hometowns, the sight of these makeshift shops – which fold closed and lock like shutters when business hours are over – is still unusual and intriguing.

See the whole series at DeviantArt.

Have you ever asked for directions in an unfamiliar city, only to find that you’ve been pronouncing the street name all wrong? It’s not hard to do even in a place that speaks your own language, let alone in a city with a foreign tongue. Just try to say ‘Rådhusstræde’ correctly, if you’re not Danish. A new installation in Copenhagen will show you exactly how to do that with an interactive speaker and light display.

For ‘What the Phonics’, Momo Miyazai and Andrew Spitz at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design installed a speaker on a cable, along with a strip of lights, above street signs in touristy areas of the city.

Says Spitz, “We recorded a Danish person speaking the street names then split up each syllable. In true karaoke style, we placed lights above the matching syllable so that in real-time, you can see which part of the word is being spoken. When participants lift the speaker off the wall, it starts playing.”

Imagine if this kind of technology were available everywhere in the world. Even in New York City there are names like ‘Koscuiszko’. Mexico City has ‘Cuauhtemoc’. In Wales, ‘Pontrhydfendigaid’ is just the name of a village, and street names can get even more complicated from there. Pronunciation guides would eliminate a lot of confusion and some seriously embarrassing moments.

Much to the disappointment of pretty much everyone, we have yet to perfect the science of teleportation and no one has bothered to invent Futurama-type human pneumatic tubes. Until those things become reality, we are stuck walking, biking, or riding almost everywhere. At least these three human transport systems are weird enough to be interesting, which will just have to do for now.

The Trampe Bicycle Lift

(images via: Trampe)

In bicycle-friendly Trondheim, Norway, a curious contraption adorns a steep hill. It is the world’s only functional bicycle lift, designed to help bike riders ascend the hill quickly and easily with a minimum amount of stress on their muscles. Built as a sort of working prototype, the Trampe (meaning “to stomp” in Norwegian) Lift was installed in 1993.

(images via: Trampe)

Inspired by Trondheim’s large student population and very hilly topography, the Trampe’s inventor, Jarle Wanvik, first came up with the bike lift idea in 1992. He envisioned the lift working like a ski lift, taking bikers from the bottom of a hill to the top with a minimal amount of effort. Since Trondheim had recently invested large amounts of money in a number of pro-bicycle city improvements, the Public Roads Administration loved the idea.

(image via: Trampe)

After choosing a manufacturer and working out the details of the plan, Wanvik and the Municipal of Trondheim chose a suitable hill. The hill that would eventually become a bike commuter’s dream and a tourist attraction for the city is located near the town center and leads up to the university campus. The location is perfect for students and commuters alike. Keycard passes for the lift cost 100 Kroner per year for residents, but one-time cards are free for tourists.

(images via: Trampe, Wikipedia)

The bike lift works in a very straightforward way: a cyclist puts his right foot on the starting point with his left foot still on the left bike pedal, then inserts his keycard in the card reader machine. After pushing the “start” button, a footplate emerges behind the right foot and begins to propel the rider up the hill. It looks precarious and tiring, but the trick is to keep the right leg extended behind the body, shift the body weight to the footplate, and lean slightly forward on the bike. Riding the lift in this way, says the manufacturer, prevents any fatigue and makes for a pleasant assisted uphill ride.

(image via: Trampe)

So why isn’t this great idea employed elsewhere in the world? According to the official Trampe website, it’s not for lack of interest by other cities. The idea has been well received by locations all over Europe, Asia and the US, with many cities promising to install one in the future. But before that can happen, the overall bicycle infrastructure has to be ready to support such an endeavor. For many cities, that means installing dedicated bike lanes on the streets before undertaking an ambitious project like a bike lift.

The Central-Mid-Levels Escalator System

(images via: Wikipedia)

Hong Kong is another urban environment full of steep hills and difficult-to-maneuver terrain. To make commuting easier between the Central and Western Districts of Hong Kong Island, the world’s longest covered outdoor escalator system was built. In the late 1980s Hong Kong officials were troubled by the increasing vehicular traffic in the residential Mid-Levels. Seeking a radical solution to the problem, they decided to pedestrianize the area with a series of 20 escalators and three moving sidewalks.

(images via: Hamish, Michael Heiniger, bricoleurbanism)

The entire escalator system is more than 2600 feet (800 meters) long and covers a vertical climb of 443 feet (135 meters). If you were to travel the entire system from one end to the other, the trip would take around twenty minutes – a considerable improvement over the time it would take to travel the same distance by car on zigzagging roads. Exits at every road give travelers the chance to step out and stop at any of the many restaurants and shops that have sprung up around the system.

(images via: Wikipedia)

To facilitate the morning commute, the escalator system flows downhill from 6:00 am to 10:00 am. The direction then reverses and the escalators run uphill until midnight daily. Although the system was only designed to handle around 27,000 people daily, it sees actual usage of more than double that. The escalators have proven a valuable resource for not only unclogging urban streets, but for increasing traffic to older neighborhoods and even serving as a tourist attraction.

A side effect of this unusual urban transit system has been the revitalization of neighborhoods that used to be remote and difficult to reach. While the higher-elevation areas were once filled with industrial buildings and low-rent apartments, they have now become some of the trendiest areas of Hong Kong. Providing simple, free transportation for commuters, tourists and residents has proven to be a smart move for Hong Kong, despite the critics who have called the system a colossal waste of money.

Curved Escalators

(images via: Wikipedia)

Since the very first escalators were built and installed, engineers have been trying to figure out how to get them to work in configurations other than the standard straight-up-and-down. The configuration of choice is the spiral, which would take up far less space than straight escalators and could be installed in a wider variety of locations. Curved escalators like the ones pictured above are as close as we have been able to get, and even these still have the same problems as standard escalators: they take up enormous amounts of space and they aren’t the true “spirals” that engineers want to create.

But why do spiral escalators matter? Aren’t they just staircases for lazy people? Actually, the importance of escalators in maintaining manageable urban traffic is often underestimated. These moving staircases can transport large numbers of people in roughly the same amount of floorspace taken up by a comparable flight of conventional stairs. They help people with mobility issues get around in areas where an elevator just wouldn’t fit. Curved escalators are, themselves, a feat of engineering – but the overall escalator design has long been due for an overhaul.

(image via: Dornob)

Finally, an engineer has come up with a viable solution to the spiral escalator dilemma. London professor Jack Levy has created a system that he calls “the Levytator,” a surprisingly flexible escalator system that takes up very little space, can be installed in already-existing buildings and can take on just about any configuration. Unlike traditional escalators, the ingenious new design does not require a large mechanical room beneath the system to keep it moving.

The stairs are on a continuous loop above the floor, which sets this design apart from traditional escalators where half of the steps are unused at any given time. Thus, the cost per step is much lower than traditional escalator designs and no excavations are required to install this system in an existing building. There is virtually no limit to the size and shape of the loop, and because the stairs turn into a moving sidewalk when flat the system can be installed to move people around all kinds of indoor and outdoor displays.