Over the years, Washington has adopted a flavor-of-the-month approach to promoting alternative vehicles.

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Dedicated lanes give buses an uncongested path, and traffic-signal priority gives buses the power, once reserved for emergency vehicles, to switch signals from red to green as they approach.

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In order to keep maps up to date, an even more expensive approach is in place, employing fleets of sensor-equipped vehicles constantly driving around.

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At Mianyang, a big city close to Jiangyou, police erected barricades on an approach road to a stadium sheltering some 20, 000 refugees, to prevent its being clogged by volunteer vehicles.

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It seems odd: After all the research Toyota Motor and its partner, Panasonic, have done in the area of advanced lithium-ion batteries, the Japanese carmaker decided that maybe Tesla Motors' crude approach--stringing together a bunch of laptop batteries--is the preferred way to power electric vehicles, at least for now.

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