Category Archives: Transportation

California doesn’t know what safety standards to adopt with driverless cars

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Who should certify the safety of driverless cars? California is considering this question:

DMV officials say they won’t let the public get self-driving cars until someone can certify that they don’t pose an undue risk. The problem is that the technology remains so new there are no accepted standards to verify its safety. Absent standards, certifying safety would be like grading a test without an answer key.Broadly, the department has three options: It could follow the current U.S. system, in which manufacturers self-certify their vehicles; it could opt for a European system, in which independent companies verify safety; or the state could (implausibly) get into the testing business…

Manufacturers generally would prefer self-certification. That may be where California ends up, but for now the DMV is exploring independent certification — something that doesn’t exist for driverless cars.

In July, the DMV asked third-party testers whether they’d be interested in getting into the game. The department doesn’t have the expertise to create a safety standard and testing framework, so “the department wanted to get a very good sense of what is out there in the market,” according to Russia Chavis, a deputy secretary at the California State Transportation Agency, which oversees the DMV and requested a deeper exploration of third-party alternatives to self-certification.

 

I can’t imagine California or another US state allowing corporations to do this on their own. Perhaps it would be allowed if they agreed to provide generous payouts if their products failed? Yet, given the hubbub about Toyota and its stuck pedals as well as the Takata air bag scares, this is a public safety issue.

I wonder what the public would want. Americans like progress and like cars. But, there would be some fear regarding the safety of driverless cars until they have some sort of independent certification. And how would Google’s reputation these days affect perceptions of these cars?

Keeping track of speeding in E-Z Pass lanes – but not enforcing it?

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Some states monitor speeding through open road tolling:

Several states, including New York, Maryland and Pennsylvania, say they monitor speeds through the fast pass toll lanes and will suspend your E-Z Pass for multiple speeding violations.

In all, five of the 15 E-Z Pass states have some kind of rules on the books for breaking the speed limit in the convenience lanes.

This makes some sense. Yet, the states don’t consistently enforce these rules. Here are two examples:

“You can lose your E-Z Pass privileges if you speed through E-Z Pass lanes,” says Dan Weiller, director of communications for the New York State Thruway Authority. “You get a couple of warnings. We don’t have the power to give a ticket, but we do have to power to revoke your E-Z Pass, which we will.”…

In Pennsylvania, a warning usually suffices for lead-footed drivers, says Carl DeFebo, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission. “If a collector spots an E-Z Pass customer blasting through at a high rate of speed, they’ll get a license plate,” he says. “We do have the ability to send a warning letter to the customer, and that has proven effective. If the customer doesn’t heed the warning we have the ability to suspend their E-Z Pass privileges but we haven’t done that recently.”

My interpretation: states have had the ability to monitor speeding at these open toll lanes. Theoretically, they could even calculate the time it takes to drive between points and could track speeding on the open highway. But, widely ticketing people in these open toll lanes would be unpopular and seen as heavy-handed so they don’t crack down on everyone.

I want to know: is this strategy effective? Does the threat of a ticket (whether it is on posted signs before the tolls or is in the user agreement) actually slow people down? If this is really a safety issue, shouldn’t this be enforced consistently? It sounds like the speeding on Chicago highways that takes place among most drivers but the state won’t raise the 55 mph speed limit near Chicago.

The difficulties in finding out the most popular street name in the United States

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FiveThirtyEight tries to find out the most common street name in the US and this leads to comparing Census information from 1993 with a Reddit user’s work:

The chart on Reddit that sparked your question looks very different from the 1993 list of most common street names from the Census Bureau.

Why, for example are there 3,238 extra Main streets in that chart compared with the census records in 1993? To find out, I got in touch with “darinhq,” whose name is Darin Hawley when he’s not producing charts on Reddit. After speaking to him, I think there are three explanations for the difference between his chart and the official data.

First, some new streets may have been built over the past 20 years (Hawley used 2013 census data to make his chart). Second, some streets may have changed their names: If a little town grows, it might change the name of its principal street from Tumbleweed Lane to Main Street.

Third, I don’t know how the Census Bureau produced its 1993 list (I asked, and a spokesperson told me the researcher who made it can’t recall his methodology), so Hawley might have simply used a different methodology to produce his chart. Because I wasn’t able to find any data on the frequency that American streets are renamed or the rate at which new streets are being built, I’m going to stake my money on this third explanation. Hawley told me that he counted “Main St N” and “N Main St” as two separate streets in his data. If the Census Bureau counted them as just one street, that could account for the difference.

That’s not the only executive decision Hawley made when he was summarizing this data. He set a minimum of how far away one Elm Street in Maine had to be from another Elm Street in Maine to qualify as two separate streets. That’s a problem because streets can break and resume in unexpected ways.

In other words, getting an answer requires making some judgment calls with the available data. While this is the sort of question that exemplifies the intriguing things we can all learn from the Internet, it is also a question that likely isn’t important enough to spend a lot of time with it. As an urban sociologist, this is an interesting question but what would I learn from the frequencies of street names? What hypothesis could I test? It might roughly tell us the names that Americans give to roads. What we value may just be reflected in these road names. For example, the Census data suggests that numbered streets and references to nature dominate the top 20. Does this mean we like order (a pragmatic approach) and idyllic yet vague nature terms (park, view, lake, tree names) over other things? Yet, the list has limitations as these communities and roads were built at different times, roads can be renamed, and we do have to make judgment calls about what specifies separate streets.

Two other thoughts:

1. The Census researcher who did this back in the early 1990s can’t remember the methodology. Why wasn’t it part of the report?

2. Is this something that would be best left up to marketers (who might find some advertising value in this) or GIS firms (who have access to comprehensive map data)?

Waze app ruins tranquil Los Angeles streets near major highways

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Drivers have flooded a number of residential streets near major LA highways thanks to apps that reroute drivers around congestion:

When the people whose houses hug the narrow warren of streets paralleling the busiest urban freeway in America began to see bumper-to-bumper traffic crawling by their homes a year or so ago, they were baffled.

When word spread that the explosively popular new smartphone app Waze was sending many of those cars through their neighborhood in a quest to shave five minutes off a daily rush-hour commute, they were angry and ready to fight back.

They would outsmart the app, some said, by using it to report phony car crashes and traffic jams on their streets that would keep the shortcut-seekers away…

There are some things that can be done to mitigate the situation, said Los Angeles Department of Transportation spokesman Bruce Gillman, like placing speed bumps and four-way stop signs on streets. Lanes could even be taken out to discourage shortcut seekers, but a neighborhood traffic study would have to be done first.

A fascinating confluence of driving culture and new technology. Now, no street near the major highways are safe from traffic!

It will be fascinating to see how the city responds to complaints from local residents. Having rush hour congestion on your residential road can make for quite a different experience. It is a quality of life issue – who wants to have bumper to bumper cars in front – and I suspect the residents are also worried about their property values. Yet, what about the concerns of drivers on highways like the 405 that handle over 375,000 cars a day? This is a classic stand-off between individual drivers and individual property owners – who should win between the prized American driver and property-owner?

The real solution here is to keep looking for ways to reduce the number of vehicles on the highways in the first place. However, such plans at this point in LA’s development require a long-term perspective and lots of money.

Does posting the number of highway deaths in Illinois lead to safer driving?

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A columnist discusses the effects of signs on Illinois Tollways that post the number of automobile fatalities on area highways:

The first time I saw one of those grim Illinois expressway signs was in 2012. I was merrily driving to the family farm in Indiana to visit my mom when I spotted a roadside sign dishing a little shock and awe to commuters and vacationers. There was something cold about the little electric bulbs in the sign above my expressway lane letting me know: “679 TRAFFIC DEATHS THIS YEAR.”

It made me think…

That’s precisely what the sign was meant to do. While many states were seeing fewer traffic fatalities during the summer of 2012, Illinois was seeing a substantial increase in the number of people killed on Illinois roads in the first half of that year. After the Illinois Department of Transportation started posting a running total of the dead in July, the last half of 2012 saw fewer fatalities than the last half of sign-free 2011.

Still, the number of fatalities went up in 2012, from 918 to 957. Last year, with those same signs updating our death toll daily and urging us to drive more safely, our fatalities inched higher again, to 973.

This evidence suggests the signs had little effect. This would line up with research that suggests drivers don’t pay all that much attention to road signs; hence, the suggestion that perhaps no signs might even be better. Indeed, the Illinois Department of Transportation has moved on to other strategies to reduce traffic deaths:

Michael Rooker, the actor who played Merle Dixon on TV’s “The Walking Dead,” stars in the latest IDOT safety campaign, a series of videos at thedrivingdeadseries.com and Facebook posts titled “The Driving Dead.” The postings don’t have anything close to the power of watching a young mother of two die while pinned in her car, but perhaps they will prove more effective than the road signs. The catchphrase of “The Driving Dead” gives those behind the wheel a new way of thinking about driving.

I would be curious to know whether IDOT is pursuing these strategies based on evidence that suggest they work or the agency is mounting what they think might work and/or what is publicly visible. Driving is a dangerous activity – one of the most dangerous the average person will partake in each day – and you would want solutions that work rather than guesses.

Buy friends and families barrels of oil for Christmas

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I’ve thought about this before…

Oil prices continued to fall today, with two different measures of the commodity’s price hitting five-year lows. Oil can currently be had for $64.10 a barrel in some circumstances.

A barrel of oil is 42 gallons.

Who do you know that could use 42 gallons of freshly drilled oil? Everyone! Oil is important for producing energy, which powers cars and flat-screen televisions through a scientific process known as “pushing the button on the remote control or turning the key in the ignition.”

And what season is it? Christmas season! The season for giving things to people. Do you see where I’m going with this? Oil is this year’s hottest and most affordable Christmas gift.

The practical issues are immense – how would an individual refine the oil? how many people could easily store the barrels? These barrels can’t exactly be bought and sold at Walmart – but it is hard to argue with giving people something they need. Why give superfluous gifts when every driver could use cheap oil?

“Why Congress won’t raise the gas tax”

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Gas prices are lower and the money is needed for highways but one writer suggests Congress is nowhere near raising the gas tax:

Fuel prices are plunging to their lowest level in years. The Highway Trust Fund is broke, and Congress faces a spring deadline to replenish it. The obvious answer—the only answer, according to many in Washington—is to raise the 18.4 cent-per-gallon gas tax, which hasn’t gone up in more than 20 years. Since prices at the pump have dropped more than a dollar per gallon in some areas, drivers would barely notice the extra nickel they’d be forced initially to pay as a result of the tax hike. That wasn’t true until recently: For years, the pocketbook punch of the Great Recession combined with gas prices that peaked above $4 made an increase both politically and economically untenable.

Yet even with prices at a four-year low, the odds of Congress touching the gas tax are as long as ever. “I think it’s too toxic and continues to be too toxic,” said Steve LaTourette, the former Republican congressman best known for his close friendship with his fellow Ohioan, Speaker John Boehner. “I see no political will to get this done.”…

Advocates on and off Capitol Hill are mounting a new push to lift the gas tax as Republicans prepare to assume full control of Congress in January. Funding for the Highway Trust Fund will run out May 31. On 60 Minutes last month, officials including former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell used the specter of a major bridge or highway collapse to warn of the need for new investments. LaHood, a Republican who was once rebuked by the Obama White House for suggesting a switch to a mileage-based tax, is now going public on the gas tax, in his typically colorful style. “The best argument for doing it is is that America is one big pothole,” he told me in a phone interview, “and America’s infrastructure is in the worst shape that we’ve seen in decades.”…

In a separate interview, Blumenauer said the administration had recently “dialed back” its opposition, with senior officials telling lawmakers that if Congress could somehow pass a gas tax hike, he would sign it. Yet just a few hours after his and Petri’s press conference, Obama himself seemed to put their plan back on ice. At a business roundtable at the White House, FedEx CEO Frederick Smith asked Obama why Congress couldn’t just raise the gas tax and solve the infrastructure problem. “In fairness to members of Congress, votes on the gas tax are really tough,” the president replied, after first chuckling that if it he were in charge on Capitol Hill, “I probably already would have done it.”

It sounds like Congress thinks that such a move would be very unpopular. Americans like driving (even if they have cut back in recent years), prefer cheaper gas, believe the country is still experiencing tough economic times, and many don’t want to personally pay more in taxes. Yet, it makes some sense that highways should be funded by the gas tax: if you use the highways and associated infrastructure, you should help bear some of the cost.

Is Congress responsible for this or the American people? The article suggests Congress won’t act but Congress suggests the American people wouldn’t want it. Are both groups pretty blind to infrastructure needs or long-term investments? In the short-term, few people want to pay the necessary costs but no one will like it if the situation becomes dire.

More protesters taking to the highways

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Protesters around the world have moved to highways where they very visibly stop traffic:

In L.A., some of those demonstrators were arrested after shutting down traffic in both directions on the 101 Freeway. Another group of protesters flummoxed traffic downtown by laying down in the intersection of Cesar Chavez Boulevard and Grand Avenue.

They were not alone. Protesters took to I-95 in Providence. Highway 55 in Minneapolis. I-75 in Cincinnati. I-980 in Oakland. I-44 in St. Louis. I-35 in Dallas. And the Lincoln Tunnel and the West Side Highway in New York.

Across the nation, many of the protests that continue to simmer have moved from parks, plazas and civic centers to freeways and highways. The ongoing protests reflect national outrage following a grand jury decision that has vexed critics, to say nothing of the many black lives cut short in police shootings. Yet the move to the highways is something else: an evolution in the language and strategy of civil disobedience.

This isn’t just an American phenomenon:

It was late in September that protesters first took a major freeway in Hong Kong’s financial district. The protests gained critical mass more than a month after Brown’s death in Ferguson. When Hong Kong demonstrators clashed with police, they appeared to adopt the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” posture made familiar after weeks of protests in Ferguson.

This updates a post from a month ago about protestors blocking traffic in Atlanta. As noted before, this raises some interesting questions about public spaces and traffic safety. American drivers tend to like wide roads with more lanes because they think this will help them get places faster. (This is not the case on highly congested highways where simply adding lanes tend to increase the number of cars on the roads. Width does seem to matter on more normal streets where width tends to give drivers the impression they have some margin of error to go faster.) Highways tend to be some of the most empty places we have: no pedestrians, no bicycles, almost no one out of their car unless something has gone wrong. Yet, protesters blocking traffic can draw the attention of a lot of people at once both on the roads and from aerial shots that show the power even a relatively small number of people can have.

Is protesting on a highway as symbolic as some of the protests in shopping malls in the St. Louis areas? Does cutting off America’s transportation “arteries” make the same point as protesting in temples of capitalism? I’m not sure but it certainly is more unusual given the typical functions of highways.

What it takes to approach a rate of zero traffic fatalities

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An expert discusses Sweden’s efforts to get to zero traffic fatalities:

But in Vision Zero, the accident is not the major problem. The problem is that people get killed or seriously injured. And the reason that people get serious injuries is mainly because people have a certain threshold where we can tolerate external violence, kinetic energy. And we know quite well now how much violence we can tolerate.One of the major things with Vision Zero now is to put that more explicitly on the table. It’s like if we’re talking about the environment, and you know you have a certain threshold when it comes to poison, or whatever. You can tolerate up to a certain level. So it’s not just to stop the traffic. You can actually allow traffic. But if you have places in your system where you have unprotected road users and protected road users, according to Vision Zero you can’t allow a higher speed than 30 kilometers per hour [18.6 mph]…

I will say that enforcement plays of course a role in Sweden, but not so much. We are going much more for engineering than enforcement. If you have a very dedicated police staff and they think it’s the most important thing, then you can be quite effective working with police. But I don’t think you will get a safe system. You will reduce risk, but you will not achieve a safe system.

What about camera enforcement?

We are doing it, but in a different way. First of all, it is a national policy. We have both rural and urban areas, and we work with both. And when it comes to safety cameras, which is what we call them, we have put them on most rural roads. We have one of the largest safety camera systems in the world, per population.

But they are not catching people — it’s nudging people. So we put up the cameras on a stretch, and we tell everyone, OK, now you’re going in this area, and in a friendly but firm way we say you have to keep the speed in this area because we have a history of crashes.

It sounds like this would create some interesting discussions in the United States: do we really want to nudge drivers in such directions or do we truly think cars and vehicles should the rulers of the road? Right now, many of our roads are geared toward helping drivers get from Point A to Point B as fast as they can. But, safety is an important issue and one that concerns a lot of people given the number of vehicle deaths.

Gas prices go down, SUVs and Hummers return. Could the same idea hold for McMansions?

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SUV sales have picked up in recent months as gas prices dropped across the United States:

Over the last month, auto analysts say, consumers have shown a fresh interest in the kind of SUVs — Hummers, Lincoln Navigators, Ford Explorers — that typified America’s bigger-is-better mindset of twenty years ago. The new mindset among some car buyers is one of the most unexpected consequences of a domestic oil boom that has helped cause global crude prices to plummet in recent months, with the cost of a gallon of gas now below $3.

As oil prices hit a three-year low, Americans are starting to see price changes that could ultimately influence everything from their grocery shopping to their heating bills to their travel. The lower prices — should they be sustained, as expected, for the next few months — have the potential to nudge the U.S. further away from its dreary post-recession mindset, leaving instead a nation with more affordable air and road transportation options, higher consumer confidence, and yes, a few more gas guzzlers driving around…

One measure is the share of “trucks” — including pick-ups, SUVs and crossovers — among total vehicles sold. Before the financial crisis, trucks almost always outsold cars, in some months grabbing as much as 59 percent of the market. Post-recession, the industry has flip-flopped; cars are more popular.

But not in recent months. In September, the truck market share was 53.5 percent. In October, it was 53.6. That is the best sustained two-month stretch since 2005.

As for those Hummers? Autotrader.com said interest in Hummer H1s on its site rose 11 percent last month, making it the fastest-growing older model among all vehicles.

As gas prices drop, Americans are returning to some of their consumption patterns from the late 1990s and early 2000s when the economy was doing better. Even though they have seen higher gas prices (which could return soon), gone through a great recession, and government regulations encourage more MPGs across all vehicles in the coming years, some Americans want bigger vehicles that require more gas.

This is interesting in itself but I wonder if the same general concept could apply to McMansions. One argument about reducing purchases of SUVs and McMansions, often paired symbols of excessive consumption, is that Americans needed to be shocked by high gas prices and hard economic times before they would change their behavior. Yet, the recent data about gas prices suggests Americans might just return to their spending patterns once things look better. (And, with the gas prices, it is not like they are likely returning to the $1.20-$2.00 range of not that long ago.) Might the same apply to McMansions? Even with all the fanfare about smaller homes, more reasonable debt loads (whether through mortgages or car loans), and critiques of the kind of sprawling communities in which communities are often built, will Americans return to McMansions once the economy picks up?

I, for one, wouldn’t be surprised. Even during the recession, people with money continued to purchase and build large homes. Homes do require a larger financial commitment than SUVs but they also are highly symbolic and linked to suburbs, all dealing with the American Dream. Perhaps the best hope for fighting these consumerist impulses is pervasive generational shifts, particularly kids, teenagers, and young adults who don’t want cars and suburban houses in the same way over time.