Tag Archives: cars

Snow reveals why we clearly need parking stripes

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I pulled into the parking lot this morning at my normal time and I saw a common winter situation: packed down snow (we got 5 or so inches overnight) covering the parking stripes meant drivers were at all sorts of angles and depths. It is a bit of a different lot – angled parking, sloped – but this is common across parking lots, including big box lots with straight parking, when snow obscures the pavement.

The biggest issue? Spacing goes out the window. Without lines to guide them, parkers are either too close or too far. Looking at the same lot later in the morning, it ended up where people are much too close together. In other lots I’ve seen this winter, people are further apart than necessary, pushing new parkers further out than necessary.

What might be solutions?

1. Some kind of glowing parking lines. This would have to be a strong glow to make it through snow. How about bioluminescent paint?

2. Heated parking lines. The cost might be prohibitive but it works for heated floors.

3. Pop-up parking lines. I’m not sure exactly how this would work with snow on top of them but perhaps they would be activated before the snow falls.

4. Parking lines that are more like rumble strips so people know when they are going over them. Again, having snow on top poses a problem.

There has to be someone working on this, right?

Traffic deaths predicted to be 5th leading cause of death in the developing world

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Even as the conversation about safer autonomous cars picks up in the United States, traffic deaths are an increasing problem in the developing world:

It has a global death toll of 1.24 million per year and is on course to triple to 3.6 million per year by 2030.

In the developing world, it will become the fifth leading cause of death, leapfrogging past HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other familiar killers, according to the most recent Global Burden of Disease study.

The victims tend to be poor, young and male.

In one country — Indonesia — the toll is now nearly 120 dead per day; in Nigeria, it is claiming 140 lives each day…

In 2010, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for a “Decade of Action for Road Safety.” The goal is to stabilize and eventually reverse the upward trend in road fatalities, saving an estimated 5 million lives during the period. The World Bank and other regional development banks have made road safety a priority, but according to Irigoyen, donor funding lags “very far below” the $24 billion that has been pledged to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

It sounds like while diseases are well known and relatively well-funded, not many people have caught on to the problems of traffic deaths. This is all about social construction: where are the Bill Gates of the world to come in and tackle traffic problems in poorer nations?

Perhaps this gets less attention it is because cars are viewed as things that may help developing countries improve: owning them means citizens have more economic power and have more independence to get around as well as help their own economic chances (can carry things around, etc.). Particularly from an American point of view, cars are generally good things. But, of course, cars bring other problems in addition to safety concerns: pollution (a huge problem in many large cities), clogged streets, and an infrastructure that may not be able to handle lots of new cars on the roads (maintaining roads, having enough police, driver training, cities that have to redevelop areas to accommodate wider roads).

It will be interesting to see if this gets more attention in the coming years. It is one thing to discuss longer-term consequences of cars like increasing pollution but it is another to ignore large numbers of deaths each day.

The American cities with the highest percentage of households without a car

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As part of a look at the connection between education levels and car ownership, Derek Thompson includes this information about which American cities have lower rates of car ownership:

Here are the non-car household rates in 30 large U.S. cities (the national average is in RED):

Source: Michael Sivak, University of Michigan

What do NYC, DC, Boston, and Philadelphia have in common? For one, they’re old, crowded cities with good (okay, decent) public transit. “The five cities with the highest proportions of households without a vehicle were all among the top five cities in a recent ranking of the quality of public transportation,” Michael Sivak, director of Sustainable Worldwide Transportation at Michigan, told WSJ.

That might be the most important, variable, but it wasn’t the first thing this graph reminds me of. When I see New York, D.C., Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, the first thing I think is: These are all the classic, even cliche, magnets for elite college graduates. 

So I compared the cities’ non-car ownership rates to their share of bachelor’s-degree holders. And it turns out there is a statistically significant relationship between being college-dense and car-light.

Then follows a correlation chart – but no number or measure of the significance of the relationship! If one is going to claim a statistically significant relationship, more information needs to be provided like the correlation coefficient and the significance level.

That said, larger Sunbelt cities don’t come out well, nor do smaller Northern or Midwestern cities. All together, these cities are more likely to have sprawl and not have the kind of dense downtowns like Manhattan or the Loop that supports a lot of workers traveling to a single area each day. There was less historical incentive in these communities to build mass transit (outside of commuter rail) and such services, particularly subways or light rail, are quite expensive to build today in more sprawling conditions.

Good question: “What Will Happen to Public Transit in a World Full of Autonomous Cars?”

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The fate of mass transit is unclear in a world of all autonomous cars:

The question of what they’ll mean for transit was actually on the program this year at the Transportation Research Board annual meeting in Washington, where several thousand transportation officials and researchers met to talk about state-of-the-art asphalts, biker behavior, and the infrastructure of the future. In one packed session, I heard Jerome Lutin, a retired longtime New Jersey Transit planner, say something that sounded almost like blasphemy.

“We’re just wringing our hands, and we’re going to object to this,” he warned the room. “But the transit industry needs to promote shared-use autonomous cars as a replacement for transit on many bus routes and for service to persons with disabilities.”…

The implication in this raises (at least) two more questions: Exactly where (and when) will it make sense for people to use buses or rail instead of autonomous cars? And if autonomous cars come to supplement these services, should transit agencies get into the business of operating them? In my initial daydream – where shared self-driving cars are whisking us all about – it’s unclear exactly who owns and manages them.

Lutin sounds skeptical that transit agencies will be able to move into this space. “They don’t adapt well to change,” he says. They’re also governed by rigid mandates that limit what they can do. A mass transit agency can’t overnight start operating something that looks like a taxi service. Public agencies also must contend with labor unions, and labor unions likely won’t like the idea of replacing bus routes with autonomous cars.

This does seem to trade a public good – mass transit paid for by taxpayers and users – for private goods, autonomous cars owned by individual users. While we haven’t seen prices for driverless cars yet, I can’t imagine they are going to be too cheap at the beginning. Even a less appointed driverless car, say a Chevrolet Aveo, is going to need more complicated gadgetry to be autonomy. But, as this planner notes, Americans do tend to like more private transit options if they can afford it.

Driverless cars might lead to the safest roads ever seen and highways that actually work

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Google’s Sebastian Thrun discusses the safety advantages of driverless cars as well as effective highways in this video. Two quick thoughts:

1. Autonomous vehicles can help stop the wave or accordion pattern of driving where someone slowing down at the front of a line of cars backs everyone up. Thrun talks about a a much more closely coordinated zipper kind of merging where cars going basically bumper to bumper can accept new vehicles with little change.

2. Even with a dip in recent years, more than 30,000 Americans die each year in vehicles. Strun says most of this is due to driver error, which can basically be eliminated when humans no longer control the car.

All of this sounds good…

Roads still susceptible to potholes

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A Google News search for the last week brings up hundreds of news stories about potholes. It is a familiar cycle: water gets on the roads, freezing temperatures cause the water to expand, potholes emerge on lots of roads. See diagrams and video about pothole formation here.

Is there any way to build roads that don’t have these problems? Here is one answer:

Which holds up better — concrete or asphalt? “Asphalt can sometimes be a more porous material than concrete depending on the depth of the asphalt surface. As a result, it can be more prone to a freeze-thaw cycle,” Shuftan said.

However, DuPage County Transportation Committee Chairman Don Puchalski said it’s all about maintenance. “The condition of the pavement keeps moisture from penetrating the riding surface,” Puchalski said.

Can’t we build pothole-proof roads? Engineering professor Imad Al-Qadi thinks we can do better. “Through better engineering of the materials and pavement systems, roads can withstand extreme temperatures and cycles of freezing and thawing,” Al-Qadi wrote in an email.

For asphalt, using proper binder and aggregate materials that aren’t susceptible to moisture, freezing or thawing can minimize damage.

For concrete, using the right chemical mixtures can control freezing and thawing. Proper spacing and using more steel in the concrete slabs can also control warping, Al-Qadi said.

This makes it sound like the best pothole solution might be more monitoring and money when roads are originally built. Who is going for pay for that? Surrey, England has gone with “pothole-proof” roads that have a 10 year guarantee:

But in an attempt to find a more permanent solution, the council has begun a five-year, £100 million plan to re-lay the county’s worst roads with new materials which carry a decade-long “no pothole” guarantee…

At the moment the council says it is carrying out a pothole repair every five minutes but the new roads, which have more flexible watertight surfaces, should overcome the problem…

About 300 miles of road will be repaired and the 10-year warranty means any potholes would be repaired by contractors Aggregate Industries and Marshalls.

So there might still be potholes but at least the road-builder will take care of it.

If the roads always have this problem, you could instead with a car that stands up better to potholes:

Honda cars are the most resilient to pothole damage, saving drivers hundreds of pounds in repairs each year, according to research by Potholes.co.uk.

The road maintenance campaign website analysed about 150,000 policies issued by Warranty Direct over three years to reveal the cars most and least susceptible to damage caused by the nation’s biggest bugbear – potholes…

After Honda, the most “pothole-proof” manufacturers are Toyota and Hyundai, with less than two per cent of their cars suffering axle and suspension damage attributable to potholes and other road defects.

Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz and Land Rover models are the most likely to suffer, with more than 10 per cent suffering damage each year.

Or you can just pay for some pothole-resistant tires.

All together, this is an annoying reminder that maintaining roads can be quite difficult. If they all have problems, it is very difficult to fix them quickly.

Watch out for the “stroad,” the bad street/road hybrid

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A former street engineer provides warnings about the “stroad” and the havoc it wreaks on the landscape:

“The STROAD design — a street/road hybrid — is the futon of transportation alternatives. Where a futon is a piece of furniture that serves both as an uncomfortable couch and an uncomfortable bed, a STROAD moves cars at speeds too slow to get around efficiently but too fast to support productive private sector investment. The result is an expensive highway and a declining tax base.”

Marohn says he coined the term in 2011 to wake up the people who design America’s roads. “I really was writing it as a way to push back at the engineering profession and get my fellow engineers to think about the bizarre things they’re building,” says Marohn. That was why he initially wrote the word in that annoying all-cap style, which he eventually dropped. “I figured engineers would read it and wonder, what was it an acronym for?” he says, laughing.

While Marohn came up with the neologism partly in a spirit of fun, he considers stroads a deadly serious problem. Not only are they dangerous and aesthetically repugnant, he argues that they are economically destructive as well. They don’t provide the swift, efficient mobility that is the greatest economic benefit of a good road, and they simultaneously fail to deliver the enduring value of a good street — which fosters community, good architecture, and financial resilience at the lowest possible cost…

Instead, stroads create hideous, inefficient, and disposable environments that quickly lose value.

These are many of the four to six-lane commercial thoroughfares that dominate American cities, at least the less dense parts, and suburbs. These roads are lined fast food restaurants, big box stores, car dealers, gas stations, offices, and big signs that try to catch your attention as you drive by. One twist that I like here is the suggestion that this is not necessarily good for cars either because of all the traffic lights and congestion.

Two places where I have seen depictions of such stroads:

1. I recently showed the documentary Jesus Camp in class and the film features several scenes of such roads. The roads don’t look very attractive – lots of cars and signs – and they are sort of stand-ins for everyday Americana. It is one thing to see it in a film and another to realize that you drive past this every day. But, as the film suggests, America is filled with these scenes and they all kind of look similar.

2. James Howard Kuntsler, a well-known critic of sprawl, makes a note of such roads. In different contexts, he points out the absurdity of trying to be a pedestrian on such a road that is clearly meant for cars (imagine crossing all those lanes at a traffic light or walking through all of the drives in and out of business) as well as the trivial amount of “nature” that planners try to add in to make it all look better. All together, these roads just encourage sprawl.

What is the alternative to this? In a perfect world, perhaps it is connecting denser downtowns and neighborhoods with pedestrian friendly streets (nodes) with a system of faster roads or mass transit (connections between the nodes).

Jaywalkers vs. car culture in downtown Los Angeles

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The battle for Los Angeles may not involve aliens but rather jaywalking pedestrians versus cars in downtown Los Angeles:

It is not quite “Dragnet,” but the Police Department in recent weeks has issued dozens of tickets to workers, shoppers and tourists for illegally crossing the street in downtown Los Angeles. And the crackdown is raising questions about whether the authorities are taking sides with the long-dominant automobile here at the very time when a pedestrian culture is taking off, fueled by the burst of new offices, condominiums, hotels and restaurants rising in downtown Los Angeles…

The police say they are simply trying to maintain order at a time when downtown Los Angeles, once a place of urban tumbleweeds and the homeless, is teeming with people competing for pavement with automobiles. “There’s a huge influx of folks that come into the downtown area,” said Sgt. Larry Delgado of the Central Traffic Division. “If you go out there, you are going to see enforcement.”

These pedestrians are confronting not only the police, but a historically entrenched car culture that has long defined the experience of living and working in Los Angeles. With its wide streets, and aggressive motorists zipping around corners, cutting in and out of lanes and sneaking past red lights, Los Angeles is hardly built for people who prefer to walk.

Yet times may be changing. There are an increasing number of people using bicycles, taking advantage of an expanding network of bike lanes. Los Angeles is in the midst of a major expansion of its subway and bus system. Much of the urban planning in recent years, particularly downtown and in Hollywood, is intended to encourage people to give up their cars in favor of public transit, walking or biking.

It is hard to tell what exactly is going on here without some hard data about jaywalking fines in downtown LA over time. However, it does make for an interesting narrative: while many cities and places are trying to encourage more pedestrian and bike use (for its green, health, congestion, and other benefits), Los Angeles is cracking down on walkers. The issue is that LA is perhaps the prototypical car city in the entire world. The sprawling city has traditionally not had a downtown on the scale of other major cities that people would want to crowd. The metropolitan area seems to stretch on forever, crisscrossed by numerous highways. This is home to the Beach Boys singing about driving, the rise of fast food, and lots of car commercials.

Jaywalking may be an opening skirmish but this could blossom into a longer war over the heart of Los Angeles: is it really a city about cars or can it also contain dense, walkable nodes? Critics of sprawl would see a Los Angeles full of pedestrians (at least in pockets) as a tremendous success story.

Natural gas bus commercial misses that riding the bus is already helping the environment

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This commercial from America’s Natural Gas Alliance highlights natural gas buses in Los Angeles. The message is that the natural gas buses are better for the environment. They may be – but it misses the point that individuals using mass transit are already helping the environment (let alone traffic congestion). So having a natural gas bus is a bonus. Perhaps we would all be better off if more people were willing to ride any kind of bus in the first place.

However, given that it is difficult to get wealthier people to ride buses, we should then ask when we might have cars powered by natural gas. If natural gas is cleaner to burn, why not reduce the emissions from cars rather than focusing on the limited number of Americans who regularly ride the bus?

(I realize the natural gas buses may just be a marketing ploy. However, it is really about helping the environment, not good PR or trying to sell more natural gas, why not use natural gas to power more things?)

Chicago’s once-thriving streetcar system

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Like many American big cities, Chicago once had a large streetcar system:

Those cable cars were preceded by horse-drawn streetcars, which began service in 1859, and were replaced by electric-powered trolleys, beginning in 1890. By the mid-1930s, 3,742 streetcars were running on tracks laid along 529 miles of streets in a grid that provided Chicagoans a streetcar stop within a few blocks of where they lived, worked or shopped. Trolley wires extended into vast areas of the Northwest, Southeast and Southwest sides far from the nearest “L,” making it the adventurous Chicagoan’s system of choice for exploration…

For their part, aldermen and legislators knew the value of changing a “no” to a “yes” vote on a streetcar-line franchise. Each innovation in motive power brought with it safety concerns, upon which politicians could hang a price tag for overcoming their reservations.

The advantage of streetcars compared to the “L” or railroads, both of which helped make Chicago famous, was that it could cover more land and fill in the development gaps between the more infrastructure intensive types of transportation. While the streetcars were eventually replaced by cars, which could serve the same function and allow drivers more independence and privacy, streetcars helped kick off mass suburbanization in the late 1800s.

See more about Chicago streetcars here on this page about Chicago Surface Lines which operated Chicago’s streetcars until 1947. According to this, Chicago had quite the system that quickly went from peak to bust:

The continuous reorganization was finally completed by the Unification Ordinance of 1913, which stipulated that all lines would come under the management of a single operating association called the Chicago Surface Lines (CSL), and unified operations commenced in 1914. Four companies formed the CSL: the Chicago Railways Company, Chicago City Railway, Calumet and South Chicago Railway, and Southern Street Railway. At this time, Chicago had the largest street railway system, the longest one-fare ride, the longest average ride, and the most liberal transfer privileges in the world.

The 1920s saw continued growth despite the increasing competition from the automobile, and while the 1933-1934 World’s Fair and wartime demand supported ridership, the underlying companies were bankrupt. Creditors’ bills were filed against the Chicago Railways in 1926 and the Chicago City Railway and Calumet and South Chicago in 1930, resulting in the appointment of receivers and bringing their property into the custody of the Federal District Court. In 1944, the proceedings were converted to those under the Bankruptcy Act, and trustees were appointed. By 1958, the Chicago Transit Authority, which took over the Chicago Surface Lines in 1947, had abandoned the remaining trolley lines, which were “bustituted.” Before that, CSL had introduced gasoline buses for light routes in 1927,and trolley buses to the northwest side starting in 1930.

In Crabgrass Frontiers, a classic on American suburbanization, historian Kenneth Jackson gives reasons for the decline of streetcars: the automobile started taking away customers and many streetcar lines were locked into municipal contracts that didn’t allow them to raise fares even as they needed money to maintain infrastructure and compete with the automobile.