Tag Archives: driving

The flying odds are (but may not feel like they are) ever in your favor

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James Fallows points out that the saga of Flight MH370 reinforces ideas about the dangers of flying, even though plane crashes are quite rare:

First-world commercial air travel has become so extremely safe that when something does go wrong, figuring it out can be a huge challenge — which heightens the mystery and, for many people, the terror of these episodes, by making them seem so random. You’re sitting there grumbling about the discomforts of modern flight — and then, for no apparent reason, your plane is the one headed into the sea…

I remember that when the 777 was introduced it was such a sales success and was expected to live such a long service life that some people speculated the fleet could actually make a billion flights. Of course, you don’t need to make a billion flights to draw the magic short one-in-a-billion straw. But it is something to think about. Transport flying is now so safe that the long time standard of 10 to the minus 9th may not satisfy the public.

The sobering point here is again that the very safety of modern air travel makes these episodes both intellectually and emotionally even more difficult.

Why does flying seem so threatening when driving is a much much more dangerous daily activity?

1. Passengers on an airplane have no or little control over their circumstances. Car drivers, in contrast, feel like they have a lot of control though is is part illusion: they can’t control the people around them or the conditions.

2. Plane crashes can involve dozens or hundreds of deaths. A larger death toll from a single event seems far worse than the amalgamation of lots of individual deaths. Think about the difference about the murder toll in Chicago on a yearly basis (spread throughout the calendar) versus the Newtown shootings (one event, worsened because the children couldn’t do anything about it).

3. The media grabs on to tragic events like this and keeps them in public view for weeks. In contrast, single deaths or smaller incidents get short mentions unless they involve unusual circumstances.

All together, the odds of dying in a plane crash are very small. That doesn’t mean those odds carry the same emotional and social weight.

Suburbanites mad at neighbors who don’t shovel their sidewalks

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Readers of the Daily Herald are upset about their suburban neighbors who didn’t both to shovel the sidewalks in front of their houses:

Nothing like hitting a nerve. Last week’s column about pedestrians in peril on unshoveled sidewalks provoked an avalanche of articulate emails. Let’s start with Nancy Johnson who writes, “I live in Elgin where shoveling sidewalks is not required and I struggle to trudge through the snow every winter to walk my three dogs.

“Two winters ago, I fell on an icy sidewalk that resulted from the homeowner never shoveling, and did serious damage to my back. I have tried putting friendly notes in neighbor’s doors reminding them to be good citizens and shovel, but to no avail,” Johnson said…

JR Beck joins three Hanover Park neighbors to clear sidewalk snow near a school and church.

“We all have snowblowers so the work is not as taxing as it once was a few years ago,” he said. “We have managed to keep the walkways clear for the blocks on which we all live.

“But no thanks to the snowplow jockeys who: plow in all the corners where the kids have to cross the streets; and drive so fast that the plows throw snow over the medians and onto the cleared walkways…

“When I replied that I was only talking about commercial properties — dead silence. I have seen people walking in the streets on extremely busy Golf Road and Algonquin Road during rush hour because sidewalks in front of these main commercial strips are impassible.”

A big problem in a really wintry season like the Chicago area just experienced. There are two possible routes of interpretation for this that come to mind:

1. This is another indicator of a lack of suburban community. People can’t be bothered to take care of parts of their property that others use. They put their own self-interest ahead of that of others. Kids may have special status and this makes sense since the suburban life is traditionally about raising children: the argument about kids getting to school or buses seems to be the most effective in motivating people to clear sidewalks.

2. This highlights the importance of roads and driving in suburban communities over the concerns of pedestrians. The suburban life is built around driving from place to place so this gets priority for snow removal. The average suburbanite or business owner may not think there are many pedestrians out there on the sidewalks so they don’t bother to clear them.

Neither reason is particularly positive but this is an ongoing issue in many places. In our residential neighborhood, in which I walk often and also walk out of (to get to the library, several stores, bank), I would estimate only 10-20% of sidewalks were clear, pushing walkers into the street. Even if I cleared my entire sidewalk (which I did throughout the winter), it doesn’t necessarily connect to anyone else who cleared their sidewalks.

Financially troubled Chicago has to pay out more to reimburse drivers for pothole damage

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Chicago doesn’t have much money these days but it will have even less after reimbursing drivers for potholes:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has ordered the Chicago Department of Transportation to assign all 30 of its pothole crews to main streets on Mondays and Fridays to address scores of potholes in blitzkrieg fashion using a grid system.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported last month that the cash-strapped city has been hit with a blizzard of damage to vehicle claims thanks to a relentless barrage of snow, cold and wild temperature swings that has turned city streets into the surface of the moon.

Since the New Year’s Eve storm that buried Chicago in 23 inches of snow before a record-setting cold snap, CDOT crews have filled roughly 240,000 potholes…

At last week’s City Council meeting alone, there were 543 pothole claims introduced, nearly double the 280 claims introduced last month. During the March City Council meeting last year, there were just 61 pothole claims introduced.

Between paying more to patch potholes plus pay out claims, the cold and snowing weather is costing Chicago more money. It’s too bad this story doesn’t have any monetary figures about the pothole claims. Plus, how much is budgeted each year to pay out these claims and what happens if there is an outlier year (like this year)? Mayor Emanuel is quoted in this story saying this is why the city is trying to pave more streets during warmer months – indeed, constructing streets in certain ways in the first place and maintaining them adequately will cut down on pothole problems down the road. In this case, paying more upfront for the infrastructure of good roads in Chicago could save the city money later.

File Chicago pothole claims here.

Photographing the class divide on LA mass transit

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A photographer considers what is revealed at the bus stops of Los Angeles buses during late night hours:

J. Wesley Brown’s vivid nighttime portraits of bus riders are a refreshing look at a rarely seen side of Los Angeles. The city’s freeway interchanges are iconic, but for many Angelinos, these bus stop dwellers represent an even more authentic feeling of home.

Brown, 34, spent two and a half years roaming the city to shoot Riders, a series of fascinating portraits of ordinary people doing ordinary things. That might seem like a mundane topic, but Riders offers a commentary on the societal strata of Los Angeles.

“Riding a bus in L.A. is the most outwardly visible sign of class divide,” says Brown.

In shooting Riders, Brown found the movie posters in bus stop advertising sometimes offered a commentary on the scenes framed by the bus shelters. And his exploration of the city noted that poorer neighborhoods that don’t attract advertising dollars often don’t have bus shelters at all.

Los Angeles is known for its cars, highways, and driving. Yet, owning a vehicle is expensive and mass transit is a necessary part of life for those with fewer resources. The current LA Metro might not be as expansive as the once-extensive streetcar systems but a major city today can’t function well or serve its full population without at least some mass transit.

It sounds like the pictures also highlight one of the odd features of car ownership in the United States: outside of a few places, like Manhattan, many Americans would choose to purchase a car when they have the economic means. Whether this is because a car offers more independence or is a symbol of having reached a certain social status or mass transit is viewed as more lower class or a combination of these, attaining car ownership is an important part of American life.

Two places for regular vehicle accidents: The Snake on Mulholland Drive, short underpass in Durham

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I ran across stories recently about two areas that experience numerous vehicle accidents. Not just a few but dozens of accidents over several years. Here they are:

1. A short underpass, eleven feet eight inches, in Durham, North Carolina takes off the tops of a number of trucks. Watch here:

Though authorities have made efforts to prevent vehicles from running into the low-ceilinged bridge – which as blinking lights and multiple signs warn, has a clearance of only 11 feet and 8 inches – the demonic structure continues to ruin the days of incautious drivers. “After a 5-month ‘dry spell,’ the Gregson St canopener got hungry again in November and December,” reports the bridge’s devoted biographer, Jürgen Henn…

Note the counter at bottom – that last collision marked at least 67 violent impacts since 2008 at this miserable crossing. As to why nobody’s fixed the wretched thing, as explained before 1) a sewer main right underneath is blocking the lowering of the road 2) the railroad company that maintains the bridge has installed a crash beam, so the problem is covered from its end 3) the city has put up signs about the low clearance as far back as three blocks, so it’s covered from its end.

2. The Snake is at one end of famous Mulholland Drive, known for its views of Los Angeles. Motorcycles, in particular, seem to have a lot of problems:

On any given Sunday, The Snake is overrun by drivers and motorcyclists. They’ve been hitting this spot 30 miles northwest of Hollywood for decades, but it became a hot destination in the 1960s when Steve McQueen started blasting through Mulholland on his Triumph. The road’s popularity grew over the years, and even an aggressive crackdown on speeding and a temporary shuttering of the road in the 1990s did little to slow the The Snake’s popularity. These days it isn’t uncommon to see celebrities like Jay Leno motoring through in six-figure cars. But it’s the motorcyclists you’ll see most often…

Bennett says Edwards Corner is not a tough one. It’s an uphill bend with a constant radius and positive camber, meaning the road’s angle is steady and the surface is tilted inward. The riders who go down tend to hit the corner way too fast, realize they’re in over their heads, fixate on the guard rail, and slam right into it. Just as often, though, riders get too greedy with the throttle on the way out, causing the rear end to slide. Beginners and squids tend to jump off the throttle or lay on the brakes, causing the bike to go wide and forge a trail into the hillside. The skilled riders come down from speed before the turn, lean in, and roll on the gas after the apex — keeping their eyes on the exit the entire time…

Snyder’s videos show exactly how, in excruciating detail. A playlist of 79 clips shows every type of rider imaginable making every type of mistake imaginable. Lowsides on Harleys, highsides on Ducatis, and the occasional car crash. But through it all, there’s an air of camaraderie, with riders helping each other pull bikes from ditches as others slow incoming traffic and even sweep up dirt and debris to prevent another crash.

I spent 20 minutes or so the other watching a number of these 79 clips. Remarkably, most of the people in the accidents were able to walk away, even in the 2013 crash where a motorcyclist hit two cyclists.

In both cases, it sounds like drivers should be well aware of the dangers. In the case of the underpass, there are plenty of signs – though it is unclear how many drivers heed signs. In the case of The Snake, it looks like there are often people standing around, indicating something to pay attention to – though this might lead to trying to show off. Perhaps officials only have two means of recourse: (1) completely rebuild these sections or (2) close these sections all together if rebuilding is not possible.

Another remarkable piece of this: there are people willing to videotape all of these crashes and then make them available online.

Considering a mileage tax at the federal level

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States have been discussing mileage taxes to fund road construction and maintenance but it is now up for discussion at the federal level:

Shuster rejected the idea of raising the nation’s 18.4 cents-per-gallon gasoline tax, now the primary method of paying for road, bridge and mass transit projects. Besides a mileage tax, he said other funding methods include higher taxes on energy exploration and bringing back corporate profits earned overseas…

A vehicle miles tax has never been considered on the federal level because of objections to the concept of tracking how many miles people drive to assess and collect the levy. There have been some state- and local-level experiments.

A partisan dispute in Congress over tax increases is clouding potential action on a long-term highway bill backed by companies including Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) It’s also heightening the risk that the U.S. will run out of money to pay for projects later this year…

Groups led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest business lobby, want to prevent a repeat of 2012, when proposals to fund roads, bridges and mass transit for six years sputtered over bipartisan opposition to raising the gasoline tax. The shorter-term measure, which used general tax revenue to keep highway construction going, expires Sept. 30…

Lawmakers in both parties, including Republican Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri and Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, already have said they doubt Congress can forge a consensus on the tax-financing issues and pass a bill that authorizes programs for five or six years as industry groups want.

It sounds like a conclusion is still a ways off. At the same time, there are powerful interests involved and a deadline for funding coming up. It would be interesting to see what happens if this gets instituted by the federal government before states make their own decisions. Could drivers end up getting taxed for their mileage by both Washington and their state capitals?

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?

Did a lack of regionalism lead to the traffic nightmare in Atlanta after 2″ of snow?

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What caused the terrible gridlock in metropolitan Atlanta after two inches of snow (which quickly turned to ice)? Here is one argument for a lack of regionalism:

Which leads into the blame game. Republicans want to blame government (a Democrat thing) or Atlanta (definitely a Democrat thing). Democrats want to blame the region’s dependence on cars (a Republican thing), the state government (Republicans), and many of the transplants from more liberal, urban places feel the same way you might about white, rural, southern drivers. All of this is true to some extent but none of it is helpful.

How much money do you set aside for snowstorms when they’re as infrequent as they are? Who will run the show—the city, the county, or the state? How will preparedness work? You could train everyone today, and then if the next storm hits in 2020, everyone you’ve trained might have moved on to different jobs, with Atlanta having a new mayor and Georgia having a new governor.

Regionalism here is hard. The population of this state has doubled in the past 40-45 years, and many of the older voters who control it still think of it as the way it was when they were growing up. The urban core of Atlanta is a minority participant in a state government controlled by rural and northern Atlanta exurban interests. The state government gives MARTA (Atlanta’s heavy rail transportation system) no money. There’s tough regional and racial history here which is both shameful and a part of the inheritance we all have by being a part of this region. Demographics are evolving quickly, but government moves more slowly. The city in which I live, Brookhaven, was incorporated in 2012. This is its first-ever snowstorm (again, 2 inches). It’s a fairly affluent, mostly white, urban small city. We were unprepared too.

The issue is that you have three layers of government—city, county, state—and none of them really trust the other. And why should they? Cobb County just “stole the Braves” from the city of Atlanta. Why would Atlanta cede transportation authority to a regional body when its history in dealing with the region/state has been to carve up Atlanta with highways and never embrace its transit system? Why would the region/state want to give more authority to Atlanta when many of the people in the region want nothing to do with the city of Atlanta unless it involves getting to work or a Braves game?

The region tried, in a very tough economy and political year (2012), to pass a comprehensive transportation bill, a T-SPLOST, funded by a sales tax. It wasn’t perfect, but it was an attempt to do something. The Sierra Club opposed it because it didn’t feature enough transit. The NAACP opposed it because it didn’t have enough contracts for minority businesses. The tea party opposed it because it was a tax. That’s politics in the 2010’s. You may snicker, but how good a job has any major city done with big transportation projects over the past 30 years?

The argument here is that no one smaller group of government was prepared to deal with the roads and the problem was compounded because there was no structure to coordinate and organize activity when something like this happened. Additionally, regionalism could promote more mass transit to serve the entire region and reduce dependence on cars.

It would then be helpful to look to other major metropolitan regions to see how they tackle responses to natural disasters. Does regionalism lead to a better outcome for the region in such situations? For example, regions like Minneapolis or Indianapolis are held up as examples of regionalism – do they respond better in major snowfalls because of this? Without regionalism, is there a way to coordinate across levels of government in emergency situations that doesn’t require a full-level of regional cooperation on everything else?

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.