Tag Archives: safety

When broken sidewalks limit mobility

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This story from Shreveport, Louisiana discusses how poorer neighborhoods in the city tend to have more problems with sidewalks:

But Murphy’s citation for walking in the street along Highland’s crumbling sidewalks spotlights the city’s infrastructure failures in the era of the new mayor’s promises to repair and beautify Shreveport’s streets…

For now, there’s no set date when Shreveporters can expect to see most sidewalks installed or fixed, though plans are in progress. And 25 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act went into effect, unsafe sidewalks with missing or poorly-maintained ramps are a common sight…

“If they contact our offices and let us know, we will do what we can to correct those places and make it accommodating for them because a lot of the places around town don’t have those ramps available and we are aware of the issues,” Harris said.

But in terms of fixing the city’s roads and sidewalks, Harris said residential neighborhoods take a back seat to downtown and other highly-trafficked areas…

The Shreveport-Caddo 2030 Master Plan includes a transportation component to address pedestrian issues, but it likely will be years before Shreveport is brought in line with major cities, according to Loren Demerath, a Centenary sociology professor who studies the importance of pedestrian spaces to communities and has been active in local efforts to make Shreveport more bikeable and walkable.

An interesting mix of race, social class, and disabilities all having to do with a simple piece of infrastructure: sidewalks. Without well-maintained sidewalks, it is difficult to be a pedestrian as it either requires a more dangerous route on the road or walking through grass or other areas. If anything, this would be a safety issue in many neighborhoods and discussing safety, particularly when it comes to kids or others who need more protection or space (the disabled or perhaps the elderly), tends to lead to better outcomes. But, it sounds like Shreveport has some work to do in this area and I would guess the city would cite funding issues as a reason the sidewalks are so uneven.

And for those who subscribe to broken windows theory, do broken sidewalks have a similar effect? While the residents may not have much to do with breaking sidewalks, it might just suggest that the city doesn’t care as much about the neighborhood.

Drivers, companies adjusting to changes in car insurance due to autonomous vehicles

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A recent survey asked Americans why they would buy an autonomous car and cheaper car insurance was second on the list:

Of the 1,500 US drivers the Boston Group surveyed in September, 55 percent said they “likely” or “very likely” would buy a semi-autonomous car (one capable of handling some, but not all, highway and urban traffic). What’s more, 44 percent said they would, in 10 years, buy a fully autonomous vehicle…

The leading reason people are considering semi-autonomous vehicles isn’t greater safety, improved fuel efficiency, or increased productivity—the upsides most frequently associated with the technology. Such things were a factor, but the biggest appeal is lower insurance costs. Safety was the leading reason people were interested in a fully autonomous ride, with cheaper insurance costs in second place. (Reasons not to want a robo-ride include fear of hacking, distrust of the technology, and good old love of driving.)

This is unexpected, because how insurance will shake out usually is on the “tricky things to be figured out” side of the ledger, alongside how the government will test and regulate the vehicles. The current insurance business model—car owner has insurance to protect himself from the risk of causing a crash—doesn’t make sense if the computer’s in charge. And if we can make cars that rarely crash, do we even need insurance? We certainly won’t need to spend as much on it (currently about $800 a year, according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners)…

So yes, we’ll be rewarded financially for giving up the wheel. But in the long run, as fully autonomous cars take over our roads, the insurance companies will have to adapt. They can’t argue against saving lives, but “they’re very, very concerned,” says David Carlisle, chairman of the board of auto industry consultancy Carlisle & Company. “If the car can’t wreck anymore, those premiums have got to go down drastically.”

Sounds like a shake-up is coming for the car insurance industry. And if the business becomes a lot less profitable, how many firms will want to participate?

Another thought for those potential buyers of autonomous cars: how long would it take in car insurance savings to make up for the extra technology needed in the car? This could be like the current hybrid or electric car situation where the premium for such vehicles would take years in gas savings to cancel out.

Cracking down on massive hide-and-seek games in Ikea stores

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Ikea in the Netherlands has banned viral hide-and-seek games inside its stores:

Ikea has quashed the dreams and shortened the bucket lists of tens of thousands people, saying it won’t allow several guerrilla hide-and-seek games to take place in its stores in the Netherlands. “It’s hard to control,” an Ikea spokeswoman told Bloomberg. “We need to make sure people are safe in our stores and that’s hard to do if we don’t even know where they are.”

More than 57,000 people were invited to participate in a May 16 game of hide-and-seek at the Ikea in Eindhoven, Netherlands, according to a Facebook page for the event, with about 32,000 people RSVPing. Twelve thousand were invited to a similar event at an Ikea in the Netherlands’ Breda on May 9. Had either game moved forward, it could easily have broken Guinness’ record for the world’s largest game of hide-and-seek, which was set in January 2014 in China and involved a mere 1,437 participants.

While this isn’t the first time Ikea has contended with plans for massive hide-and-seek outings in its stores, it may be the first time the company has banned them outright. A game that took place in 2009 at an Ikea in Sweden reportedly attracted about 150 people and forced organizers to apologize for the “whooping and cheering” that scared customers straight out of the store. And when thousands of people in Melbourne, Australia, signed up to play hide-and-seek at an Ikea the following year, the company said it would “discourage” customers from participating in the event but would not “go so far as to ban them.”

At any rate, the more interesting question here is how many people an Ikea store could reasonably host for a game of hide-and-seek, were the company’s management to get on board. The Eindhoven store, which opened in 1992, is 28,600 square meters, according to Ikea’s website. That’s about the same as four standard soccer pitches, or 5? American football fields. Let’s stipulate that for a really good game of hide-and-seek, you need at least 20 square meters (about 225 square feet, or a 15-foot-by-15-foot spot to stand in). Less than that and you might as well play sardines or blob tag instead. Also, presumably not all 28,600 square meters in the Eindhoven store are usable space, or even accessible to customers looking for hiding spots.

Think of all the hiding places! I’m not surprised that safety was the primary reason for banning the games though I assume the real reason was that this could be bad for business. (Yet, how many of the game players would purchase something – from meatballs to another Billy bookcase) on the way out?) If you think about it, a lot of businesses could be overwhelmed by such viral efforts. (Maybe all those extra parking spots mandated in American parking lots would then be filled.) How far away are we from outright bans on indoor games in multiple countries or from other stores and businesses as well?

At the same time, why doesn’t Ikea turn the tables on this and host some special hide-and-seek events with a lottery system for participants. This could generate good publicity and reestablish the brand’s cool factor.

Recommendation that many Chicago area highways have 60 or 65 mph speed limits

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A new investigation from an state agency suggests speed limits on several Chicago-area highways should be raised:

Higher speed limits on parts of I-294, I-88 and I-355 were recommended for approval Thursday by the Illinois Tollway’s customer service and planning committee.

According to the state’s vehicle code, the tollway is required to conduct an engineering and traffic investigation before raising its maximum speed limits.

The investigation — which took factors like prevailing speed, high-crash segments, access point density and the volume of traffic congestion into consideration — determined that the 70 mph maximum that is allowed by the state is not a “safe and reasonable increase in the speed limit” for certain sections of the highway…

Once all the necessary approvals are complete the Illinois Secretary of State can publish the updated rules and the new speed limit signs can be installed. Tollway officials estimate that the new speed limit signs could be posted this summer.

It sounds like safety concerns led to this slight increase. But, I would be interesting in seeing this study as the reasoning behind a slight increase is not clear. If prevailing speed is a factor, we know that a good number of Chicago-area highway drivers still go faster than the new 60 or 65 mph speed limits. How many more crashes and deaths will occur with a 60 or 65 mph speed limit? Does this mean Illinois is not joining the move toward zero-death roads? And if there is more damage, how is the positive side calculated (less time lost, less congestion, etc.)? At the same time, raising the speed limits won’t necessarily lead to faster driving; evidence from Michigan suggests people will continue to drive at the speed at which they feel comfortable.

Designing homes in “Disaster Chic”

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Looking for a home that will help you survive the coming apocalypse? Look no further than printable homes, prefabricated small homes, and shipping containers.

You peer warily out of the single window in your zombie-proof steel box. The street seems deserted—except for a lone figure who is staring at you from a distance. Is it 2079, in the years after the Great Drought Plague!? No, it’s 2015 in Royal Oaks, Michigan, and that zombie is a curious local Fox reporter.

Royal Oaks is just the latest American town to get a house made from shipping containers, which offer something unique to consumers with a taste for apocalyptic adventures. While designers are developing smarter ways to build temporary housing and disaster shelters, developers and real estate agents are using the same technology to sell trendy and high-end homes. What results is a bizarre kind of hybrid style that pairs our worst fears with our biggest hopes for the future—utopia and dystopia overlap. Call it disaster chic…

Of course, it’s not surprising to see interesting ideas cross-pollinate—3D printing, containerization, and pop-up dwellings are all really cool concepts, and there’s no reason they should be shrouded in break-in-case-of-emergency glass. What’s interesting is how similar our ideas about crisis engineering and future chic really are. In the city of the future, everything is instant, whether for a good reason or a bad one. The cities of our dreams have a lot in common with those of our nightmares.

These homes don’t seem all that well equipped to help keep you safe. If anything, their primary feature in relation to disasters is that they can be quickly produced and moved. Those are important features in recovering from disasters but I imagine some might want more solid homes to survive the disaster in the first place.

But, it is interesting that such homes that do well at addressing disaster recovery might become more popular with a broader audience. Do such designs simply offer something different in a housing market where the typical home or housing unit isn’t really that exciting or different? Is this a way to offer ironic commentary about one’s home – homes in the United States are often intended to imply permanence but these structures hint at catastrophic change and adaptability? Or is this primarily driven by younger adults looking for cheaper housing options in cities that seem pretty determined to not provide much in the way of affordable housing?

The decline in kids walking to school

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Several experts talk about the issues with many fewer American kids walking to school compared to fifty years ago. The negative effects? Less exercise, less learning about active transportation, less exploration in and knowledge of their own neighborhoods.

I suspect many people will blame parents and kids for this and tell them to simply walk and stop being lazy/decadent/unnecessarily scared/etc. However, it is not as if many Americans regularly walk places outside of major cities and denser neighborhoods. Some of this may be due to comfort but other factors are involved including nicer vehicles, more fear about crime, more sprawl (particularly in the Sunbelt) which means further distances and fewer pedestrian-friendly streets, less emphasis on physical activity in daily life (which is not necessarily laziness but rather more sedentary lives overall), and a shift toward technology (starting with television) rather than active exploration. In other words, this is likely a multifacted problem that is not easily solved by simply “making” kids walk.

Study suggests thousands more road deaths when gas prices drop $2 a gallon

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American drivers certainly like cheaper gas prices but it may come at the price of more deaths:

South Dakota State University sociology professor Guangqing Chi, who analyzes the relationship between gas prices and road fatalities, calculated what the current prices might mean for fatalities by analyzing traffic and crash data numbers from a Minnesota study he conducted from 1998 to 2007.

“A $2 drop in gasoline price can translate into about 9,000 road fatalities a year in the U.S,” Chi said on NPR’s Morning Edition Tuesday. NPR science correspondent Shankar Vedantam said his “jaw dropped” when he heard the “scary” number. A more conservative calculation based on Chi’s research translates into 3,000 more road deaths per year, Vedantam said…

Chi’s original Minnesota study — from which he extrapolated the 9,000 road deaths figure — showed that even a 20-cent drop in gas prices was linked to 15 additional road deaths in the state per year.

Chi told The Huffington Post by phone Tuesday that it typically takes almost a year for drivers to adopt new driving habits in response to changes in gas prices. Some analysts have predicted low gas prices will persist for the next six months or so.

Those driverless cars (with solar power and electric cars) can’t get here soon enough. Yet, Chi acknowledges that Americans have already been driving less so it will take some time to see if driving picks up just because gas prices dropped significantly.

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.

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.