Photo by Meryddian/Flickr

Just something on my mind given the battering the eastern seaboard is taking. I know Chicago (above) does, and so too does Boston, Pittsburgh too. But this is an alien concept in New York City, at least in my neck of the woods (though I’ve seen friends of drivers standing in spaces to reserve them temporarily). Put chairs out to reserve a spot and you’ll probably see them listed on Craigslist within the hour.

Why does the ‘parking dibs’ culture work in some places, but not in others? Does it actually work in the aforementioned towns, or has increased demand (or whatever) put strains on the custom? Any ‘dibs’ tales to tell?

Peter sends along this troubling video of a woman struck by a bus — I’m sure any number of you out there could dissect the many things wrong with that street (not sure where it is).

Almost as disturbing as the video is the fact that its categorized on Digg as “comedy,” which in the world of Internet culture, I’m sure it is.

You may have heard the news: Cars that accelerate inappropriately down local streets, veer out of control on rural highways late at night, fail to brake in time to strike a pedestrian, follow lead vehicles too closely to stop in the event of an emergency, and so on. There was a technical problem in all these cases, but one that, I’m afraid, is difficult to fix with a factory recall, for I’m talking about the human decision-making apparatus. Towards this end Leonard Evans provides some much-needed perspective about the Toyota recalls:

Consider: According to various reports, 19 deaths have been associated with Toyota’s gas pedal problem over the past decade. But over the same decade, a total of 21,110 people have been killed in Toyota vehicles, with an additional 1,261 killed in Lexus cars (based on analyzing 1999-2008 fatality data from National Highway Traffic Safety Administration). Almost none of these deaths had anything to do with technology, faulty or otherwise. Almost all of them were the result of driver behavior.

So if the prospect of a sticky gas pedal alarms you, just slow down a little. The result will be that you are safer with the defect than you were without it.

Obviously, deaths linked to faulty cars are a serious problem, and it’s also clear that if attention is not paid, the safety problems could grow much worse. And still, however, I am struck by the sheer volume of the coverage about Toyota — almost verging on a panic — given the comparative risk posed in the numbers above. The study of risk perception is instructive here: Risks seem to loom larger in our imagination when they are novel, and when they are seemingly out of our control, among a host of other factors. Toyota is certainly novel, and the idea that an accelerator might suddenly activate on its own fills us with much more dread than the calculated decision to drive very fast down a street — itself a risk for the drivers and others but seemingly under one’s own control.

There’s a larger story here too, of course, which I was talking about last week with a writer for the Globe and Mail; i.e., the kind of shattering (or cracking) of a mantle of sheer confidence in not just the Toyota brand but the idea of the modern automobile as more or less infallible. When I think of my MacBook Pro or iPhone, I think of wonderful devices that are also prone to bugs (the later device had to be swapped out three times). But thinking about my Subaru, another incredibly complex device, I basically expect that as long as I take it in for its regular maintenance plateaus, I do not expect to encounter any difficulty on the road (needless to say, the experiences at the Genius Bar and Subaru dealership are distinct; one is tense anticipation as I wait to hear the diagnosis, the other is simply showing up to check off the list). Like many other drivers (or at least I suspect), I barely cracked the owner’s manual (this was studied Talmudically in my father’s era) when I bought the car, and certainly didn’t spend much time under the hood because, quite simply, I wouldn’t have understood much of what I was looking at (nor, for the record, do I take apart the MacBook). One still sees articles in the AAA magazines and the like with “driving checklists,” a tally of things you should do before setting out, but I would guess that very few of us do this, for a very simple reason: It has become an article of faith that the car will perform. This contrasts with the situation when I drove used American cars of 1970s vintage as a teenager, during which I experienced all kind of random breakdowns, faulty gas gauges, blinking ‘check engine’ lights that seemed to come on, as if by a law, late at night far from an open service station.

It’s hard to quantify, but I imagine this sense of the machine’s infallibility has changed the way we operate it. It is known that average speeds and following distances changed over time on certain highways, causing engineers to rework their models, and one of the reasons given is, inevitability: Superior handling and performance of the modern car. In this respect, all the coverage given to Toyota is a good thing — if it serves as a reminder of the risks of the road. If it merely shifts further focus away from driver behavior and onto a large, litigable car-maker, this won’t mean much in the overall picture of traffic safety.

But where does it end?

I can’t help but view the image above and think of 2001, with some impenetrable black slab tilted horizontally and laid upon the city. The sign, which comes from Toronto, has been the source of some puzzlement over its origin or purpose — maybe someone in actual authority can provide the final answer as to what this signage means and why it needs to be in place (although, I will admit, the sign gains in strange, mythic stature the less one knows about it). It seems to have something to do with plowing — and monolithic refers to its construction — but are sidewalks plowed by trucks? (and if it’s plowed in the way the above image suggests, wouldn’t that dump a bunch of snow on that very sidewalk?) Why only a monolithic sidewalk there, and not anywhere else? What’s a non-monolithic sidewalk called?

And as reader Bruce notes, the sign has even prompted a searching inquiry into self-effacing signage and Canadian national identity.

Reader Richard sends along a link to this article, from the Raleigh News and Observer, on distracted driving:

“Sometimes I will zone out and forget I’m driving,” said Tyler, 23. “If I’m on the phone talking about something that takes up all my focus, I’m looking straight ahead - but not even seeing what’s there.”

(as an aside you can read in depth about this phenomenon, and others, this spring). But to continue:

Her dad, Buckley Strandberg, worries that she will never curb her dangerous habit.

“And if I run off the road, there are rumble strips that divert me back onto the road. That has happened occasionally. They seem to work, those rumble strips.”

Apart from the irony of an insurance executive engaging in risky behavior (I suppose the A.I.G. fiasco showed that insurers are hardly immune from not properly anticipating risk), I was particularly intrigued by the last sentence in the excerpt.

I had long taken shoulder rumble strips (the so-called “Sonic Nap Alert Patterns” debuted on the Pennsylvania turnpike) as a passive, essentially invisible safety device that one would only become aware of in moments of emergency and wouldn’t actually influence one’s self-selected level of what they considered safe driving activity. In other words, people’s driving wouldn’t change simply because of the presence of rumble strips (unlike other forms of risk compensation, say, driving a vehicle in which one is seated higher), and that SNAPs made people safer without making them feel safer — an important distinction, to my mind, in traffic safety.

But I may have to reconsider this.

Writing that “previous design guidance was influenced by documents such as the AASHTO Green Book, which is inappropriate for urban streets where modes of transport other than the automobile are present,” Nelson/Nygaard has made available its Abu Dhabi Street Design Manual, which provides guidance to “design streets that create a safe environment for all users; transition from a vehicle-trip based society to a multimodal society; introduce fine-grained street networks into the existing super-block pattern.”

It is, they suggest, “perhaps one of the most progressive in the world.”

Judge for yourself here.

Photo by Pat Linsley/Flickr

The town of Ashford in the U.K. was one of the highest profile experiments in ’shared space’ when it launched over a year ago. The changes, meant to reconnect the center (severed by a hostile ring road) and make the town feel more ‘town-like,’ were quite radical — removing signals, blurring formal notation of right of way — as well as drawn from more traditional traffic-calming approaches (special pavement treatments). The reaction ranged from skeptical to hostile (Jeremy Clarkson, whose opinion on anything but the braking ability of an E-Class Mercedes should be heeded with a yellow flag, predicted ‘millions’ would die).

Ben Hamilton-Baillie, one of the leads on the project (he appears in Traffic), has sent along a Q&A he did with a local paper on the status of the project after one year. Though such things need continual monitoring, the early prognosis is positive and a sign that fresh thinking in terms of the built environment and accommodating traffic can bring good results.

You can read what Ben had to say after the jump. Continue Reading »

Via Infrastructurist:

The survey was done from June 30 through July 2, 2009, and involved 800 adults, with a +3.46% margin of error. And a whopping 60% of the respondents — Republican and Democrat alike — believe the federal gas tax is raised annually. Geographic location didn’t make much of a difference — 61% believed this incorrect statement in the Northeast, 58% in the South, 54% in the Midwest, and 67% in the West.

It was, of course, last raised in 1993.

From the Guardian:

Last year road accidents claimed more than 130,000 lives, overtaking China, where fatalities have dropped to less than 90,000, and prompted a government review into traffic safety, which until now has been best summed up by local drivers as “good horns, good brakes, good luck”.

As Smeed pointed out long ago, this divergence is unfortunately predictable via economics; China’s GDP (per a quick Wolfram Alpha search) per capita is more than three times that of India — and presumably it has risen faster in the last few years, and has now surpassed the “break even” point where traffic fatalities now begin to decline, for a variety of reasons. The upward surge in India, as per Smeed, is accompanying a move towards increasing motorization and may signal the high-water mark of traffic fatalities (or so we can hope). And from limited personal experience, there is certainly something to be said for road design and infrastructure, which uniformly appeared to be superior in China. In the latter country, I saw men in uniforms sweeping roadsides of debris; in the former, I saw children sleeping there.

Via Biking Bis, credit the judge for not simply shrugging off another “accident” on the roads:

The text-messaging motorist who struck and killed his former high school teacher told the court: “This was not intentional. It was an accident. I’m so sorry.”

He then sentenced Antonio Cellestine, 18, to five years in prison after he pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide and felony hit and run.

(Thanks Brian)

Driving home from the Yale event last night (which was packed, and filled with all kinds of interesting traffic types, ranging from Norman Garrick to Anne Lutz Fernandez), as I was listening to various renditions of La Boheme on Doug Fox’s wonderful program (Mr. Fox, I didn’t catch the details on that second act), which I discovered for the first time, a warm presence amidst the eerie fog-tinged, arc-lighted Stygian gloom of I-95, I was thinking back to Donald Shoup’s reply to a question I had posed to him, which itself was related to Brian Pijanowski’s study of parking-lot sprawl in Indiana. Despite a huge and quantifiable overabundance of parking in the county he studied, he was interested to note that people still complained “there wasn’t enough parking.”

I asked Shoup, who of course from the groves of academe has helped ignite a quiet but fomenting revolution in parking policy, to what extent this question of perception in the parking equation had been studied or quantified — keeping in mind that perception is a crucial, if often under-appreciated part of the traffic/planning nexus (e.g., commute times, etc.). One part of Shoup’s answer stuck with me: He talked of studying a parking garage in West Hollywood. On the bottom floors, there were cars, and in the empty spaces, plenty of oil stains to indicate past users. On the upper floors, he noted, it looked as if the spaces had never been graced by a single car. And yet the word from drivers was that there was ‘nowhere to park.’ But the problem, Shoup noted, is that drivers’ perception parking supply is informed by the parking spaces they can actually see. Call it “parking availability bias” (ode to Tversky and Kahneman). And the spaces that are most easily seen, of course, are curb spaces, hence the importance of rational market pricing policies to ensure turnover and vacancy. A few empty spaces (15%) can go a long way.

This perception is a powerful force and leads cities into all kinds of policies that turn out to be misguided and rife with unintended consequences; take the “free holiday parking” approach. Towns hoping to lure shoppers downtown, away from the big boxes, offer up free parking. But beware the power of incentives: Given that many of the best parking spaces in front of local businesses are often occupied (it happens right here in Brooklyn) by the store keepers themselves, the free parking bonanza ends up actually enticing local employees (who would have parked elsewhere or not driven) to grab some free real estate for the day — leaving would-be shoppers with the perception (all-too-real in this case) that there’s ‘nowhere to park.’ Here’s how it went down in Providence.

This is a case where ITS may prove quite useful: Let the algorithms, not fallible human perception, guide the driver to the (properly priced) parking. In the meantime planners and politicians should take parking complaints with a healthy dose of salt.

Is it art (left) or compliant signage (right)?

Reader Rich (sig?)-alerted me to this dispatch from Alissa Walker about an incredible piece of guerrilla wayfinding on the freeways of Los Angeles by artist Richard Ankrom, which lasted for the better part of a decade.

The curious denouement to the story is that the carefully pre-aged sign was taken down by CALTRANS, and then replaced with a “real” version. Ankrom was unable to locate his original, which has been turned into scrap metal destined for China.

Somehow this put me in mind of a recent line from Arthur Danto’s book on Andy Warhol, vis a vis the famous Brillo Boxes: “The challenge was to explain why Warhol’s box was art while its look-alike in common life was not.” (Danto thinks you cannot, hence pop art’s disruptive presence in the continuum of art history).

Perhaps it’s time for CALTRANS to institute an artist-in-residence program.

My latest Slate column, a look at Jason Vuic’s new book about the Yugo, is up.

Via the Moscow Times:

An enormous television screen showing a pornographic film caused a midnight traffic jam along Moscow’s Garden Ring Road as stunned motorists slammed on the brakes to gawk at the writhing naked bodies.

Authorities said they are investigating the incident, which lasted about 20 minutes. “Within three minutes we found it out, and within 15 minutes the screen was shut off,” said the deputy head of Moscow’s advertising committee, Alexander Menchuk, Interfax reported.

I can’t help be reminded of one of James Howard Kunstler’s favorite words: Clusterfuck.

In case you missed it (I actually did, being more or less on holiday), Webster’s chose “distracted driving” as the word of 2009.

And here’s Leonard Evans on the subject:

Driving while distracted is not like drunk driving — it is far worse.

In stark contrast, the victims of distracted driving are in all too many cases random road users behaving responsibly. Sober drivers, for example, are responsible for 90 percent of the child pedestrians killed each year.

Photo by misskyra/Flickr

In my drive-through piece a while back, I speculated the numbers about drive-throughs somehow being environmentally superior to parking lots might be off for a number of reasons, including the idea that some drivers use the drive through and then park. In any case, I came across this curious sign that seems to connote just that behavior, rather paradoxically.

Calling New Haven-ites (New Havinians?): I will be appearing in a talk with the estimable Donald Shoup next week at Yale University.

I’ve written here before about the transverse bars — which get closer to one another as the driver approaches a curve — installed on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive to help ameliorate a crash hot spot where traditional signs and the like didn’t seem to be having much effect (for the primary reason that Chicago drivers seem to treat LSD like an Interstate highway facility). A discussion I had with CDOT some time ago seemed to reveal some early promise in the treatment, but now, the Nudge blog reports, some actual hard data is in, and the results are encouraging:

According to an analysis conducted by city traffic engineers, there were 36 percent fewer crashes in the six months after the lines were painted compared to the same 6-month period the year before (September 2006 – March 2007 and September 2005 – March 2006).

To see if it could make the road even safer, the city installed a series of overhead flashing beacons, yellow and black chevron alignment signs, and warning signs posting the reduced advisory speed limit. Again, accidents fell – 47 percent over a 6-month period (March 2007 – August 2007 and March 2006 – August 2006). Keep in mind that the post-six-month period effect included both the signs and the lines.

The more treatments the better is one conclusion to be drawn here, but the 36 percent reduction achieved with just the paint, without the added expense of the flashing signs, etc., is striking.

Via Nudge, a small rental-car reminder of road directionality for tourists (the reversion to old norms is an actual risk issue, one that presumably can supplant the heightened sense of awareness due to a new environment).

The comparison here is of course to London’s street warnings to “look right,” etc.; I’ve often wondered about any before-after numbers (though they’ve been in London for many decades, no?) about their effectiveness as, for example, other places with left-side directionality don’t feature the warnings.

This line intrigued me from Greg Grandin’s superb Fordlandia, about Henry Ford’s quest — almost Herzogian — to build a clean-living, soy-eating company town in the Amazon, a sort of subtropical Pullman:

“Manaus is famous for its hulking Amazonas Theater, an opera house built of Italian marble and surrounded by roads made of rubber so the carriage clatter of late arrivals wouldn’t interrupt the voices of Europe’s best tenors and sopranos.”