Archive for October 28th, 2008

From today’s Globe and Mail.

“Is cellphone use by drivers dangerous? Yes, it increases the risk of a crash or near-crash by 1.3 times (2.8 times, when dialling), the Alberta review found. But then, eating hikes the risk by 1.6 times, inserting a CD by 2.3 times, applying makeup by 3.1 times and looking at, say, a billboard or someone on the sidewalk by 3.7 times. An insect in a vehicle raises the odds of a crash by 6.4 times.”

It’s that last bit that caught my eye. I know my wife virtually climbed out of the seat when a spider once dangled down from the rear-view mirror. And I’ve had some scrapes with bees. I’ve no idea where the data comes from in the governmental study, or whether all insects carry equal crash risks.

I know most of you are paying attention to only one election, but let’s not overlook that the results of another ballot are in. It’s “Europe’s Most Stupid Road Sign”.

Via David Hembrow, check out this trailer for Van Der Valk, an early 70s Brit cop show set in Amsterdam. Note that you only see a few cyclists (and one horse-drawn wagon); it might as well be Starsky and Hutch cruising around their fictive Southern California. It’s an interesting reminder that cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen were not just natural cycling hotbeds, but became so through very conscious decisions made by planners and politicians.

Adrian, a psychology grad student in Australia, wrote in with mention of a disturbing episode in Australia, recounted here, of a car driver going after some cyclists in an “Around the Bay Day” event (for charity, mind you).

What one editorialist also found objectionable, however, was the link at the bottom of the page where readers could vote on that day’s opinion question. The question was: Are cyclists responsible road users?

Not really the first question that comes to mind after reading the original article (I’m almost afraid to know what the answer was). As the writer put it, “OK. If those hooligans had bowled over a bunch of grannies going to church, would readers be having their say on whether senior citizens are responsible road users?” A more contextually appropriate question to vote on, in my opinion, would have been: Should drivers who commit what is essentially aggravated assault with a deadly weapon have their driving rights permanently revoked? (uh, yeah)

The writer went on to coin the word “bikeism” to describe the dynamics he thought were at work — tarring an entire class of people with the extreme acts committed by a few (or a stereotypical image of that behavior). “Unfortunately, many motorists who don’t ride bikes and don’t understand cycling seem to think that all cyclists are ego-driven menaces who run red lights.” (more…)

I was intrigued by two different strands of thought in the news this past weekend. From the New York Times, in a piece on a car-sharing program in Europe, by Daimler.

“Car2go is a daring step for an automaker. According to the Ademe survey, when car owners adhere to a car-sharing program, most of them get rid of their own cars. Car sharing works because owning a car in a city can be a pain.
“In Europe, the relationship between people and cars is changing,” said Gildo Pastor, chief executive of Venturi Automobiles in Monaco. “Young people today want a computer, a telephone. The car is not at the center of their thoughts. In the city you can’t park, and it costs a fortune to insure it.”
Venturi is one of a dozen European companies developing small electric cars for proposed car-sharing programs. In 2010, Paris plans to introduce AutoLib, a car-sharing service with 2,000 electric cars in 700 Paris parking lots with charging stations and a similar number in suburbs…
Being environmentally kind is one attraction of car sharing. People in the Paris study drove half as far each month after they joined, and some car-sharing programs compensate for carbon emissions by paying third-party companies to capture carbon.

And then this bit of alternate reality, from the head of BMW:

“There are many studies that say it took 120 years to get to 800 million cars around the globe, and that it will take only another 30 years to double that volume,” he says. “If that is true, the best is still ahead of us.”