Archive for November 6th, 2008

Readers of Traffic (the Los Angeles bits) may remember my brief encounter with Kartik Patel, the L.A. DOT engineer I interviewed on “Oscar Night” in the city’s traffic bunker. He was later accused, with another engineer, of tampering with the traffic lights during an ongoing labor action.

News comes from the LA Times that Mr. Patel and Gabriel Murillo have “pleaded guilty to a single felony count of illegally accessing a city computer connected to the center.”

I liked Mr. Patel when I met him, so I’m admittedly pleased that he didn’t appear to get a more severe penalty (at one point the DHS had been called in):

“Under the plea deal, sentencing will be delayed one year, said Jane Robison, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. The two must pay full restitution, serve 120 days in jail or complete 240 hours of work with Caltrans or other community service, and must have their computers at home and work monitored.

“This was an emotional collective-bargaining strike situation,” Blatt said. “This should have been handled administratively. Mr. Murillo and Mr. Patel are outstanding citizens and have devoted a significant part of their professional lives to transportation safety in Los Angeles County.”

My old pal Roadguy wrote recently about a curious parking-garage pricing structure in Minneapolis:

“$2 for the first 20 minutes, a whopping $12 for the next 20 minutes, then $2 for every 20 minutes after that, with a daily maximum of $23. But if you’re in before 9 a.m. and you leave after noon, you pay eight bucks.”

Parking pricing, which in New York City can seem capricious and non-transparent, deserves its own chapter in economics textbooks — is there anything comparable? (OK, I suppose there’s plenty of things, daily versus weekly rates at hotels, for example). My bet here is that given that it’s across from a court house, the garage receives a lot of people coming in for short visits (renew licenses, etc.). Those people are in a hurry and probably not in the mood to shop around. You can further imagine that, under normal bureaucratic conditions, there’s no way you’re getting in and out from your car and back in less than 20 minutes. So you hit that ’sweet’ spot of the next 20 minutes (perhaps the garage has ascertained the average visit is around an hour). To stop short of outright highway robbery they probably ease off after that, but the damage has been done. Perhaps the people who arrive before 9 a.m. and leave after noon are the daily commuters, and perhaps they wouldn’t use the garage if they had to pay the short-term rates. Any other thoughts?

There’s an interesting discussion of parking pricing structures over at Marginal Revolution. I like the Occam’s razor approach that one poster suggests: “Isn’t there a much easier explanation–third-degree price discrimination? People who want to park for short period have inelastic demand and as a result they end up paying higher price.”

On the cycling theme for a moment, I’m wondering what the thinking is out there about London’s trial for motorcycles in the bus lanes (where pedal cyclists currently dwell). We’ll have to wait and see the results of the trial, but it brings up some interesting inter-modal issues. Will this really pose no risk to cyclists, as TFL claims, or would that risk be smaller than the risk posed to motorcyclists by cars? What about the increased emissions in the path of cyclists? Is there sort of thing standard elsewhere? How well do pedal and motor cycles intermingle — what about speed differences (motorcycles tend to attract much more risk-seeking users, at higher speeds, with predictable results)?

On the last point, did you know more U.S. Marines have been killed on motorcycles in the past 12 months than in Iraq?

A reader from D.C. writes with the news that there is some very initial exploration of a “stop and roll”-style ordinance, a la Idaho, that would allow cyclists to essentially treat signalized intersections as stop signs as “yield” signs.

I know that San Francisco (whose landscape is more akin to D.C. than Idaho) has been batting the idea around, but does anyone else know of any initiatives out there have been successful, or any studies that show the effects of such a law in Idaho or elsewhere?

I know we shouldn’t expect too much from outlets like AOL News, but note how this story replicates the classic cultural construct that “drunk driving is a horrible crime” and “speeding is OK and just something for the police to make money off of…”

After discussing how fines are rising for first-time speeding infractions, the article notes:

“Now, for the heavy stuff: drunken driving, known as DUI or DWI depending on your state.”

Speed, presumably, is the light stuff, the frothy romantic-comedy if you will in the pantheon of traffic safety, as compared to the dark tragedy of drunk driving. How light? This from NHTSA: “Annually, about 32 percent of all fatalities in motor vehicle traffic crashes were speeding-related, i.e., at least one of the drivers involved in the crash exceeded the posted speed limit or was driving too fast for the prevailing conditions.”

Not to mention things like the vast, exponential increase in chance of pedestrian death as speeds move from 20 mph to 30 mph.

Mattel, makers of “Hot Wheels” (I was more of a Matchbox guy myself), is now worth more than GM, reports Newsweek.

Key surreal quote: “As the stock market melted down, he still paid $13,000 for a rare “overchromed” Ford T-bird from the original Hot Wheels catalog. “I’ve looked over my portfolio and I’m down in everything except Hot Wheels,” he says.”