Archive for February 4th, 2009

There is a strange sort of consensus in this tragic tale from Atlanta of a child killed as he was crossing in front of his school that somehow, lack of traffic signals is the underlying problem.

Traffic signals, however, despite our fetishistic belief in them, are not a safety device per se: They are a means for directing traffic flow. To the extent they actually get drivers to stop (for fear of being struck by another car), they have an ancillary benefit for pedestrians. But they also encourage drivers to look up away from the street, and to accelerate towards an intersection (potentially crowded with pedestrians) so as to not miss a light. They may also raise a false sense of security amongst pedestrians.

But as the story notes, there was no shortage of warning here:

A crossing guard was on duty and had carried a stop sign into the street, and other vehicles had stopped, police spokeswoman Mekka Parish said.

What’s more,

Road signs warn drivers they are approaching the school crosswalk. Ogilvie’s car was southbound. Drivers coming from the north pass a flashing school zone sign on a roadside post and a sign warning, “Stop for pedestrians in crosswalk” before traveling over a small hill just north of the school.

Exactly how many more warnings this driver needed (no word if they were on a phone or similarly distracted) before realizing they were in an area with crossing schoolchildren is unknown — and why, having missed all these other signs, this driver would magically stop for a traffic light (more than 3000 people a year are killed by people who don’t), is beyond me. At what point do we treat the issue of driver responsibility, instead of cursing the absence of a set of colored lights in the sky or some bit of road engineering?

The piece skirts around the real issue: Driver speeds (from experience people in the Atlanta region treat small neighborhood streets as high-speed shortcuts). It could have also noted the much greater likelihood of a pedestrian dying when struck by an SUV, rather than a car.

I like the deadpan, nature-doc (or is it Ken Burns?) feel of this piece by B.C. Brown.

No, I’m not talking about the mythical drivers of the 1970s, riding their luxe mobiles down to the benefits office to collect their check.

I’m talking about Detroit. Congress seems intent on handing yet another short-sighted free ride to the automakers. As reports the Wall Street Journal, Congress has come up with the following piece of “policy”: “The $11.5 billion auto amendment, adopted 71-26, would give an income-tax deduction to car buyers for both sales taxes and interest payments on auto loans.” This even as the newspapers are filled with stories of transit systems with expanding riderships nevertheless having to cut back for lack of funding.

There are, seemingly, no further requirements on this latest gift to the industry — e.g. no stricture that it be used only for high-mileage or hybrid vehicles, nothing that might make Detroit (or American consumers, for that matter) wake up and face reality.

Do you see a pattern here? Let’s review. There was the time Congress eviscerated the tax credit for hybrid vehicles — the more that are sold, the more the credit erodes (how’s that for incentives?). In Europe, the tax credits for lower-emitting vehicles don’t erode. Then there was the time Congress enacted tax breaks for “light duty” vehicles (the ones family farmers used to use back in the days such a creature existed), encouraging an entire generation to move away from higher-mileage vehicles into unsustainable suburban trucks. And then, as Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon note in their new book Two Billion Cars (which I’ve reviewed in the next Wilson Quarterly), there was the old “two fleet rule” for imports and domestics, “added at the request of the UAW, which hoped Detroit would be forced to keep building small cars to offset sales of gas guzzlers. This worked for a short time, but the share of imported parts rose in Detroit’s ‘domestically built’ cars defined as having at least 75 percent domestic content).”

The pattern seems to be: Detroit, caught in its oligopolistic slumber, runs ashore on the shoals of global socio-economic reality; Congress finds some short-term way to help them that leaves them precariously ill-prepared for the future. Repeat.