Archive for February 9th, 2009

From Florida, where this sort of thing seems to happen inordinately, comes a classic tale of armed “road rage”:

Two men arrested in what could have been a disastrous road-rage shootout on Interstate 95 Sunday offered an insight into the psychology of aggression on the highway when each sought police to report the other’s actions, experts said…

“We don’t see the world how it is; we see the world through our own eyes,” said Guess, who studies decision-making as part of his research. Neither of the men probably believed they were wrong, he said.

In the end, however, both were arrested.

Just following up on the recent multiple-offender DUI fatal crash in St. Louis, the Post-Dispatch writes:

The St. Louis County prosecutor wants to know why repeat DUI offender Newton M. Keene twice escaped potential felony charges that could have imprisoned him before his wrong-way car killed three people near Edwardsville last week.

“All I can say is it got lost in the shuffle,” Wolf said Friday. “It should have never happened. … I’m upset because none of the supervisors followed up on it.”

(Thanks Jack)

Via Popular Mechanics:

There are no specific parameters or requirements that define shovel readiness. But according to civil engineers, the idea behind this new buzzword could help scuttle the stimulus bill’s highly publicized, though secondary, goal of infrastructure reform. At issue is that 90-day restriction stipulated by Congress, an even narrower window than the bill’s original 180-day limit. “They’re well intentioned, and they know their infrastructure sucks, so they’re trying to do immediate reactive management to what is a very deep, endemic problem,” says Robert Bea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. “If you want to patch some potholes in the road, this is a good program. But if you’re hoping for anything long-term with this approach, throw away all hope. It can’t happen.”

The programs that would meet the bill’s 90-day restriction are, for the most part, an unappealing mix of projects that were either shelved after being fully designed and engineered, and have since become outmoded or irrelevant, or projects with limited scope and ambition. No one’s building a smart electric grid or revamping a water system on 90 days notice. The best example of a shovel-ready project, and what engineers believe could become the biggest recipient of the transportation-related portion of the bill’s funding, is road resurfacing—important maintenance work, but not a meaningful way to rein in a national infrastructure crisis. “In developing countries, there are roads that are so bad, they create congestion, because drivers are constantly forced to slow down,” says David Levinson, an associate professor in the University of Minnesota’s civil engineering department. “That’s not the case here. If the road’s a little bit rougher, drivers will feel it, but that’s not going to cause you to go any slower. So the economic benefit of those projects is pretty low.”

I would only disagree in that NYC, there are some roads that are so bad they make you slow down, but the benefit here is that it acts as passive (and inexpensive) traffic calming.

Ant lane discipline and socially optimally network routing are old faves around here, and I just broached the subject on this past weekend’s Good Morning America, but Wired hits the ant traffic trail with news of an enticing new study by entomologist Audrey Dussutour.

In the latest findings, published in the February issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology, Dussutour’s team found that ants leaving the colony automatically gave right-of-way to those returning with food. Of the returning ants, some were empty-mandibled — but rather than passing their leaf-carrying, slow-moving brethren, they gathered in clusters and moved behind them.

“One dominating factor in human traffic is egoism,” said University of Zoln traffic flow theorist Andreas Schadschneider. “Drivers optimize their own travel time, without taking much care about others. This leads to phantom traffic jams which occur without any obvious reason. Ants, on the other hand, are not egoistic.”

Humans, meanwhile, who are busily updating their “25 Random Things About Me” entries on their Facebook pages, could not be reached for comment.

Full story after the jump…
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Road crashes cost at least $20 billion a year, leaving aside the human suffering.

To the extent speed cameras reduce speeding and road crashes, they save government money. To take the argument to the extreme, if speed cameras were so blanketed as to ensure total compliance with speed limits, they would raise no revenue. But they would cut the road toll by at least a third – a saving of more than $1 billion a year to Australian taxpayers.

An interesting way of reframing, from a good piece by Australian journalist — the figures he cites are from Australia — Crispin Hull titled “A New Attitude to Speeding Needed.” (or after the jump)

(Horn honk to Michael Paine)
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