Archive for February, 2009

The BBC reports on the bumpy road for Paris’ Velib bike-sharing program.

The company which runs the scheme, JCDecaux, says it can no longer afford to operate the city-wide network.

Hung from lamp posts, dumped in the River Seine, torched and broken into pieces, maintaining the network is proving expensive. Some have turned up in eastern Europe and Africa, according to press reports. \

The video below reveals the sort of users who were probably not part of the intended target audience.

Since so many drivers seem to lack any other kind, Needham, Massachusetts is hoping to appeal to their “emotional intelligence,” reports the Boston Globe.

As is so often the case, the community in question is trying to get people to drive more slowly on neighborhood streets with schools and children. The typical signage seems to do squat. As the story notes, “The idea is that seeing a child’s handwriting and drawing will make parents relate to the sign in a way they never would with an impersonal version.” In other words, it’s not the voice of the impersonal state, but a child — and how many SUVs loaded with parents’ own offspring are barreling down that road?

Interestingly, this idea did not stem from traffic engineers. Writs the Globe: “She said the novel approach came out of a conference she attended last year, when Daniel Pink, best-selling author of “A Whole New Mind,” talked about using so-called right-brain skills like empathy to communicate more effectively - and ultimately to be more successful.”

Pink himself “came upon the idea by accident while visiting a New York museum with his wife and three young children. The family took a break from touring to get something to eat at the museum cafeteria. ‘The line is just outrageously long,’ Pink recalled. ‘And I’m all stressed out about that because we don’t have a lot of time, and I don’t want to waste my time at this beautiful museum waiting for a grilled cheese sandwich.” Then he saw a sign that read, “Don’t worry. This line moves really quickly.’ Pink said he immediately felt much calmer and it made his entire experience at the museum better.’

This may all be a bit too soft for the New Yorker raised on “Don’t Even THINK of Parking Here” and its ilk. And I’m not sure about the legibility of those signs (then again, legibility is only half the issue). But I’m all for unconventional approaches, and this one seems an interesting parallel with the U.K.’s “road witch” trials and David Engwicht’s “intrigue and uncertainty” ethos, the idea that the “outdoor living room” of a residential street, one that shows signs of life, might be as or more effective than anonymous, disregarded signs. I’m also not sure about the ‘novelty effect,’ but in any case it will be interesting to see how it plays out (the town is trying the ‘empathetic’ signage for other purposes, as well). I like the idea of simply posting images of huge sets of eyes with any traffic message, as psychological experiments have shown how eye contact (not necessarily “real” eye contact) improves cooperation.

Part of me can’t help but to look at those “child-like” signs, meant to engender feelings of empathy for the nearby children, and think they almost say more about the drivers. We often hear about how children are “unpredictable” and do things like cross at inappropriate moments, but to look at the behavior of drivers through these school areas it is they who seem to be behaving without the appropriate amount of control and risk-awareness. How can a person drive in such an environment without the understanding that they are in the presence of unpredictability? (of course, with issues of speed, one tends to only hear from drivers about how they feel they are traveling at a speed that is safe for them, without taking into account the ethical dimension of how their behavior raises the risks to others). To take the analogy further, how many “children” do we see out on the roads, hostile to being reigned in, thinking that parental rules don’t apply to them, selfish to the extreme (swap a toddler’s crying for the horn), angry when their toys are taken away (how dare you remove parking spots!).

What do y’all think — more carrot, less stick? Or the reverse? Or a whole new way of thinking about the problem?

The BBC reports on how the number of “near misses” at level train crossings in Wales from drivers who do not see, or willfully disregard the warning, is rising. The harrowing footage is here.

In the case shown, “the motorist admitted dangerous driving, claiming he did not see the flashing lights and failed to notice cars waiting at the crossing.” The article also notes that: “The court heard that his wife had been so traumatised by the experience that the couple had had to move to a nearby town.”

What’s interesting about the report is the stiffness of the fine, higher than many I’ve seen in the U.S. for negligent driving that did cause a crash (this was just a hair’s breadth away from that happening in this case, judging by the video). Of course, with train crossings, one driver’s action could jeopardize the lives of many more people than in a typical traffic scenario (not to mention granting themselves a likely death sentence).

The motorist was given 12 month suspended sentence and ordered to do 180 hours of community service. He was also disqualified from driving, made to take an extended test after 12 months and fined £722.

I’m all for increased driver responsibility but one wonders what design or “nudge” solution there might be for improving safety at these crossings.

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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I was intrigued by this anecdote from Stephen Baker’s new book The Numerati:

“What is it about romantic-movie lovers?” Morgan asks, as we sit in his New York office on a darkening summer afternoon. The advertising entrepreneur is flush with details about our ramblings online. He can trace the patterns of our migrations, as if we were swallows or humpback whales, while we move from site to site. Recently he’s become intrigued by the people who click most often on an ad for car rentals. Among them, the largest group had paid a visit to online obituary listings. That makes sense, he says, over the patter of rain against the windows. “Someone dies, so you fly to the funeral and rent a car.” But it’s the second-largest group that has Morgan scratching his head. Romantic-movie lovers. For some reason Morgan can’t fathom, loads of them seem drawn to a banner ad for Alamo Rent A Car.

The reason is later revealed:

I ask him about the correlation he told me about earlier, the one between romantic-movie fans and Alamo Rent A Car. It takes a moment for him to recall it. “Oh yeah. They were off the charts.” Did his researchers, I ask, ever come up with an explanation for it. He nods. “It had to do with weekends. It was Alamo ads promoting “escapes” that attracted the attention of these web surfers, he says. The romantic-movie fans booked leisure rentals, largely for weekend getaways. Perhaps they wanted to act out the kind of scenes that drew them to the cinema. Banners for weekday rentals apparently left them cold.”

Via the Times:

For many expatriate workers in Dubai it was the ultimate symbol of their tax-free wealth: a luxurious car that few could have afforded on the money they earned at home.

“Every day we find more and more cars,” said one senior airport security official, who did not want to be named. “Christmas was the worst – we found more than two dozen on a single day.

I’m all for stiffer traffic penalties — and much of Costa Rica’s new law is commendable (and tries to treat the corruption issue) — but I did find a particularly curious bit of fine print:

“Other controversial measures include an $82 fine for a taxi or bus driver who insults his passengers.”

One wonders where something like this comes from — is there a rampant plague of offensive bus/taxi drivers? What constitutes an insult (do we know one when we hear one)? Who exactly will decide to declare a citation (maybe armed ‘bus marshals’?) And why $82? (in the U.S. you’d have to tack on a few thousand bucks for emotional pain and suffering).

One of the interesting and rewarding things about putting a book into the world is to witness the myriad and often unexpected ways people engage with it. For example, Jelani Greenidge wonders about the spiritual issues the book, in his opinion, raises — and of course even the Vatican’s Pontifical Council has weighed in on the problems of driver savagery.

Michael Giberson, meanwhile, delightfully salvages a moment of poetry of which I was not even aware.

He writes:

I found a sentence (p. 126) to read nicely as a bit of traffic poetry (I’ve broken the prose sentence into three lines, in the manner of most poetry):

and backward in time, did something as simple as change lanes.

He then elaborates:

I particularly like the way the meter has a sort of pulsing flow through the lines until you reach the last two words, which to my ear must both be stressed. A spondee, in poetic terms, that brings the flow of the sentence to a halt, while echoing the “hiccup” at the beginning of the first line.

You might also note the manner in which the syntactic unit “forward in space and backward in time” is broken over two lines, a poetic device called enjambment, which seems appropriate for this found poem about a hiccup in heavy traffic.

This piece, on the clash between individual routing action and overall network efficiency, generated a ton of discussion of the blogosphere (which tended to treat it as an entirely novel discovery). In an “erratum” published in the latest Physical Review Letters, the authors acknowledge some previously unacknowledged predecessors (e.g., J.G. Wardrop) to their research:

“After the Letter was published, it was suggested that we provide a few additional references about social optima and Nash equilibria in transportation science. The importance of optimum and equilibrium traffic led Wardrop to postulate them as fundamental principles in 1952 [1]. Four years later, equilibrium conditions were described mathematically by Beckmann et al. [2]; see Ref. [3] for a retrospective. An English translation of Braess’s classic paper [4] on paradoxes in equilibrium traffic, together with accompanying comments [5], was published in 2005.

[1] J. G. Wardrop, in Proc. Inst. Civ. Eng., 2 1, 325 (1952).
[2] M. J. Beckmann, C. B. McGuire, and C. B. Winsten, Studies in the Economics of Transportation (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1956).
[3] D. E. Boyce, H. S. Mahmassani, and A. Nagurney, Papers Reg. Sci. 1 (2005) 85.
[4] D. Braess, A. Nagurney, and T. Wakolbinger, Transp. Sci. 39, 446, (2005).
[5] A. Nagurney and D. Boyce, Transp. Sci. 39, 443 (2005).

Slightly off topic, but just to plug Jonah Lehrer’s new book, How We Decide, a look at the inner mechanics of our decision-making process; as it happens, I’ve blurbed the book — but lest you suspect that is purely some corrupt log-rolling at work, I don’t actually know the author.

One of my favorite bits involves some recent neuroscience work on the nucleus accumbens, “a crucial part of the dopamine reward pathway,” says Lehrer; in other words, if you own one of something and acquire another, the NAcc won’t see much activation. But getting that first thing — something one craves — well then it’s on fire.

Lehrer argues that “retail stores manipulate this cortical setup.” (whether this is because they have neuro-scientists on staff, or simply rely on inherited retailing wisdom, is another question). “Just look at the interior of a Costco warehouse,” he writes. “It’s no accident that the most coveted items are put in the most prominent places. A row of high-definition televisions line the entrance. The fancy jewelry, Rolex watches, iPods, and other luxury items are conspicuously placed along the corridors with the heaviest foot traffic. And then there are the free samples of food, literally distributed throughout the store. The goal of Costco is to constantly prime the pleasure centers of hte brain, to keep us lusting after the things we don’t need. Even though you probably won’t buy the Rolex, just looking at the fancy watch makes you more likely to buy something else, since the desired item activates the NAcc.”

A-ha! I always wondered why I felt so oddly weak in front of the 48-packs of California pitted olives. I was still lusting after that 64-inch Sony Bravia! It always did strike me as a bit of a disconnect why there were laptops and such (which I never buy) directly at the entrance; as if to suggest, well, I’m really here to buy bulk garbage bags but maybe what I actually want is… a Dell notebook. Or I suspected they put that stuff before the staples because you might not otherwise reach that area (like the way supermarkets stuff milk at the very end of the store), or your cart would already be filled with tube socks and toothpaste, with no room (actual or psychic) for luxury goods. But I like Lehrer’s theory that it’s like Costco’s version of a kind of mental stimulus package, a bit of Keynesian pump-priming — I develop an instant crush on the TV, and this unrequited romance makes me fall harder for 55-gallon-drum of Chi-Chi’s salsa ten aisles further on (and that also seems like such a more virtuous and rational purchase to boot).

In any case, the book is filled with similarly fascinating excursions into the human decision-making apparatus, in all its imprecise glory.

Via the St. Louis Post Dispatch comes this:

A wrong-way driver caused a crash that killed two adults and a boy early today and left a teen-age girl critically injured.

A random ‘accident’? Hardly.

The wrong-way driver’s history of driving trouble goes back years.

Shana Alexander, a spokeswoman with the Missouri Department of Revenue, recited a long list of administrative actions to convictions in court. He has a 1994 conviction for excessive blood alcohol; a 1995 conviction for driving while intoxicated; a 1997 conviction for driving while suspended or revoked; a 1997 conviction for DWI; and a 2001 conviction for driving while revoked. The most serious one, the 1997 DWI conviction, was out of St. Louis County.

This is the unfortunate reality with traffic enforcement. Even if you stiffen the penalties, you can’t physically restrain someone from getting behind the wheel (outside of putting ignition interlocks on every vehicle). Unless, of course, they’re in jail, where this criminal must now surely be heading, albeit too late.

(Thanks Jack)

I’ve seen signs on small churches in the South that warned the Rapture was coming, but I’ve not yet seen a “Raptors ahead” warning.

What began with Texas zombies, then moved to Nazi zombies, has apparently become a nationwide phenomenon, with Indiana drivers being warned of some unseen hawk presence.

“It’s kind of crazy. I’m totally confused,” said one motorist. “I’m kind of expecting … dinosaurs to run down the road, or something.”

Well, defensive driving lesson number one is: Expect the unexpected.

Germany’s trying to stimulate its economy by giving new car buyers a $2500 Euro for junking their old car in exchange for a model that meets the latest emissions standards. The new car need not be German. One wonders if there’s an interesting long German word for this program.

Not everyone is convinced the plan from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is best for the car industry or the environment.

“One could say the wreck premium is an economic program for the factories in Italy, France, eastern Europe and Korea. For workers in Germany, the bonus will contribute little,” Dudenhoeffer said.

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.