Archive for May 11th, 2009

This piece brings up two issues that have been batted around here recently: Lane-splitting by motorcycles, and distracted drivers. In this case, a motorcyclist stopped at traffic lights was killed after being struck by a driver who was painting her nails (had she been between vehicles, the crash presumably would not have happened). The piece notes another egregious case in which a cyclist was killed by a driver who was “downloading ring tones” on his cell phone — and received nothing more than a “traffic ticket.”

The piece wonders, in that abstract way of lazy journalism, of “where the line should be drawn” in deciding what’s distracting: “Is programming a GPS more of a distraction than tuning the car radio?” Uh, yeah, it actually is, and there’s plenty of research on that — it’s why the car manufacturers don’t let you input addresses while you’re in motion, and they do let you change the radio station.

And the piece also finds the requisite “critics” of criminalizing distracted driving — not surprisingly, it’s a criminal defense attorney!

“Truth be told, anything we’re doing other than giving our full attention to the road is potentially a distraction, but that doesn’t make it a criminal case,” said Darren Kavinoky, a criminal defense attorney who practices in California.

So a glance to the side of the road is the same, in terms of non-criminality, as someone painting her nails while she drove?

Yet another driver is implicated in texting while driving — this time a trolley in Boston. Given the trouble that highly trained drivers have with distracting technologies, it doesn’t require much imagination to think what’s happening to the average car driver as they remotely engage.

David Williams of the Telegraph gives a prototype vehicle equipped with Intelligent Speed Adaptation (what used to be known as a “governor”) a spin through London. The car limits speed to whatever the limit is on the segment — typically 30 mph.

This line struck me:

Like most motorists I want to be law-abiding. Up until now I’d believed I was. But this clever car exposes such self-delusions. Normally I try to keep to 30mph in town but in reality I must have been doing nearer 40 as I never drive this slowly.

Someone recently asked me, “why do people speed?” There’s no short answer to that question (I’ve got 250-page reports tackling the question), but one possibility that must be considered, in light of the above sentences, is that: They actually don’t know how fast they are going. Any number of studies have shown how drivers, particularly when the feedback is noisy — i.e., they’re sitting high up from the road, the car cabin is ultra quiet (or the radio loud), the road is very wide — routinely underestimate their speed.

As we’ve banged on here about many times before, these minor differences in urban speed, while inconsequential and almost imperceptible for the driver, can be of dramatic importance for the pedestrian or cyclist struck by a vehicle.

Ramping up slowly here, folks, and it’s staggering how much happens in the world of traffic in a week — there are dozens of things I would have posted on, had my attentions not been elsewhere.

With Hummer on the verge of extinction, save for its purchase by some Chinese manufacturer looking for a new market niche for emerging oligarchs, I came across this piece by Salon on the rise and fall of America’s most unbeloved car brand. This bit struck me in particular:

Beginning in 1996, a series of tax laws combine to create large tax credits for certain Hummer buyers. By 2002, the New York Times reports that, thanks to changes in the tax code during the Bush administration, an eligible buyer can deduct $34,912 of the $48,800 base price of the Hummer.

God does that now seem like a piece of Bush-era lunacy (and keep in mind at the same time the deduction for hybrid vehicles was being capped and restricted). That whopping deduction supposedly reflected the Hummer’s role as a “light duty truck,” and hence a work vehicle for yeoman farmers and the like, though the only people I ever saw driving them looked dressed for nothing for labor intensive than a day on the links — and they were certainly never hauling anything beyond a pair of jet-skis or ATVs (and don’t get me started on those!). In retrospect they were the perfect emblem of the Bush interregnum, a totem of entitlement, profligacy, social and personal insecurity, militarism as a form of consumption, and absolute pretension — “all cattle and no hat.”