Archive for July 6th, 2009

The above image is one of a series of roundabouts photographed by Kleinefenn, a German-born photographer living in France. The complete collection is here, and will leave traffic geeks heads spinning in wonder.

Vis a vis the recent discussion at the Transportation Experts blog on the question of whether car VMT in the U.S. should be reduced as a matter of federal policy, I was curious about this factoid over on the Rocky Mountain Institute’s website.

Improve public transportation, they say. Develop housing near mass transport nodes. Form carpools at the office. These are all effective and viable measures to address the average American business commute, and we should indeed do all of these things. But what if our business commute isn’t necessarily where we have the most influence? What if it’s our kids’ activities driving us to drive more — our child miles traveled (CMTs)?

According to the 2001 National Household Travel Survey, the average vehicle travels 3,956 miles for family and personal business. In 1969, that average was 1,270 miles. We’ve tripled our family business mileage, but VMTs for business commuting only increased 36 percent during the same period. Looks like our family miles are to blame.

An insurance company sponsored study at a driving simulator at the University of Leicester finds that football fans drive erratically when listening to their favorite clubs on the radio.

The report also showed that the driving speed of football fans mirrored that of the match that they were listening to. For example, during a match between Portsmouth and Newcastle, the pace of the match increased with a forward movement by the Newcastle team. At the same time, the driver under scrutiny reacted by accelerating the vehicle. During this period, the throttle was set to maximum and the driver increased the simulation vehicle speed from 68mph to 77mph in 22 seconds. The driver also overtook another vehicle.

One can’t help but wonder what would have happened if they had done the experiment the day Newcastle was relegated, on a 1-0 loss to Villa on an own goal by Damien Duff.

When I wasn’t watching a bit of Tour de France, or playing backyard badminton, I was hammock-bound this weekend (I was clearly out of town, as my Brooklyn apartment has neither yard nor hammock) with Mary Beard’s wonderful book The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found. Beard, a Cambridge classicist who also blogs, leaves no layer of pumice unturned as she probes the “ordinary life” of the lost town. Not surprisingly, there’s a bit about streets, and the still ongoing tension between the externalities of wheeled traffic and the other functions of urban spaces.

The streets of Pompeei could be closed to wheeled transport by simple devices: by large stone bollards fixed in the roadway, by the placing of fountains or other obstructions across the traffic path, or by steps or other changes of level that were impassable to carts. Every one of these was used to ensure that, at least in its final phases, the Pompeian Forum was a pedestrian area. We should put out our minds any fanciful reconstruction of the central piazza criss-crossed by chariots and carts. Each entry point to the Forum was blocked to wheeled traffic…

Pompeian traffic was then reduced or, in modern terms, ‘calmed’ by the creation of cul-de-sacs, and other kinds of road block. But there remains the more general problem of narrow streets and what would happen if two carts should met in those many roads which were wide enough only for one. Needless to say, reversing a cart drawn by a pair of mules, down a road impeded by stepping stones, would have been an impossible feat. So how did the ancient Pompeians avoid repeated stand-offs, between carts meeting head-to-head? How did they prevent a narrow street being reduce to an impasse?

Well, I don’t want to give the whole thing away — read the book!