Archive for August 14th, 2009

According to the UC Berkeley Traffic Safety Center, more than 80 percent of crosswalk collisions are related to driver behavior – not pedestrian behavior.

From a salutary editorial in the Sacramento Bee.

A very local-centric post here, but I’m so glad someone wrote about this issue: People using the ‘emergency exits’ when exiting subway stations (which is illegal), thus setting off a loud, unpleasant noise; once one person does it, the sheep fall in line and duly follow, thus prolonging the horrible sound (if there’s one thing New York does not need more of, it’s horrible sound). Once one person has does it, of course, you lose out, theoretically, by not joining along; meanwhile, all the law abiding people suffer (although often, really, it takes no longer to go through the turnstile). The excuses given remind us that selfish, short-sighted and contra-the-posted-signs behavior is not limited to drivers. “Quite frankly when I’m leaving the subway it’s always an emergency because I need to get home,” one vile sort told the reporter.

The kicker here is that many exits (like mine, the ‘F’ train at Carroll) are set up with revolving turnstiles that filter the throughput of people exiting. What the steady, uninterrupted stream of people coursing through the emergency exit does is merely shift the bottleneck to the stairwell (where people are delayed by slower people exiting, or the ‘friction’ of those coming down the stairs). So the total egress time may in fact be the same, despite the illusion of progress.

Reader Robin notes this in a comment in my previous post:

I remember as child in occupied Austria around 1946 being told that Austria was forcibly switched to RHD when Hitler annexed the country in 1938.

That’s a fascinating, creepy detail — does anyone have any documentation of its truth?

Dear readers, I’ve had some people writing in to say the full blog isn’t posting, or is taking forever, or that they have trouble in general with the Flash animation in the banner (which you may not have even noticed, but take a second to stare at the lovely effect!). Anyone having trouble I’d love to hear at info@howwedrive.com.

I’ve got a new piece up at Salon.com that considers that ever vexing question: Which side of the road should we drive on? And should we all do it the same way?

Here’s the opener:

A revolution is afoot in the small Pacific island nation of Samoa. Mass demonstrations, the biggest the country has ever seen, have rocked the capital. A new political party has formed in an attempt to depose the prime minister. The airwaves crackle with dissent.

As is often the case in political strife, a left-right divide underpins the Samoan turmoil. In this case, left vs. right refers to which side of the road Samoans are meant to drive on. At 6 a.m. on Sept. 7, Samoans, who for over a century have navigated on the right — like their neighbors in American Samoa — will change over to the left.