Archive for August, 2009

One of the most universal, and seemingly intractable, problems in the world of traffic is controlling drivers’ speeds on local streets, particularly those with children present. The latest approach, in Leicester, England, combines hardcore traffic engineering — steel bollards — with a more humanistic side: They literally look like small children standing on the side of the road.

There is, admittedly, a bit of a Village of the Damned look to the bollards — and yet also something rather cheerful, something like foosball players — but perhaps, echoing Daniel Pink’s “emotionally intelligent signage” proposal, they may trigger some instinctual response, reminding drivers of the presence of humans (and, after all, studies have shown that images of humans, particularly human eyes, can be as persuasive as real humans).

Not surprisingly, the locals are a bit divided.

Sylvia Thomas, who lives in nearby Greenhill Road, said: “I can’t see the point of them. If they are there to calm traffic they don’t work, because one has already been knocked over.

Helen Evans, 44, from Knighton, said: “They look great. I think they’re cute – and hopefully they will make people drive more carefully and remember there are children around here.”

As to the first commenter, rather than viewing it a failed solution, the idea that one has already been knocked down might simply demonstrate the extent of the problem. And the bollards are merely one part of a wider strategy, including striping and a new 20 mph speed limit.

From another story came this comment:

The RAC told Sky News Online that there was a risk “the statues will become a distraction with drivers focusing on them rather than the road ahead.”

One way to deal with that issue would be to put a few in the road. But of course there’s also the issue that real pedestrians will become a distraction — do we ban them from roadsides? Do we strip any sign of life from city streets so drivers will not have their precious roads obscured, their perilous attention (probably already compromised by their phone) fractured any further?

In any case, I’ll be curious to hear of any before/after speed comparisons.

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.

I slept on this story, but the above clip (actually it’s here as I couldn’t embed for some reason) is from Andre Marin, the Ombudsman of Ontario. He filmed the driver ahead as he shaved his head while driving.

“I was absolutely astounded,” Marin said. “He had both hands up in the air and he was using one hand to pull the skin at the back his neck and head and in the other hand he had an electric razor.”

The kicker is that Marin, who waited until he was stopped at light to film the offending grooming driver, is the one who would have gotten a ticket under Ontario’s forthcoming legislation against hand-held electronic devices (which does not discriminate against moving versus non-moving traffic), while police would presumably have been left, er, scratching their heads over what to do with the shaving driver.

I’m currently in Texas, and just heard an item on the radio about a curious new law: That it’s illegal to use a (hand-held) cell phone in a “school zone.”

And, as an article by Ben Wear (who was on my panel back at the Texas Book Festival last year) in the Statesman notes, cities like Austin now have to (or don’t, it’s still a bit up in the air) post signs alerting drivers to the presence of this law, otherwise police cannot enforce.

Robert Spillar, the City of Austin’s transportation director, said the city has not set aside money for the signs. Nonetheless, it will begin installing them this fall, starting with elementary schools. It could take two years to get them all up, he said.

“I don’t see how we can not put them up,” Spillar said. He said he isn’t sure the mere presence of signs will change driver behavior, and said some sort of education program might be necessary to get the message across. “It’s an unfunded mandate that has our backs against the wall. We can’t enforce it if the signs aren’t up.”

This is the first I’d heard of such a particular distinction being made in a particular zone, and I’m having trouble seeing the reasoning, or the safety impact. The first thought that jumps to mind is that a driver on a cell-phone is hardly likely to pick out a “no cell-phone” sign, much less expeditiously hang up their call as they approach. The second is that signs warning of “school zones” themselves, while a bit better — particularly when backed up flashing lights — than the ubiquitous (and absolutely ineffectual) “Slow Children” signs that are not officially recognized by engineers, tend to be little regarded as well, at least based on various tests in which drivers were still found to be routinely exceeding the speed limit; typically it’s the parent bringing their kids to the very same school. The entire concept of “School Zones” is a bit wanting, really, prone to driver and legal confusion, not to mention that it raises that eternal question: One is supposed to drive slowly and attentively on this stretch past a school, but it’s then OK to accelerate to higher speed a block later (a block on which there may be just as many children)?

And then, on the cell phone issue, we’re again making odd distinctions: We’re admitting that cell phones are a hazard to use when driving around groups of children at schools, but somehow OK when driving among groups of pedestrians or cyclists or children on the blocks in front of their homes — or in fact every other car on the road? And that it’s OK for drivers to zip past schools while talking on their hands-free-not-brain-free unit?

And then there’s the aesthetic blight of all the extra signage — more signs for drivers to ignore — not to mention all the money going to put the signs up, just so a law can be enforced; it seems rather ridiculous that if a state law is passed declaring it illegal to use cell phones in a school zone, one would have to expensively repeat that statement at every already marked school zone. After all, we don’t feel the need to erect signs announcing that driving while impaired is illegal, in school zones or anywhere else.

As always, any experiences or technical clarifications welcome.

Unlike most big city mayors (Portland’s Sam Adams is, or was, or still is, an exception), D.C.’s Adrian Fenty drives himself, and is apparently not setting the best example:

But Fenty’s recent fender bender has again raised questions about why the mayor is commandeering his city-issued vehicles, a Lincoln Navigator and a Smart Car. Fenty (D) was driving the Navigator when it collided with a Nissan Pathfinder at a four-way stop in the Chevy Chase neighborhood of the District this month. A police report on the accident was incomplete and contradicted an accounting of the incident provided by the mayor’s office.

It is another controversy surrounding Fenty and his vehicles. In May, he apologized for allowing a friend who was not a government employee to drive the Navigator, an apparent violation of the law. Fenty also picked up a speeding ticket in the Smart Car during the same month.

Former NJ-DOT-er Gary Toth (now with the project for Public Spaces) recently visited the Netherlands, a country that not so long ago had a worse traffic safety record than the U.S., but which now has a far superior one. There are a number of explanations, but in an interesting post (which echoes some material in Traffic), he singles out differing national approaches to the “forgiving road” concept:

Forgiving Highways is a concept that designs roads to “forgive” mistakes made on the road. It seeks to smoothly redirect the vehicles that leave roads, and allow wide enough clear zones to bring vehicles to controlled stops if and when they leave the roads. Breakaway supports, burying the end of guardrail, clearing the roadside of unneeded obstacles, and flattening and rounding slopes and ditch sections became standard design as part of the concept.

In the US, application of the Forgiving Highways approach in urban areas did accomplish its mission when vehicles did leave the road. However, as an unintended consequence, vehicular speeds go up. Drivers responded to their environment. Put them on a stretch of road that is wider, flatter, and straighter and they drove faster. While okay on controlled access freeways where there are no adjacent land uses or pedestrians, and where sight distances are near infinite, curves are flat and opposing roadways are separated by wide medians or center barriers, higher speeds caused problems in built up areas. Yet we were so caught up in the paradigm that we never stopped to check to see if we were getting the desired result.

Via online only Seattle Pi.com comes an interesting tale of tentative success with red-light cameras.

This bit stood out:

A random telephone survey of 400 people last August showed an 85 percent approval rate, Quinn said. And city officials continue to get unsolicited recommendations for intersections to install new cameras.

I don’t know the specifics of that survey, but given that nary a day goes by that I don’t hear the old charges about cameras “increasing accidents” — without identifying the much more serious crashes that same cameras have reduced — and being simple revenue-raising tools for municipalities, I was surprised by the high level of seeming support.

Or maybe it’s a Seattle thing (I once received a jaywalking warning there by an officer in blue).

From Liveleak, via BoingBoing.

I’m in busy/travel mode, hence the sporadic, short posts as of late…

OK, it’s another one that’s not real, but I couldn’t resist this take on drugs not be consumed while driving.

(Horn honk to Richard)

I was delighted to come across this bit on the blog Alternatives to Valium, as the writer visits with the former lead singer of the Talking Heads (and transportation writer) David Byrne:

And this, really, is the essence of David Byrne. He could, we may assume, afford to take a taxi, but, armed with his free maps from the London Cycle Campaign, he chooses to bike it, even when his journey involves an encounter with the Elephant and Castle roundabout. “Oh my God! Yes. I’ve heard that roundabouts are good for traffic, better than stoplights. Some guy [Tom Vanderbilt] has a book out called Traffic; there was a study, and there are fewer accidents on roundabouts than traffic lights because on roundabouts, it’s so precarious, you have to really be aware, and stop texting on your cellphone. Whereas with stoplights, people feel like the light does the job for them. So they’ll pull out when it turns green, and not think that someone else may have missed the light.”

The ’some guy,’ to me, was rather perfect; it’s cooler in a way than actually being name-checked because a.) this shows that David Byrne doesn’t actually know me, and this isn’t just log-rolling and b.) the ideas are preceding me, which is the way it should be. I wouldn’t necessarily say that this really captures my feelings on roundabouts 100%, but it’s good enough.

After I wrote the roundabouts piece recently in Slate, there was a lot of chatter about pedestrian safety, and how some people don’t feel comfortable crossing at roundabout intersections. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that roundabouts can be as safe, if not safer, for pedestrians than conventional intersections for some of the same reasons they are for drivers. And one reason that might not have been considered is how they use space. To wit, the photos below, which come from Asheville, North Carolina, which has converted a number of downtown intersections, like those pictured on College Street, to roundabouts.

Here’s the before:

And here’s the after (not the most current ‘after,’ mind you, and not the very same location, but you get the general drift):

One thing that roundabouts do away with is the need for a dedicated left-turn lane. Left-turn lanes — there are generally two — have the consequence of making intersections wider. If there’s one iron law of pedestrian safety, it’s that the more lanes you have to cross, the less safe it is (for a number of reasons). Instead of things like left-turn lanes, you can fill the space with planted medians, which are not only more aesthetically pleasing, making the downtown seem more like a downtown than a stretch of asphalt, but provide safer crossings for pedestrians. Looking at the two images above, it’s instantly clear which one you’d rather walk across, traffic lights or not (and incidentally, there have been no pedestrian crashes at these intersections since 2005, the city’s head traffic engineer informs me).

James Fallows with some interesting comparative thoughts on air crashes, and ground crashes, vis a vis this weekend’s events:

To someone with no experience controlling cars or trucks, it would seem incredible that drivers could whiz past each other in opposite directions on a two-lane road and not have head-on collisions all the time. They’re so close to each other! How can it possibly be safe? Isn’t anyone in control? And in fact, tens of thousands of people do die in road crashes each year. But since most people know about cars, they understand how drivers can watch out for other vehicles, how two-way traffic can usually be safe, and what kind of mistake, misjudgment, recklessness, or sheer bad luck can lead to a head-on crash.

But when it comes to aviation, relatively few people have first-hand experience steering planes or watching out for other aerial traffic. And because air disasters, when they happen, are so gruesome, it’s natural for most people to think: they’re so close to each other! How can it possibly be safe? Isn’t anyone in control? In fact, avoiding collisions in the air is, in terms of sheer reflexes required, less demanding than avoiding them on the road. (Landing an airplane is more demanding than most aspects of driving; simply flying an airplane is not.) If you lose attention for five seconds in a car, you can be in serious trouble. In airplanes there’s usually a lot more time to see what’s coming toward you and decide how to avoid a problem. It’s more like operating a boat in a harbor than like driving a car on a road. This may be why Mayor Michael Bloomberg — who has trained extensively as a helicopter and airplane pilot (his certificate info here) — struck the calmest note in the NYT story. He said, essentially: this is a terrible tragedy, and while we have to look for causes, it doesn’t mean we have to go crazy or shut everything down. More or less the way car drivers respond after a road tragedy.

From New Jersey, the state that give birth to Traffic, comes this appraisal of late and early merging (yes, I’m quoted), bound to be a issue this year as stimulus spending drops a torrent of orange cones across the Garden State.

Vis a vis the hottest, most annoyingly ear-worming song of the summer, referenced in the above video, I wonder how Trip Generation (and ditto Parking Generation) handles combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bells? Do they generate more, fewer, or the same amount of trips as individual Pizza Huts and Taco Bells? And is that a more potent combination than the combination Dunkin’ Donuts/Subway/Baskin Robbins?

Via Roadguy comes this interesting and nuanced discussion of a planned conversion in Minneapolis from one-way to two-way streets, on what seems like former residential boulevards (Park and Portland) that were turned into de facto highways in the incipient motor age.

I could have written an entire chapter in Traffic about the one-way/two-way debates (like LCD and plasma, they each have their particular attributes), but of more immediate concern to me here is the idea that every conversion I’ve heard of recently is from one-way to two-way. I wonder if the tide of planning orthodoxy has fully shifted, or are there any big two-way to one-way conversions going on as I write?

I was intrigued by this comment from travel guru Rick Steves, part of a passel of advice to Americans on how to drive in the U.K.:

Outside of the big cities and the motorways (freeways), British and Irish roads tend to be narrow. Adjust your perceptions of personal space. It’s not “my side of the road” or “your side of the road.” It’s just “the road” — and it’s shared as a cooperative adventure. In towns, you may have to cross over the center line just to get past parked cars. Sometimes both directions of traffic can pass parked cars simultaneously, but frequently you’ll have to take turns — follow the locals’ lead and drive defensively. On rural roads, locals are usually courteous, pulling over against a hedgerow and blinking their headlights for you to pass while they wait. Return the favor when you are closer to a wide spot in the road than they are.

For those of you eagerly following this story, justice has been rendered.

Now that the legal flap has died down, no word yet if all the parties involved have been invited to talk through their differences over a beer at the White House (though the geese would sure enjoy that lawn).

And the cynic in me can’t help concluding this guy was facing more legal trouble than have drivers who have struck cyclists or pedestrians, for example.