Archive for October 6th, 2009

From a report by Boeing:

Since 1970, the actual speed at which passengers boarded an airplane (enplane rate) has slowed by more than 50 percent, down to as low as 9 passengers per minute. (figure 3) Similar through-stop time increases and boarding rates have been observed for wide-body airplanes. The trends are generally attributed to increased passenger carry-on luggage, more emphasis on passenger convenience, passenger demographics, airline service strategies, and airplane flight distance (stage length). Boeing believes that these trends will continue unless the root causes are understood and new tools and processes are developed to reverse the trend.

Of course, new queuing systems have been proposed, but they all depend on compliance — people not sorting through their bag in the overhead compartment and holding up dozens of others, or people boarding out of order and being held back for not being biz class, etc.

In his entertaining “Nanny State Diaries” presentation before the Distracted Driving Summit, Democratic Rep. Steve Farley made an offhand remark that I found curious: Arizona bans dogs from the back of pickup truck beds but not children. I’m not sure I’ve got this correct, or how it works in other states, but it seems a strange distinction.

The Missouri DOT gives a nice time-lapse (and count-down, or count-up that is, money clock) depiction of a highway’s life span. (Via Infrastructurist)

I come across stories like this all the time. The subhead announces, “POLICE are warning tech-savvy school students to unplug, log off and look out, amid a surge in pedestrian deaths in Victoria.”

It then quotes a police official: “It’s no surprise to police that with more and more people, especially school students, owning MP3 players, and lots of people walking and sending text messages, that we’re seeing more and more collisions between distracted pedestrians and vehicles,” Insp Parr said.”

The only problem is that among the surge in deaths reported, we are not given exact figures, or really any clue, as to what extent that has to do with distracted pedestrians, as well as what other factors might have been involved. This is not to dispute the idea that a pedestrian acts differently and loses situational awareness when on a mobile device — and this idea should give any driver pause — but we can’t just announce an iPod scare when for all we know the bulk of the rise in pedestrian fatalities may have been due to distracted (or otherwise negligent) drivers (and there are plenty of observational studies hinting at the added risk to pedestrians from drivers on cell phones, a point raised at the Distracted Driving Summit).