Archive for November 4th, 2009

I came this across this passage in Jan Zalasiewicz’ book The Earth After Us, which takes a very long geologic view of the planet — 100 million years in the future (”we would almost certainly have died out long before then”). While our roads might be well preserved under layers of sediment, future archaeologists, it seems, may have to rely on written or pictoral records, or inference, to understand teh actual machines that traveled on them.

The wheeled transport machines that now run in such numbers along them may also fare rather poorly as regards long-term preservation. Were they made of ceramic, concrete or bone they would fossilize, perhaps even rather well. But iron and mild steel easily rust at the surface, and corrode and dissolve in the chemically reducing conditions of burial, while the compaction would crush the structure as effectively as the jaws of a breaker’s yard; rubber and plastic would carbonize, and glass devitrify. It would take some more than averagely good preservation to discern that there were even rotating wheels, and yet more to show that their rotation carried the whole contraption along the ground surface.

I suppose this means, contra Planet of the Apes, the Statue of Liberty won’t make it either.

A Beckett-ian transcript of a self-reported drunk-driving call to 911:

Dispatch: You behind them?
Mary Strey: No, I am them.
Dispatch: You am them?
Mary Strey: Yes, I am them.
Dispatch: Okay, so you want to call and report you’re driving drunk?
Mary Strey: Yes.
Dispatch: Are you still driving right now? You want to stop driving before you get in an accident?
Mary Strey: Yes, I will stop.
Dispatch: You want to stop right now?
Mary Strey: Yes, I will stop right now.

While the driver shouldn’t have gotten behind the wheel to begin with, admittedly she is to be praised for staging her own intervention.

Via Roadguy.

Another delight from Copenhagenize.

Perhaps one could, with Lego Mindstorms, create an electronic congestion charging cordon?

The Sacramento Bee notes the state’s insurance commissioner is drafting regulations.

A pay-as-you-drive study last year by the Brookings Institution, a public policy research group, concluded that driving would drop by 8 percent nationwide – and oil consumption by 4 percent – if all motorists paid for car insurance by the mile.

Two-thirds of U.S. households would save money – averaging $270 per car – under pay-as-you-drive policies, which routinely would be adjusted for rural vs. urban driving, the Brookings study concluded.

If some cars are being charged less, presumably some will be charged more, based on more miles driven, but that issue hasn’t been discussed as much. But bringing any granularity to the incredibly inexact pricing regiment of auto insurance is welcome.

(thanks Robert)

This was a question posed to me by an audience member at a recent speaking engagement, based on his observation at his small town’s local courthouse that males seemed to predominate on the speeding offenses, while women seemed more prone to things like traffic signal/stop sign violations.

It’s an interesting question, one that, like many things in traffic, I imagine is difficult to tease out of the official citation statistics (as that wouldn’t give us the exposure data, among other things).

It did put me in mind of a recent study, “Committing driving violations: An observational study comparing city, town and village,” by Tova Rosenbloom and colleagues at Israel’s Bar Ilan University, published in the most recent Journal of Safety Science. This paper looked at five traffic violations (”(a) not wearing a seat belt (seat belt violation); (b) not using a safety seat for a child (safety seat violation for children); (c) not using a speaker while speaking on the phone (on-phone violation); (d) failing to comply with a ‘give way’ sign (‘give way’ sign violation); and (e) stopping in an undesignated area (undesignated stop violation).”) in three settings: City, town, small village.

There was a clear gender effect, but essentially it was that men were more likely to commit violations of any type than women (I didn’t see it gender data coded by violation type), which is not surprising.

But there was another, perhaps more interesting finding: The highest level of violations came not in a city like Tel Aviv, but in the villages (which had around 3,000 and 800 residents).

The researchers speculated a number of reasons: The more complex city driving environment challenges drivers and forces them to pay more attention (they also feel it to be riskier, even if it actually isn’t, which explains greater seat-belt compliance) there may be less law enforcement in the smaller areas, the drivers in the small towns may be more likely to be local drivers (whose familiarity with the road environment breeds a relaxed attitude toward whatever signals and regulations are in force).

And if anyone has seen any studies examining violation types by gender, please advise.