Archive for April, 2011

“People in conditions of monotony in a car automatically are going to want to keep themselves stimulated, to make life a little more difficult for themselves.”

From an interesting interview with Michael Regan, adjunct professor for vehicle safety at Chalmers University of Technology in Goteborg, Sweden and a senior research fellow on secondment from the Monash University Accident and Research Centre here in Melbourne, Australia, over at Gerry Gaffney’s User Experience podcast (transcript here).

Apparently, drivers like to watch.

The Barnes Dance is being phased out in the city where it was born (that’s right, Henry Barnes worked there before moving to NYC). It’s apparently a victim of (increasingly popular, it seems) light rail, which just goes to show how transportation planning for intersections, as one person once described it to me, is like apportioning a pie among a variety of hungry users — you can’t add to one share without taking away from somewhere else.

The full story is here.

Sometimes I honestly don’t understand traffic safety engineering. A random bit from something I was reading:

Motor vehicles and pedestrians can coexist on local residential streets on which both motor vehicle speeds and traffic volumes are low and on-street parking is either prohibited or limited. However, even on these streets the provision of sidewalks can be beneficial in encouraging walking, facilitating social interaction and creating play areas.

Am I wrong or does the first sentence miss the obvious inverse correlation between the presence of parked cars on a street and vehicle speeds on that street? (not to mention parked cars serving as a buffer from wayward cars in traffic).

My latest Slate column considers the role of Twitter in traffic.

Twitter provides a kind of a metaphysical traffic report, probing not just road conditions but the heretofore unconnected, if jammed together, society of the road. In one sense, this is strikingly appropriate: Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, as Vanity Fair has noted, was “fascinated by the haiku of taxicab communication—the way drivers and dispatchers succinctly convey locations by radio.” The service he proposed would bring that to everyone, enabling “a missing human element to the digital picture of a pulsing, populated city.”