Archive for the ‘Cars’ Category

The last time I was in Berlin, Brian Ladd’s Ghosts of Berlin was my invaluable key to the contested city’s palimpsestual history. I’ve reviewed his new book, Autophobia, in this weekend’s New York Times, and I’ll no doubt be referring to it again here. Review here or after the jump.

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The Washington Post reports that Tysons Corner, poster child for “Edge City” sprawl, sees heavier traffic counts at lunch as it does during the morning or evening peaks.

Not everyone, like this lunch commuter, was so worked up about it.

“We drive a mile at most,” he said. “Even with traffic, it’s not more than a couple of minutes.”

Why even take such a short drive?

On a recent sunny weekday, four young financiers got out of Mike Eisenberg’s Acura in the parking lot of the Silver Diner. They took the three-minute drive from their office building, rather than walk. “We’re not willing to risk our lives crossing Route 123,” Eisenberg said.

Classic.

“Drivers’ perceptions of the speed above the speed limit at which they believe they will receive a ticket (perceived-ticket speed) has a strongly significant impact on their assessment of safety risk.”

That’s from Fred Mannering, “An empirical analysis of driver perceptions of the relationships between speed limits and safety,” in Transportation Research Part F.

“So the faster you think you can go before getting a ticket, the more likely you are to think safety’s not compromised at higher speeds,” said Fred Mannering, a professor of civil engineering at Purdue University, in Science Daily.

So reports the Independent.

Many interesting stats here, but this one jumps out:

“The motor industry is suffering across the world, with Volvo, the Swedish giant, selling just 115 heavy trucks over the past few months, compared to 41,970 during the same period last year – a 99.7 per cent fall.”

Hanoi crazy night traffic from v!Nc3sl4s on Vimeo

I came across this entrancing video of night traffic in Hanoi, a city said to currently have the highest per-capita motorbike usage in the world. It’s hard not to watch this and be dazzled by the wonderfully organic, almost aquatic flow — no man steps into the same Hanoi traffic stream twice. “It somehow works,” you hear people say. Matt Steinglass reminds us it’s not often as pretty as it looks.

I was in Hanoi last December, on the eve of the country’s new compulsory helmet law (which according to one account seems to have brought a 30% reduction in injuries, though presumably we’ll need more time and better science to see how it shakes out), and seeing this video had me in a nostalgic mood.

So allow me to drag out the photo album for a moment, of snaps taken mostly from the back of moto-taxis:

Watching Hanoi traffic is hypnotizing, like sitting on a beach and watching waves break.

Photo by Tom Vanderbilt

There were many stylish riders, but helmets were not generally considered a vital accessory.

Photo by Tom Vanderbilt

Mattel, makers of “Hot Wheels” (I was more of a Matchbox guy myself), is now worth more than GM, reports Newsweek.

Key surreal quote: “As the stock market melted down, he still paid $13,000 for a rare “overchromed” Ford T-bird from the original Hot Wheels catalog. “I’ve looked over my portfolio and I’m down in everything except Hot Wheels,” he says.”

“Man there’s an opera out on the turnpike,” sang Bruce in “Jungleland.” Seems like there may also be some more lanes, reports this piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer (which briefly mentions Traffic.

Predict and provide fait accompli? Check.

The goal of the wider turnpike is to accommodate traffic needs through 2032. By then, state highway officials predict, northbound traffic on the turnpike will be 67 percent higher than in 2005, and southbound traffic is forecast to increase by 92 percent.

Induced demand counterargument? Check.

“When you make those kinds of improvements, capacity gets eaten up very quickly. About 80 percent of the new capacity gets used up right away,” said Donald Shanis, deputy executive director of the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission. “Any time you make a trip easier, you encourage more auto trips.”

And what about the fact that traffic on the turnpike has actually been declining? See here.

In any case, it’s tough to imagine some latter-day Springsteen ever coming up with these lyrics: “This turnpike sure is spooky at night when you’re all alone.”

Via the Belarus News:

“Raman Myantsyuk, a speeding driver whom traffic police tried to capture near Minsk this past March by using civilian vehicles with people still inside, was sentenced on October 29 to five years in a low-security correctional institution…

The incident, dubbed the “human roadblock” by the media, occurred near Minsk on March 2. Two traffic police officers used four vehicles, with their occupants still inside, to block a road in order to catch Mr. Myantsyuk who was under the influence of alcohol. The chased car, which was said to be moving at a speed of between 160 and 180 kilometers per hour, never stopped and crashed into the vehicles, with a BMW in which a woman and a child were in the back seat hit worst.”

There’s an interesting Q&A in New Scientist with hypermiler Jack Martin that hints at some of the reasons why, as studies have suggested, people who drive with fuel economy in mind are less likely to be involved in a crash.

How does the way you drive differ from how everyone else drives?

I have difficulty multitasking while driving. I can’t talk on the phone while driving. It’s about awareness and “hyperconsciousness”, which takes a lot of practice. You have to look far down the road and be aware of everything going on in front and around you. I first learned that while driving the bus. My eyes were constantly moving to the mirrors, the speed dial, the road, to anticipate conditions and stop in time.

That was well in line with what I’ve read before. But then I was struck by this odd detail:

“Most hypermilers also like to drive barefoot to feel the resistance on the accelerator. The connection between that resistance and the numbers on the scan gauge tells you what behaviours improve your mileage. By following my techniques, a friend improved her mpg by 70 per cent.”

Like those human specimens on the off-world colony in Wall-E, is there anything Southern Californians won’t do in their cars?

P.S. What if you happen to hear an ad on the radio while you’re pulling up to the ATM/voting machine? Doesn’t that violate rules?

Dec. 17, 1924. Washington, D.C. "Auto safety device demonstration. Inspector Albert Headley." National Photo glass negative.

Via the fantastic Shorpy — a wonderful time-suck if there ever was one — I was intrigued by this image of a jazz-age automobile ‘cowcatcher.’ Risible though the image may seem, it does suggest an interesting lost history of sorts, as the car business, for most of the following decades, paid no attention whatsoever to the idea of mitigating pedestrian injury in car design.

I was intrigued by two different strands of thought in the news this past weekend. From the New York Times, in a piece on a car-sharing program in Europe, by Daimler.

“Car2go is a daring step for an automaker. According to the Ademe survey, when car owners adhere to a car-sharing program, most of them get rid of their own cars. Car sharing works because owning a car in a city can be a pain.
“In Europe, the relationship between people and cars is changing,” said Gildo Pastor, chief executive of Venturi Automobiles in Monaco. “Young people today want a computer, a telephone. The car is not at the center of their thoughts. In the city you can’t park, and it costs a fortune to insure it.”
Venturi is one of a dozen European companies developing small electric cars for proposed car-sharing programs. In 2010, Paris plans to introduce AutoLib, a car-sharing service with 2,000 electric cars in 700 Paris parking lots with charging stations and a similar number in suburbs…
Being environmentally kind is one attraction of car sharing. People in the Paris study drove half as far each month after they joined, and some car-sharing programs compensate for carbon emissions by paying third-party companies to capture carbon.

And then this bit of alternate reality, from the head of BMW:

“There are many studies that say it took 120 years to get to 800 million cars around the globe, and that it will take only another 30 years to double that volume,” he says. “If that is true, the best is still ahead of us.”

This bit caught my eye, via Paul Ingrassia’s diagnosis of Detroit’s woes in the WSJ (”a tale of hubris, missed opportunities, disastrous decisions and flawed leadership of almost biblical proportions”):

“For all the Pinto’s infamy, perhaps no car better captured America’s decade-long haplessness than the pug-ugly AMC Gremlin, which debuted in 1970 and died — mercifully — in 1980. The Gremlin’s shape, fittingly, was first sketched out by an American Motors designer on the back of a Northwest Airlines air-sickness bag.”

Story after the jump…
(thanks Jack!)
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Some interesting numbers out of an HOT on Highway 167 in Washington state.

People seemed willing to pay $1 to lower their commute by 10 minutes in heavy congestion.

The highest possible tolls is $9, and only a dozen paid that in heavy-traffic July.

HOT’s have been famously tagged “Lexus Lanes,” but some reports have been shown them being used by a broad variety of users across income, etc., lines. The most common vehicle found in these lanes were not Lexuses (Lexi?) but Fords (7,500 of ‘em). I wonder what percentage were pickup trucks, and I’m further interested in the gender breakdown of lane users.

I talked to Mitchell Joachim in the new issue of Wired. As befitting someone who worked on the “City Car” at MIT, some of the talk turned to wheels, which like everything else in Joachim’s vision would look radically different down the road:

“His various cars would be less machine than Facebook on wheels. Instead of rpm gauges, there’d be social networking software telling drivers where their friends are and how to get there. Made from neoprene and other soft materials, cars would no longer suffer traffic-fouling fender benders, merely what he calls “gentle congestion”–picture a flock of urban sheep grazing against one other. Like Zipcar vehicles, the cars would be shared. They would “read” potholes and send warnings to nearby drivers and city repair crews. Urban parking would be eased by intelligent real-time supply and demand management, with people bidding remotely for available spots. Of course, there’d also be more spaces to begin with, since his cars could be folded and stacked like shopping carts. The average New York City block could handle 880 of the vehicles, he says.”

There was a lot more interesting stuff I couldn’t squeeze in, like ConEd thinking about getting into the mobility business — “cars as batteries,” etc.

That’s the subtitle of the book, just out in the Netherlands, published by the fine De Bezige Bij — the “busy bee.” For the other international editions check here.

Jans, a Dutch traffic engineer, got in touch to note the book had been mentioned in the newspaper De Pers a few days ago. He also noted the article contained news that a recent “morning peak hour was the tenth worst peak hour ever, measured in total length of traffic jams, with a total of 568 kilometers (over 350 miles).”

I’m going to have start assembling a league table of traffic jam standings…

Traffic data company Inrix has a new report out exploring the relationship between fuel prices and congestion. Not surprisingly, they found that “increases in gas prices in the first half of 2008 significantly impacted consumer behavior, resulting in strong correlations with reduced traffic congestion on a nationwide basis.”

Perhaps a bit more unexpected, however, is that this relationship was much stronger in certain metro areas, and seemed to barely affect others. And so places like Las Vegas and Orlando had a relatively big correlation between TTI (”travel time index”) and fuel price, while others, like NYC, barely had any. INRIX speculates this may have to do with the fact that more discretionary driving is typically done in those sorts of places (e.g., people on vacation), and that that would be the first thing to go, and further notes that “he largest decrease in congestion is at those times that are most impacted by vacation driving, specifically Friday PM, not Monday AM.”

One wonders what other factors might be lurking in there; e.g., the subprime crisis seemed to particularly hit areas that were particularly dependent on long car commutes; as Business Week has noted, “the subprime crisis was most pronounced in places where poorer people could afford to buy—largely in the distant suburbs where land was cheap and builders were active”; I imagine that was going on more in Las Vegas and Orlando than NYC.

China Daily reports on how primary school students in the county of Guizhou are required to “salute” the drivers of passing cars (I don’t think they’re talking about the one-fingered variety).

Story here or after the jump…

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Greenwich Village, NYC, has just doubled its hourly meter rates for street parking in a trial, reports the NYT.

I’m not sure if they’re going for that Shoupian “85% occupancy” solution, but judging by some of the quotes, the price might need to get higher (or time limits need to be enforced).

“On Wednesday, shortly before noon, Sal Rincione sent one of his employees to feed the meter where his 2008 Acura sedan was parked on Seventh Avenue South.

“Even at $2 an hour, it’s still cheaper than putting your car in a garage,” he said.”

The U.K.’s “Think” campaign typically offers first-rate stuff (even when they borrow the concepts from others, as in the “gorillas” video), and this one’s no exception.

I can’t remember the last time I saw an ad in the U.S. talking about speed and pedestrian safety.

(via The Transportationist)