Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

From Jan Gehl’s new report on New York City (via Streetsblog), this graph nicely depicts the typical (mis)allocation of New York City’s public space. We need hardly point out the glaring gap in negative externalities as well.

Networks guru Anna Nagurney (my kind host yesterday at Amherst), lends a valuable historical perspective in a letter in the Economist, in response to their article on routing inefficiencies in road networks.

SIR – It may be of interest to your readers to know that it was actually economists who first figured out that an individual’s selfish behaviour when selecting an optimal travel route would yield different traffic flows and times than if one were to assign flows in a centralised manner to try and minimise the cost to society (“Queuing conundrums”, September 13th). Arthur Pigou wrote “The Economics of Welfare” in 1920, by which time he was well aware of the distinction between different traffic behaviours.

Anna Nagurney
Director
Virtual Centre for Supernetworks
Isenberg School of Management
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, Massachusetts”

It’s hardly news in the traffic psychology world that people who routinely speed fall under the category of what are called “sensation-seekers.” But it’s always interesting to see just who those people are, and how this behavior correlates with other areas of their life.

A study by Mark Grinblatt, a professor of finance at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Matti Keloharju, a finance professor at the Helsinki School of Economics, titled “Sensation Seeking, Overconfidence and Trading Activity” (available here), gets at that question in an interesting way.

They had access to an interesting data set: A record of investing behavior among Finnish households that had, scattered amongst its sub-categories, the number of speeding tickets those households received. And they found an interesting relationship: “Each additional speeding ticket tends to increase turnover by 11%.” In other words, the people who sped the most, traded the most.

The economists were really looking to find evidence of whether behavioral attributes could explain trading volume, but the finding is just as relevant for driving. Whether it was down to sensation-seeking or, perhaps, overconfidence, the riskiest investors took the most risks on the road. And given that this was Finland, where speeding tickets for violations over 15 kph are related to one’s income, the risks one took could bear a high financial (and personal) cost. Interestingly, those who traded most didn’t see better performance than those who traded less (not to mention all the money they probably lost to speeding tickets). And it will surprise no one that “sports cars,” as a variable, were more linked to the most active traders, though not as much as speeding tickets.

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

“Motorists can learn a thing or two about dodging traffic jams from the humble ant, claim scientists,” goes the lead in a story in today’s Telegraph.
This is hardly news to readers of Traffic, but still, there’s some interesting stuff here (as is always the case from Dirk Helbing).

“His team set up an “ant motorway” with two routes of different widths from the nest to some sugar syrup. Soon the narrower route soon became congested.

But when an ant returning along the congested route to the nest collided with another ant just starting out, the returning ant pushed the newcomer onto the other path.

However, if the returning ant had enjoyed a trouble-free journey it did not redirect the newcomer.

The result was that just before the shortest route became clogged the ants were diverted to another route and traffic jams never formed.”

My old pal Roadguy wrote recently about a curious parking-garage pricing structure in Minneapolis:

“$2 for the first 20 minutes, a whopping $12 for the next 20 minutes, then $2 for every 20 minutes after that, with a daily maximum of $23. But if you’re in before 9 a.m. and you leave after noon, you pay eight bucks.”

Parking pricing, which in New York City can seem capricious and non-transparent, deserves its own chapter in economics textbooks — is there anything comparable? (OK, I suppose there’s plenty of things, daily versus weekly rates at hotels, for example). My bet here is that given that it’s across from a court house, the garage receives a lot of people coming in for short visits (renew licenses, etc.). Those people are in a hurry and probably not in the mood to shop around. You can further imagine that, under normal bureaucratic conditions, there’s no way you’re getting in and out from your car and back in less than 20 minutes. So you hit that ’sweet’ spot of the next 20 minutes (perhaps the garage has ascertained the average visit is around an hour). To stop short of outright highway robbery they probably ease off after that, but the damage has been done. Perhaps the people who arrive before 9 a.m. and leave after noon are the daily commuters, and perhaps they wouldn’t use the garage if they had to pay the short-term rates. Any other thoughts?

There’s an interesting discussion of parking pricing structures over at Marginal Revolution. I like the Occam’s razor approach that one poster suggests: “Isn’t there a much easier explanation–third-degree price discrimination? People who want to park for short period have inelastic demand and as a result they end up paying higher price.”

On the cycling theme for a moment, I’m wondering what the thinking is out there about London’s trial for motorcycles in the bus lanes (where pedal cyclists currently dwell). We’ll have to wait and see the results of the trial, but it brings up some interesting inter-modal issues. Will this really pose no risk to cyclists, as TFL claims, or would that risk be smaller than the risk posed to motorcyclists by cars? What about the increased emissions in the path of cyclists? Is there sort of thing standard elsewhere? How well do pedal and motor cycles intermingle — what about speed differences (motorcycles tend to attract much more risk-seeking users, at higher speeds, with predictable results)?

On the last point, did you know more U.S. Marines have been killed on motorcycles in the past 12 months than in Iraq?

An interesting letter in the FT from Geoff Wardle:

“Sir, There is much debate about whether the US car industry should be bailed out. Some argue that lame ducks should be left to die. Others point out that if General Motors, Chrysler or Ford fail, millions of indirect employees could lose their jobs too as the colossal supply industry falters.

So, I would recommend that any “bail-outs” from Washington be contingent upon Detroit’s re-invention. Clearly the 20th-century auto industry business model is broken. Designing, mass-producing and selling cars yields a sad or, at best, sporadic return on investment (unless your name is Toyota or Honda). However, the demand for personal mobility and transportation continues to rise. The auto industry needs to see its future business as providing mobility. Building cars might still be a significant part of the industry’s economic activity but it would be a means to an end, not the end in itself.

Detroit (and much of the global car industry) might not be good at heeding advice but its design and engineering teams are spectacularly good at developing and manufacturing complex, extremely reliable and durable products at a very keen price and on a massive scale. So imagine how this prowess could be utilised to create and build much-needed alternative transportation and infrastructure, such as personal rapid transit systems. If Washington insisted that American taxpayers’ money was used to build a different, sustainable business model, the car industry’s product development and manufacturing expertise would become better utilised and provide the US with much-needed alternative transportation.

Perhaps the dealer network, which has for so long held the auto industry’s development hostage, could also play a more profitable part in the mobility service equation. There is a great deal of creativity and technical expertise within the auto industry. Washington just needs to insist that it happens on the executive floor as well.

Geoff Wardle,
Director, Advanced Mobility Research,
Art Center College of Design,
Pasadena, CA, US”

“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.”

There’s this one…

And this one…

I’m back at home and my thoughts turn to local traffic. And so continuing in the “Ten Things” series of my utterly unscientific, sample-size-of-one observations and picked-up-pieces of trivia:

1. The nation’s worst bottleneck is in the Bronx. According to INRIX, the exit 4B segment (.30 miles) of the Cross-Bronx Expressway is congested 94 hours a week. The average speed when congested is 9 mph. (the average New Yorker walks 3.4 mph).

2. The clearance phase here is about 1.7 seconds (e.g., when one set of lights turn red, the others will go green approximately that much later).

3. Access-a-Ride drivers are the worst in the city — I’m not sure if this is because they’re put on a too-tight schedule or they’re just trying to increase their numbers of passengers. Empty school buses are a close second, followed by off-duty ambulance drivers.

4. Smokers, and people on cell-phones, walk more slowly than other New Yorkers (4.17 f/s and 4.20 f/s, respectively, versus an average of 4.28 f/s for all pedestrians).

5. Every third car in Brooklyn has North Carolina license plates (insurance fraud, anyone?)

6. New York is the only major U.S. city without residential parking permits (see item #5).

7. The only thing harder than trying to park a car in NYC is trying to park a bike.

8. Bloomberg deserves reelection for his Janette Sadik-Khan appointment alone.

9. After a decade of investigation I still do not know the fastest approach lane on the massive funnel-like, ten-lanes-to-two entrance to the Holland Tunnel (once you’re past the tolls, on the Jersey side). The outside lanes sometimes seem better to me; not sure if this correlates to say, rice moving through a funnel.

10. New York City is home to the world’s first traffic circle, Columbus Circle, designed by William Phelps Eno (note, however, there is a countering claim that the ‘carrefour a gyration’ in Paris, by Eugene Henard, deserves the prize). Also note this has nothing to do with the modern roundabout, of which NYC has none.

Your further suggestions are welcome.

Photo by Jason Eppink/Flickr

I was listening last night to Frances Anderton’s interview with agit-prop artist Robbie Conal on KCRW’s Design and Architecture and was quite surprised to hear, out of nowhere, a discussion of traffic lights.

Why? Because, Conal noted, at every intersection in L.A. there are controller boxes for the traffic signals — “virulent spawn of HAL” — I think he said. These, it turns out, make perfect surfaces for displaying things like posters. So Conal, when he was starting up, went out and actually measured the dimensions of these boxes, and created appropriately sized posters (also using Helvetica Bold so that it could be read by drivers). He noted that if a driver missed one at a certain intersection, he could serially repeat them at a number of intersections so he’d be guaranteed a viewing (depending on the cycle timing!)

This makes Conal, I suppose, LADOT’s unofficial ‘artist in residence.’

Reading David Brooks’ elegant summation of how behavioral psychology and economics can help explain the dynamics of the financial crisis — to explain, as he puts it, “why so many people could have been so gigantically wrong about the risks they were taking” — I couldn’t help but think of another area rife with questions of risk and decision-making, namely ‘the way we drive.’

Whether from personal on-road experience, or from reading studies, or from examining in-car footage of crashes and near-crashes, I am often struck by how often people seem to put themselves, and others, at great risk. Following closely at high speed on the interstate, or driving fast through a neighborhood street, they act in a way that suggests they believe that nothing could go wrong, or that they would be in control if it did. Over time, this behavior is typically rewarded, perhaps through sheer luck, until the ‘black swan’ event that they never expected actually happens. Then, as is often the case, begins a process of denial, an attempt to assuage the cognitive dissonance that has come between the image of themselves as a good and cautious driver and an event that was ‘beyond their control.’

Some quite literal connections can be drawn between the behavior of traders and the behavior of drivers. For one, both activities are prone to the ‘above-average effect’ — studies have shown how both large groups of traders and drivers define themselves to better than average. What’s also interesting is the gender question; research has also shown men seem to be more susceptible to the above-average effect. As Brad Barber and Terrence Odean showed in their paper Boys Will Be Boys, a study of a large brokerage house found that men made many more trades than women, per account, seemingly indicating a heightened sense of confidence, but that their portfolios on average earned less than women. Given the male dominance in the trading sector, it’s not hard to extrapolate these findings to the larger financial crisis. It also need hardly be pointed out that men are involved in more fatal crashes than women — overconfidence mixed with a greater propensity for risk-taking.

Another connection is the way we act on the information we perceive. “And looking at the financial crisis,” writes Brooks, “it is easy to see dozens of errors of perception. Traders misperceived the possibility of rare events. They got caught in social contagions and reinforced each other’s risk assessments. They failed to perceive how tightly linked global networks can transform small events into big disasters.”

This passage reminded me of a recent conversation I had had with a journalist in Abu Dhabi, who was telling me about the massive, fatal chain-reaction crashes that have occurred on fog-bound highways there. Fog is a classic perception problem: Differences in contrast affect how we perceive speed. Moving through fog, drivers actually feel as if they are moving more slowly than they are. So they continue to drive fast, much faster than they should. They may also drive close to the vehicle in front of them, thinking, falsely, that seeing the taillights of the driver ahead is safer than not seeing anything. All this is fine until the rare event happens, and that ‘tightly linked’ network, full of people reinforcing each other’s risk assessments and acting on what they think is sufficient information (but which may disguise hazards around the bend), find themselves in a calamitous crash.

Behavioral psychology isn’t part of the driver’s ed curriculum, of course, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t be, given that attitudes and behavior are as, if not more, important than driving skills per se. And the simple vision test that’s given is fine for testing the strength of one’s vision, but left unmentioned is the idea what we see of the world does not always represent the world as it is.

Is apparently coming to Poughkeepsie, New York.

“Workers this fall are clanking away at the metal and laying on concrete slabs for a high-altitude pedestrian bridge organizers say will be the longest in the world at 1.25 miles. When it opens Oct. 2, 2009 _ a date coinciding with the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s exploration of the river that would bear his name _ the $35 million bridge will link to fitness trails on both sides of the river and be operated by the state parks department.

“We think people will come from all over,” Fred Schaeffer said on a recent day as he watched the construction. “It’s the equivalent of the Eiffel Tower, or the Golden Gate Bridge.”

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 know most of you are paying attention to only one election, but let’s not overlook that the results of another ballot are in. It’s “Europe’s Most Stupid Road Sign”.

Adrian, a psychology grad student in Australia, wrote in with mention of a disturbing episode in Australia, recounted here, of a car driver going after some cyclists in an “Around the Bay Day” event (for charity, mind you).

What one editorialist also found objectionable, however, was the link at the bottom of the page where readers could vote on that day’s opinion question. The question was: Are cyclists responsible road users?

Not really the first question that comes to mind after reading the original article (I’m almost afraid to know what the answer was). As the writer put it, “OK. If those hooligans had bowled over a bunch of grannies going to church, would readers be having their say on whether senior citizens are responsible road users?” A more contextually appropriate question to vote on, in my opinion, would have been: Should drivers who commit what is essentially aggravated assault with a deadly weapon have their driving rights permanently revoked? (uh, yeah)

The writer went on to coin the word “bikeism” to describe the dynamics he thought were at work — tarring an entire class of people with the extreme acts committed by a few (or a stereotypical image of that behavior). “Unfortunately, many motorists who don’t ride bikes and don’t understand cycling seem to think that all cyclists are ego-driven menaces who run red lights.” (more…)

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.”

Photo by Tom Vanderbilt

A nifty little meditation on the visual language of the street, by Peter Campbell in the LRB (subscribers only; but you should really subscribe).

It begins: “Step into the street, look down, and it tells you what to do. Kerbs and gutters separate walkers from drivers. Painted words, lines and changes of material nudge you forward or make you pause. The street surface shows what is going on underground: scars left by repairs indicate new pipe work; trapdoors, lids, covers and grills point to drains, cables, coal holes and cellars. Signals of activity other than that created by people going from place to place proliferate. Responsibility for all this is diffuse.”

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.