Our pedestrian managers all come from law enforcement backgrounds and bring at least 15 years of experience with them to the job. At any one time there is nearly a century of experience guiding pedestrians across Church St. In addition to their law enforcement and crowd control qualifications, all of our employees have received certification through the American Traffic Safety Services Association (ATSSA).

A woman driver caused a pile-up after becoming distracted while shaving her bikini line.

Barnes was driving to meet her boyfriend in Key West and told police she wanted to be “ready for the visit,” website WJZ.com reported.

This is why I don’t do fiction — you can’t make this stuff up.

(thanks Karl)

Which reminds me of one last point: The curious power (both as narrative and sense-memory) a song can have in the context of a drive. I once almost drove off the road in rural Maine at night when I first heard the plaintive, haunting voice of Townes van Zandt singing Kathleen:

It’s plain to see, the sun won’t shine today
But I ain’t in the mood for sunshine anyway
Maybe I’ll go insane
I got to stop the pain
Or maybe I’ll go down to see Kathleen.

When I hear that song today I still recall a glowing white line, the dark outlines of tall trees lining the road, glittering moose eyes…

The choreography of North Korean traffic control is staggeringly precise, and fascinatingly eerie (and I recommend playing the above clip without sound, to spare yourself the inane commentary). Interesting that the cops are women — could this be an anti-corruption measure, as in Mexico City? There are more cars than one might think (and even Minis!) — are they all party functionaries?

But I just wanted to take a moment to recommend my Slate colleague Julia Turner’s series on signs.

Signage—the kind we see on city streets, in airports, on highways, in hospital corridors—is the most useful thing we pay no attention to. When it works well, it tells us where we are (as when an Interstate marker assures us we’re on the right highway) and it helps us to get where we want to go (as when an airport banner directs us to our gate). When it fails, we miss trains, we’re late to appointments, we spend hours pacing the indistinguishable floors of underground parking garages, muttering to ourselves in mounting frustration and fury. And in some cases, especially where automobiles are involved, the consequences of bad signage can be fatal.

Unlicensed Drivers: A View From California

David R. Ragland
Phyllis Orrick
Berkeley, Calif., Feb. 18, 2010

Which isn’t to say there aren’t some problems with the checkpoints and the larger traffic justice system. For example:

California law allows police to impound the cars of unlicensed drivers for 30 days if they endanger public safety. But at some checkpoints witnessed by reporters, the seized vehicles appeared just fine. And while getting unlicensed – typically uninsured – motorists off the road is worthwhile, the punishment is out of whack with the crime, especially when DUI suspects typically don’t lose their cars.

Clive Thompson makes this point in an interesting new column at Wired.

Texting while driving is, in essence, a wake-up call to America. It illustrates our real, and bigger, predicament: The country is currently better suited to cars than to communication. This is completely bonkers.

Thompson has an idea for a technological solution to the problem:

So what can we do? We should change our focus to the other side of the equation and curtail not the texting but the driving. This may sound a bit facetious, but I’m serious. When we worry about driving and texting, we assume that the most important thing the person is doing is piloting the car. But what if the most important thing they’re doing is texting? How do we free them up so they can text without needing to worry about driving?

The answer, of course, is public transit. In many parts of the world where texting has become ingrained in daily life — like Japan and Europe — public transit is so plentiful that there hasn’t been a major texting-while-driving crisis. You don’t endanger anyone’s life while quietly tapping out messages during your train ride to work in Tokyo or Berlin.

I don’t think it’s a stretch at all to say, for the current crop of young drivers, that texting — staying in electronic touch — is far more important than the act of driving. They also protest that they are uniquely well adapted to “handle” such behavior, overlooking the inconvenient fact that all the major studies of texting/cell-phone distraction have been conducted on college students, not at retirement homes.

Joel Kotkin, along with his ­some-time ­nemesis Richard Florida, is perhaps the leading purveyor of a kind of ­psycho­economic demography, a predictive chronicler armed with Census tract data, Pew surveys, and some old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting, all recounted in an urgent, assuaging, insider-y ­tone—­a kind of Kiplinger Report for the national soul. I can imagine Kotkin and Florida randomly encountering each ­other—­in, say, the Admiral’s Club at DFW, as each is en route to his assignation with civic leaders eager to sup the ­sooth—­and engaging in a ­dueling-­PowerPoint exer­cise, with Florida touting his “creative class” metro­poles and their ­cappuccino-­fueled dyna­mism, and Kotkin his “ephem­eral cities”—places such as Port­land that are elaborate stage sets for hip urban play, ultimately overregulated and hostile to the wants of average Ameri­cans, who would find fuller expression of their economic (and reproductive) potential in a place such as Boise. Only one man would be left standing amid the acrid tang of overheated hard drives, but I’m not sure ­which.