Now, about that magpie, which I had tweeted about briefly in reference to its intoxicating song. It turns out they can be rather fierce enemies of those on bikes, swooping down from trees to land on their helmets and peck at their ears. As a countermeasure, riders will strap plastic twist-tie-like things to their helmets, virtually sprouting of their heads like gangly antennae. It was a bit unnerving to find a couple of these fellows coming toward me, the shock troops of some alien two-wheeled race. I’m not sure if this sort of thing happens elsewhere, but it was the first I had seen in such active preparation for avian attack. Yesterday, at least, the magpies were quiet.

JS: To me, the hallmark of civilization, and I believe this on its core foundational level, is the every-other-car merge at tunnels…

DB: I love you.

Sheer brilliance in the ending:

The idea came to him one day in a hallway at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine, where he had stopped to admire a century’s worth of class photos showing mostly white men.

“Some people might say, ‘What an old boys’ network,’ ” Dr. Redelmeier said. “But I thought, ‘My goodness, what a homogeneous population, akin to identical white mice, which thereby controls for all sorts of differences.’ ” Thus was born another Redelmeier classic.

Huhnke said that his group wanted to find out if drivers passengers in autonomous cars would feel safe: “If you have an autonomous car driving … do you trust your car? Do you really press the autopilot button and let the car drive you at 60 miles per hour?” So they conducted a study — and were surprised by the results.

Huhnke’s group then pushed its luck: “We also initialized some emergency situations: ‘So please, go back to your steering wheel and take over, we need some help from you,’ and they did it. They put the newspaper back, and just controlled the car through the situation. Then what did they do? Immediately press the button and start it again — it was really amazing.”

The question, of course, from a human factors point of view, is how quickly the car can alert drivers to a particular emergency (and what the warning will be; either a vague “emergency” or the exact diagnosis), and how quickly they can respond (and whether it’s the correct response) after they’ve been “out of the loop.” Would a texting driver with eyes and mind off-road be able to respond to a path intrusion warning that comes just as the car detects it?

(thanks Jeff)

A reminder of my own piece on Slate about London Transport posters.

London bike hire scheme data visualizations.

A “safer” way to text and drive (as a thought exercise try replacing the word “texting” with drinking as you listen to this).

Endlessly hypnotic: Bicycle rush hour in Copenhagen.

Excellent bike-related stencil art from Adelaide-based Peter Drews.

Adam Greenfield ponders the complexity of bus networks. (”You know I believe that cities are connection machines, networks of potential subject to Metcalfe’s law. What this means in the abstract is that the total value of an urban network rises as the square of the number of nodes connected to it. What this means in human terms is that a situation in which people are too intimidated to ride the bus (or walk down the street, or leave the apartment) is a sorrow compounded. Again: everything they could offer the network that is the city is lost. And everything we take for granted about the possibilities and promise of great urban places is foreclosed to them.)

New standards dictate 3.5 FPS average pedestrian walking speeds.

Forget trashing hotel rooms — today’s indie rockers spend their time twittering about parking tickets!

Recalls media friendly but distort true road safety picture, via the WSJ.

The Chinese used car market.

How about an “ignition interlock” for habitual speeders in Australia?

The always good Carl Bialik on “traffic math.” (and I liked this bit: Nicholas Taylor, a research fellow at the consulting company Transport Research Laboratory in Wokingham, England, says that adding road capacity can be effective if it isn’t perceived as adding capacity. Opening a highway’s shoulder to traffic during peak hours appears to work, Mr. Taylor says, because it is “not seen as a whole new provision of the road. There’s a psychological element to it.”)

Driver distracted by sex toy.

Driver who thought (fatally) he was piloting the Star Trek enterprise ruled “insane.”

This has struck an enterprising verve in some locals, notes the BBC:

The drivers have complained that locals are over-charging them for food and drink while they are stuck.

Then again, what is the “market price” for selling food and drink to 100 km traffic jams?

Parking lots are also surprisingly civic. People politely observe rules of behavior for the sake of the common good, parking between the lines, staying out of the handicapped spaces, driving slowly. It is one place where cars and pedestrians happily coexist.

I’m not sure how happy that coexistence is (e.g., “bad parking”). To wit, this piece from the Washington Post:

[Montgomery County] Employees calculated the numbers and were surprised by the frequency of parking lot accidents. Of the 1,496 pedestrians struck between January 2006 and June 2009, 324 had been hit in parking lots.

“Where are we exactly — are we near the island?”
‘The “island” — is that what you call it?
“The traffic island. The patch of waste ground below the motorway. Are we near there?”

J.G. Ballard, Concrete Island

“The April 1995 issue of the Journal of Trauma includes a case report of a man whose pipe was between his BMW’s airbag and his face when the bag deployed. A piece of the stem shot into his eye, resulting in a “ruptured globe.” The author, a Swiss physician, has a keen globe for detail, noting that “there was tobacco all over the floor” and that the injury was similar to those seen “after the thrust of a pointed cow horn.” The paper concludes with an exhortation to “behave appropriately” — no “drinking from cups … holding articles on the lap, or wearing spectacles while driving.” Not to thrust too pointed a cow horn, but wearing one’s eyeglasses while driving surely prevents more injuries than it causes.”

The death of law enforcement officers (LEOs) in motor vehicle crashes have increased by 48% in the past 28 years. Between the years 2005 to 2007, 54% of all LEO deaths “in the line of duty” were motor vehicle crash involved. When comparing the fatality rate of LEOs to the general population, during the years from 1996 to 1999 LEOs deaths by motor vehicle crashes were at the same or lower rate than the general population. Since the year 2000 the fatality rate for the general population has steadily declined, but the LEO fatality rate has been increasing.