Readers of Traffic (the Los Angeles bits) may remember my brief encounter with Kartik Patel, the L.A. DOT engineer I interviewed on “Oscar Night” in the city’s traffic bunker. He was later accused, with another engineer, of tampering with the traffic lights during an ongoing labor action.

News comes from the LA Times that Mr. Patel and Gabriel Murillo have “pleaded guilty to a single felony count of illegally accessing a city computer connected to the center.”

I liked Mr. Patel when I met him, so I’m admittedly pleased that he didn’t appear to get a more severe penalty (at one point the DHS had been called in):

“Under the plea deal, sentencing will be delayed one year, said Jane Robison, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. The two must pay full restitution, serve 120 days in jail or complete 240 hours of work with Caltrans or other community service, and must have their computers at home and work monitored.

“This was an emotional collective-bargaining strike situation,” Blatt said. “This should have been handled administratively. Mr. Murillo and Mr. Patel are outstanding citizens and have devoted a significant part of their professional lives to transportation safety in Los Angeles County.”

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?

A reader from D.C. writes with the news that there is some very initial exploration of a “stop and roll”-style ordinance, a la Idaho, that would allow cyclists to essentially treat signalized intersections as stop signs as “yield” signs.

I know that San Francisco (whose landscape is more akin to D.C. than Idaho) has been batting the idea around, but does anyone else know of any initiatives out there have been successful, or any studies that show the effects of such a law in Idaho or elsewhere?

I know we shouldn’t expect too much from outlets like AOL News, but note how this story replicates the classic cultural construct that “drunk driving is a horrible crime” and “speeding is OK and just something for the police to make money off of…”

After discussing how fines are rising for first-time speeding infractions, the article notes:

“Now, for the heavy stuff: drunken driving, known as DUI or DWI depending on your state.”

Speed, presumably, is the light stuff, the frothy romantic-comedy if you will in the pantheon of traffic safety, as compared to the dark tragedy of drunk driving. How light? This from NHTSA: “Annually, about 32 percent of all fatalities in motor vehicle traffic crashes were speeding-related, i.e., at least one of the drivers involved in the crash exceeded the posted speed limit or was driving too fast for the prevailing conditions.”

Not to mention things like the vast, exponential increase in chance of pedestrian death as speeds move from 20 mph to 30 mph.

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.”

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…

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.”

If you want a bit of audio-visual accompaniment to the Delhi section in Traffic, including, as in the book, interviews with Rohit Baluja and Amandeep Singh Bedi at the IRTE, and the by-now enshrined-at-the-city-gates motto “Good Horn, Good Brakes, Good Luck,” there’s this report, via Al-Jazeera. Note, as always, the best-of-intentions, worst-of-results overhead pedestrian bridges.

(via Bottleneck blog)

This is priceless. The bit in Welsh there, rather than translating the traffic info in English, is actually an “out of office” auto reply that made it in by error.

What went wrong?

All official road signs in Wales are bilingual, so the local authority e-mailed its in-house translation service for the Welsh version of: “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only” The reply duly came back and officials set the wheels in motion to create the large sign in both languages.”

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.

I’m not quite sure what that phrase means in this article, particularly if, as the article also states, people are doing 55 mph right through the heart of town (which would indicate plenty of road capacity), but is it me or does Lowell, Mass., based on this article, appear to be on the verge of getting things wrong in fixing their traffic problems?

Note this paragraph:

“For the next four years, MassHighway has slated $42 million in projects to improve Lowell intersections, including traffic signal improvements, bridge betterments and replacements, realigning the intersections, and the construction of a pedestrian bridge over the busy downtown thoroughfare, Thorndike Street .”

A pedestrian bridge? Why does this retrograde idea, imported from the anti-urban totalizing fantasies of modernist architects and itself a symbol of a decline of a place, still enchant traffic people? Well, actually it doesn’t much anymore, except in the developing world. How about a boulevard? A road diet? I dunno, a roundabout (if left turn crashes are as big as they say)? I don’t know Lowell or that street — anyone care to weigh in?

Halloween presents one of the classic cases of risk misperception. Growing up, like most kids, I lived in terror of the vaporous threat of razor-bladed apples and butcher-knife wielding escapees from local insane asylums. But the real threat was right there in the road. As the Center for Disease Control has found in a much-referenced study, “the number of childhood pedestrian deaths increased fourfold among children on Halloween evenings when compared with all other evenings.” It’s not hard to imagine the reasons: Children clad in dark costumes, etc. Or, perhaps more to the point, drivers (perhaps liquored up) moving at improper speeds through residential neighborhoods. And pedestrians of all ages (but especially children) tend to have little idea of just how far away the driver of a car can see them (they tend to think it’s twice as far as it really is) — so maybe you should chuck out the Ninja costumes.

Trick-or-treating through New Jersey a few Halloweens ago with my nephews, I was appalled to notice a number of children simply being ferried from house to house in cavernous SUVs, which then sat idling as the children rang the doorbell and received their corn-syrup-ey treats. In true L.A. Story fashion, the behemoths would then literally drive a few dozen feet to the next house. Thus enters the classic cycle: The roads are perceived to be more dangerous, so more parents drive their kids, thus raising the very same risk.

The U.K.’s Ted Dewan and friends had an interesting method for reducing the Halloween risk: Staging a quite ghoulish mock crash on their street to calm (or frighten?) traffic.

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.’

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?

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.”