The above infographic comes via Mapping the Strait, who notes:

Of course, there are many ways to measure infrastructure. Perhaps the most ubiquitous type of infrastructure, streets and highways, is the best single indicator. By this measure, feet of street per resident – “FSR” – Detroit has a lower density than 9 of the 10 largest American cities.

Would love to see someone do an equivalent for sidewalks.

(horn honk to The Transportationist)

Yup.  No way to see this one coming.

3-Way Street from ronconcocacola on Vimeo.

Via http://blog.ronconcocacola.com/

As discussed in Traffic, sometimes the best way to eliminate tension over ‘late merging’ is to simply eliminate the concept, as the Illinois DOT seems about to do.

“Once people get used to it, it seems to work well,” Wegmeyer said. “As long as traffic alternates at the merger, it should go more smoothly.”

Of course, that “as long as” still presents challenges, as those people in the “open lane” may still feel some sense of priority over those they view as late-arriving interlopers.

(thanks Darrin)

My latest Slate column is up, examining the problems with “Children at Play” traffic signs (the headline, which is never the writer’s, may overstate things a bit…)

If the sign is so disliked by the profession charged with maintaining order and safety on our streets, why do we seem to see so many of them? In a word: Parents. Talk to a town engineer, and you’ll often get the sense it’s easier to put up a sign than to explain to local residents why the sign shouldn’t be put up. (This official notes that “Children at Play” signs are the second-most-common question he’s asked at town meetings.) Residents have also been known to put up their own signs, perhaps using the DIY instructions provided by eHow (which notes, in a baseless assertion typical of the whole discussion, that “Notifying these drivers there are children at play may reduce your child’s risk”). States and municipalities are also free to sanction their own signs (hence the rise of “autistic child” traffic signs).

As someone with an interest in traffic, and a more casual interest in operations research, I was curious about the order history on a recent item from Apple I had purchased. As you will note from the illustration above, the item was shipped from FedEx’s Memphis hub to Newark, where it then made its way to Brooklyn, where I live. But the item wasn’t delivered. Why? The reason given explains everything, yet explains nothing: “Package not due for delivery.” OK. So it wasn’t due for delivery. But couldn’t FedEx have delivered it anyway, given that it was in my home borough?

No. The item then went back to Newark, only to finally be shipped, once again, to Brooklyn, where it finally arrived on my doorstep. Now, I’m no OR genius, and there may be some variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem, or some intricacy of routing and logistics that I’m missing here, but why, for an industry always trying to root out inefficiencies (e.g. UPS’ famous ‘left-turn’ software), would it send my product on an extra round trip, bloating its inventory for a few more days? Perhaps some reader can enlighten me.

“People in conditions of monotony in a car automatically are going to want to keep themselves stimulated, to make life a little more difficult for themselves.”

From an interesting interview with Michael Regan, adjunct professor for vehicle safety at Chalmers University of Technology in Goteborg, Sweden and a senior research fellow on secondment from the Monash University Accident and Research Centre here in Melbourne, Australia, over at Gerry Gaffney’s User Experience podcast (transcript here).

Apparently, drivers like to watch.

The Barnes Dance is being phased out in the city where it was born (that’s right, Henry Barnes worked there before moving to NYC). It’s apparently a victim of (increasingly popular, it seems) light rail, which just goes to show how transportation planning for intersections, as one person once described it to me, is like apportioning a pie among a variety of hungry users — you can’t add to one share without taking away from somewhere else.

The full story is here.

Sometimes I honestly don’t understand traffic safety engineering. A random bit from something I was reading:

Motor vehicles and pedestrians can coexist on local residential streets on which both motor vehicle speeds and traffic volumes are low and on-street parking is either prohibited or limited. However, even on these streets the provision of sidewalks can be beneficial in encouraging walking, facilitating social interaction and creating play areas.

Am I wrong or does the first sentence miss the obvious inverse correlation between the presence of parked cars on a street and vehicle speeds on that street? (not to mention parked cars serving as a buffer from wayward cars in traffic).

My latest Slate column considers the role of Twitter in traffic.

Twitter provides a kind of a metaphysical traffic report, probing not just road conditions but the heretofore unconnected, if jammed together, society of the road. In one sense, this is strikingly appropriate: Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, as Vanity Fair has noted, was “fascinated by the haiku of taxicab communication—the way drivers and dispatchers succinctly convey locations by radio.” The service he proposed would bring that to everyone, enabling “a missing human element to the digital picture of a pulsing, populated city.”

I missed this when it was first aired. Apparently the culprit is snow that blew in. But this signal lays out more plainly the big-middle-finger reality faced by many pedestrians.

In Mexico City recently, I met George Osodi, a Nigerian photographer who’s done some incredible work in the Niger Delta, among other places. One series particularly caught my eye: ‘Devil’s Dexterity,’ which captures the not-uncommon road crashes in Nigeria, a country that oil rich but infrastructure poor (anyone who can opts to fly between cities rather than make the harrowing drive). It’s not uncommon, Osodi told me, for wreckage — vehicular and human — to lie for months, years, on the sides of roads. As he explains the title of the series:

I can recall growing up as a kid in a neighborhood in Benin city, and overhearing various adult whenever there is news that an accident has occurred, especially when lives are lost and people injured. You will hear them say “Oh my God this is the Devil’s work, the Devil has done it again, the Devil is a blood sucker” it goes on and on. Therefore it is little wonder that many jobless youths take advantage of this by providing jobs for themselves acting as “Prayer Warriors” on many commercial buses. Praying for the passengers before embarking on a journey. Passengers will listen with great humility as these “Prayer Warriors” step into a commercial vehicle and start to pray, using words like “this vehicle is covered with the blood of Jesus so any evil demon on the highway will not succeed, I bind and rebuke the devil in the name of Jesus, I ask the holy ghost fire to burn all demonic agents looking for blood on the highway” and many more such prayers. At the end of these prayers passengers are asked by this “Prayer Warrior” to make a donation, which some will happily do.

The Devil’s Dexterity was born out of a curiosity, having survived many road accidents myself, one in particular very serious. I seek to change the psyche of people in context of what things really are, and not justify living an illusion.

What interests me is that the sort of ‘magical thinking’ as evidenced in the above paragraphs, while we might consign it to those of a particularly religious worldview, is expressed by a great many of us when it comes to thinking about risk and safety on the road — e.g., the problems of talking on the phone and driving can be eliminated by removing the phone from one’s hands and moving it wirelessly to one’s ear; or the idea, oft-floated, to build what are in essence more dangerous roads for the illusory safety offered by “fast” emergency response times. Or witness the apparent seriousness given in the U.S. to a recent “survey” from Allstate (which it was forced to apologize for) ranking drivers’ safety based on their astrological signs. While the insurer said it was for “entertainment purposes only,” the original release had more than a whiff of certainty about it: “But, can an astrological sign really influence driving habits? Generally, the signs with the fewest number of reported accidents were those associated with traits like “compassion,” “graciousness” and “resourcefulness” where those with more accidents tended to be more “uncompromising,” “arrogant” and “impatient.” ”

Via: Car Insurance Guide

I was interested in this comment in the earlier post about the piece in Outside:

My favorite secret though is riding to La Guardia. It is AMAZINGLY easy to ride right to the terminal at LGA. What is impossible is finding a place to lock your bike. I ended up just taking it into the terminal which was met with no objection.

When I was out with some cyclists in Canberra, Australia, we went fairly close to the airport and I was advised it was indeed very possible, even pleasurable, via segregated paths. This got me to wondering about what other airports one could reasonably cycle to, and then what to do with the bike once you arrived. Anyone done it?

My latest Slate column investigates a topic many of you have weighed in on here: Winter dibs.

Back in November, I did an unusual bike commute with a guy named Joe Simonetti: I traveled from Northern Westchester County, to Joe’s office in midtown Manhattan (I then continued home to Brooklyn), via a carefully chosen, if not always evident, path that wound through bucolic gated communities in Greenwich, Ct., underneath the concrete underpasses of the city’s edges, to the delivery-truck laden warrens of the Bronx. I was admittedly intrigued by the unusual nature of the commute itself (for me, it was around 65 miles, one way) — in articulating a kind of “secret” way to get into the city it evoked, for me, John Cheever’s short story The Swimmer, whose narrator undertakes a quixotic journey to swim across his suburban county:

His life was not confining and the delight he took in this observation could not be explained by its suggestion of escape. He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county. He had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he would name the stream Lucinda after his wife. He was not a practical joker nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure. The day was beautiful and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty.

But I also wanted the journey to serve as a kind of Ur-text for exploring the state of riding a bike in America today, to examine the mechanisms of the oft-cited “culture war” between drivers and cyclists. In any case, the story, headlined ‘Rage Against Your Machine,’ is out today, in the new issue of Outside magazine. As far as I know it’s not online yet (I imagine it will be eventually), but I would, of course, urge you to buy this or any other issue of Outside in print. In the meantime, a few handlebar shots of the sometimes beautiful, sometimes foreboding landscapes we traversed.

Thanks to the voluminous response from blog readers that I received in light of the earlier query on this blog, I’ve expanded the thoughts on rear-in parking into my latest Slate column, in case you haven’t seen it.

Lisbon’s blood vessels from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

Via Pedro Cruz:

In this work the traffic of Lisbon is portrayed exploring metaphors of living organisms with circulatory problems. Rather than being an aesthetic essay or a set of decorative artifacts, my approach focuses on synthesizing and conveying meaning through data portrayal. This portrayal is embodied in the visualization: The Blood Vessels in the traffic of Lisbon. I use an adaptive physics system to build and manipulate the road network – the thickness, the color and the length of the vessels are excited by the number of vehicles and average velocity in each road. With this system I try to bypass the strictness of contemporary visualizations that depict data accurately through direct mappings.

I have a short essay in the next issue of Time magazine (it will be online a week later) looking at the historical career of the American paperboy. Due to the vicissitudes of publishing, the piece had to be rather severely cut, but here is the longer, original version.

* * *

Walking downstairs the other morning to retrieve the newspaper, I realized I was the last person in my Brooklyn apartment receiving the daily New York Times and Wall Street Journal. The number swells a bit on weekends, but Monday through Friday find me alone in my ritual.

Trudging back through the snow, thinking about the future of this physical object and its delivery, I suddenly wondered: Were there any paperboys left in America? Certainly not on my block: The Times shifted to all-adult carriers over a decade ago. Mine wasn’t the image of Norman Rockwell and Leave it to Beaver — a boy on a bike — but a guy in a van from Staten Island. But did this once familiar cultural icon still exist? Where had he gone? And why should we care?

The paperboy has been subject to two distinct forces. The first is the newspaper business: Not just circulation — which peaked in 2000 and has been dropping since — but when papers were delivered. 2000 marked the first time there were more morning than evening papers. This helped accelerate a shift begun a decade previously, when from 1980 to 1990, the number of adult carriers had risen by 112 percent, while youth carriers had dropped by 60. Most children either could not or were not willing to get up and deliver papers by 6 a.m.

Cost-conscious newspapers shifted to large “distribution centers,” meaning carriers needed to distribute bigger bundles of papers across a wider area — via car. To entice adults, newspapers changed the name: The “paperboy” became an “independent delivery contractor.” They changed the job: Few carriers today do collections. And they changed the delivery experience: In what’s referred to as the “controversial tube-vs.-porch delivery dilemma,” instead of a kid putting it on your porch (or in the bushes), an adult in a car would put it in your roadside mailbox.

The larger culture around the paperboy also changed. Kids stopped delivering papers for the same reason they stopped walking to school — since the early 1970s the percentage has from over 50% to just 11%. Stranger danger, for one. In a high-profile case in 1982, a 12-year-old Iowa boy named Johnny Gosch disappeared while on his paper route in West Des Moines. But as Free Range Kids author Lenore Skenazy notes, stranger abductions haven’t been rising, and violent crime involving children has been dropping (lest you think it’s because we stopped letting children be paperboys, she notes all violent crime rates have dropped). “If we only focus on the rare and horrible,” she says, “we will be too scared to let our kids do anything.”

People also began moving to exurban regions that were simply too spread out for kids on foot or on Scwhinn Stingrays, where streets were deemed unsafe for anything but the inside of a car (even if that’s where most accidental injury occurs to children, as Skenazy notes). From 1981 to 1997 youth participation in organized sports doubled; where nearly half of 16 year-olds had a summer job in 1978, just above 20% did by 2008.

But so what? Why should we lament the passing of an entry-level, low-skilled job? Do jobs for kids actually do any good? Interestingly, Bureau of Labor Statistics research shows that men who worked in high school earned more than a dollar more on average at age 27 than those who did not. Was it the job, or were those kids simply more motivated? History teases suggestively: Benjamin Franklin delivered The Boston Gazette, Thomas Edison sold papers at the age of 12, and Warren Buffet, long before he was trying to buy the Washington Post, was delivering it.

Ask a former paperboy about the job and you’re likely to summon a misty-eyed recollection of predawn bundling and knee-high snow. “Today it’s basically something that doesn’t exist,” said Today host Matt Lauer. “It’s a bit of innocence lost — and it meant a lot to me as a kid.” Clarence Eckerson, a filmmaker (and former paperboy), describes it as “an amazing responsibility to have as a teenager, to essentially be a private business, collecting money and paying a weekly bill.”

After these ruminations, I was admittedly pleased to find that there are still paperboys — and girls — in America (even if, in 2008, they made up only 13.2% of all carriers, down from nearly 70% in 1990). As Fred Masenheimer, publisher of The Times News, a newspaper with roughly 14,000 subscribers (“in central eastern Pennsylvania, just north of Allentown”) told me, the daily paper not only employs an all-youth carrier force — it’s resisted shifting to morning distribution precisely so it could keep those carriers.

“I think it’s a vital part of a kid’s growing up and learning to be their own business person,” say Masenheimer. About half of the paper’s 100-plus carriers deliver papers alone, while the rest have parental supervision — particularly younger children. This is partially for safety, partly to ensure delivery. “When you put your reputation o the back of a 10 or 12 year old kid, you want to make sure that they’re doing the job properly,” he says. In 41 years of publishing the paper, he’s seen countless carriers go on to college, or routes change hands several times within the same family.

Those carriers still risk the occasional dog bite, and they still sling canvas bags across the handlebars of their bikes. Masenheimer himself was a paperboy, delivering The Hanover Evening News. “They used to tell us it was the last two-cent newspaper in America,” he says. “So you can imagine how much money we made in a week.” Nobody’s getting rich as a carrier, he concedes, “but nobody’s getting rich as a journalist these days either.”