Posts Tagged ‘Traffic’

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Non-traffic causes of traffic congestion

May 27, 2011

Michael Giberson

Is this an unpriced external effect of shooting off fireworks on July 4?

July 5 tends to have an unusual number of animal-related traffic problems, as pets, spooked by the fireworks on the previous day, have a greater propensity to wander onto freeways.

From Eric Morris at the Freakonomicsblog, “Road Blocks: The Strange Things That Cause Traffic.”

Other non-traffic contributors to traffic congestion mentioned in the article: oil spills, antifreeze, oranges, lemons, livestock, wild animals, abandoned pets, suicides, homicides, discarded Christmas trees, and furniture and appliances including couches, chairs, refrigerators, and stoves.

Posted in Miscellany, Networks | Tagged | 4 Comments »

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My own private Idaho Stop Law

August 6, 2009

Michael Giberson

Danny Morris at Common Tragedies explains and advocates for wider adoption of the Idaho Stop Law:

The law, named after the clever state that instituted it in 1982, says that cyclists may treat stop signs as yield signs (they must stop for those w/ the right of way, but can proceed w/o stopping if the coast is clear) and may treat stop lights as stop signs (they must stop, but can proceed when the coast is clear, even if the light is still red).

Morris links to a report at The Athletes Lawyer that said:

Meanwhile, in the past 27 years, Idaho motorists and police have grown to accept the legislation as sensible public policy, said Jason Meggs, a UC-Berkeley researcher who spent last summer crunching years of traffic data, conducting interviews and observing cyclist behavior in the state. Boise, home to Idaho’s biggest bike population, “has actually become safer for bicyclists than other cities which don’t have the law,” Meggs said.”

I guess I’ve been operating under my own private Idaho Stop Law, the description fits my usual riding habits pretty well.

Casual observation suggests the Idaho Stop is widely practiced by cyclists.  (See, for example, this article from The Oregonian where the author came up with the same Gus Van Sant movie reference that I’m using.) Perhaps one reason that the law improves safety is that it helps coordinate expectations of cyclists and motor vehicle operators.

Posted in Miscellany, Politics, Sport and fitness | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments »

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About “something mostly enjoyable that also performs a function”

May 29, 2009

Michael Giberson

From David Byrne’s review in the New York Times of Jeff Mapes book, Pedaling Revolution:

[Mapes] argues that cycling promotion can raise society’s level of general fitness, since people exercise more when it seems less like exercise and more like something mostly enjoyable that also performs a function, like getting to work. “Bike and walking advocates,” he writes, “have been rebranding their cause as ‘active transportation,’ which manages to come off as nonthreatening to your average couch-bound American while carrying a nice touch of gravitas as well.”

Yes I would describe my bike commuting as “something mostly enjoyable that also performs a function.” I wouldn’t count myself as a “bike and walking advocate,” per se; I’m happy to let other people do their own things.

But I like it, and if your circumstances permit, you should discover whether you like it, too.

Posted in Miscellany | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

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Poetry in Traffic

February 5, 2009

Michael Giberson

I’ve been reading and enjoying Tom Vanderbilt’s book, Traffic, subtitled “Why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us).”  The book appeals to the “amateur traffic engineer” in me.  Maybe you have one too, a little voice in your head that clicks on when you are stuck in traffic and says, “We could all be moving much faster if you guys just learned how to drive.”

I found a sentence (p. 126) to read nicely as a bit of traffic poetry (I’ve broken the prose sentence into three lines, in the manner of most poetry):

Or the hiccup in heavy traffic that passes through you

might be the echo of someone who, forward in space

and backward in time, did something as simple as change lanes.

I particularly like the way the meter has a sort of pulsing flow through the lines until you reach the last two words, which to my ear must both be stressed.  A spondee, in poetic terms, that brings the flow of the sentence to a halt, while echoing the “hiccup” at the beginning of the first line.

You might also note the manner in which the syntactic unit “forward in space and backward in time” is broken over two lines, a poetic device called enjambment, which seems appropriate for this found poem about a hiccup in heavy traffic.

Posted in Books, Complexity | Tagged , , | 4 Comments »

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