System Rants and Raves

 A family member lives in Chicago, and mentioned in passing a drive/transit decision with trade-offs.  They already have a car, and are not likely to consider a car-free lifestyle, so that decision already makes this commuting decision one of incremental cost.  I suspect this is a very common situation. Scenario:  Commute to work, about 5 miles each way, more or less normal business hours.  The route has options for car (of course), train (decent), and cycling (poor - no protected lanes and fairly fast road segments). Option 1 - Cycling:  This one is not much desired, due to safety concerns but also societal expectations.  "A man coming in sweaty or unkempt is 'that cycling guy' at the office.  A woman doing the same is unprofessional and not good at her job."  Perhaps this is a societal issue we should fix? Pragmatically, an e-bike ride is possible, if the risk is embraced.  She thinks it'd be as fast as driving, or faster, for a confid...

  When a speeding motorist is pulled over by a police officer and he asks, "Do you know how fast you were going?", most people say "not exactly", and probably often this is true, especially on city streets where cruise control is not much used and the stroad feel is more highway than street. We say individuals are responsible for managing their speed, yet we give them more tools to evade laws than to follow them, and then we're somehow surprised when the behavior is less than exemplary. Why are cars built to go over twice as fast as any highway speed limit in the country? Why do cars permit setting cruise control in cities, and at speeds over the speed limit on highways? Why do uninsured cars operate at all? Why do cars, which know exactly where they are on the city streets, not at all control speed on those streets to match posted limits? Why can cars with hacked vehicle computers and inoperable safety systemsbe operated on the street? How can we have meaningfu...

  A couple of weeks ago I introduced the notion of a safety pyramid. Now that we've dug through some of the needed changes and the ramifications of culture, I though we could revisit the model and hit the high point. I'll add a few cautionary notes, too. For reference, here's the pyramid again, with modestly updated numbers as I've attempted to find decent statistics. Ideally, we'd each calibrate these for our cities and then manage the whole pyramid down in size. Recall that the general assertion of this model is that it is not usually possible to chop off the top of the pyramid, but that action must be taken at the lower layers (improving the slices of cheese in our avoidance model) to reduce the top layers, as these manifest as statistical inevitabilities. Unfortunately, as we've outlined in the intervening blogs, we cannot hope to have a healthy, robust safety system to create and improve a robustly safe street network without better responsibility. ...