The New York Times hosted an online debate over the question “Do we tolerate too many traffic deaths?”

Adrian K. Lund:

Compared with the Toyota controversy, there is no clamor for Congressional action calling for tough enforcement against speeding. There is no victims’ advocacy group urging installation of speed controls on all vehicles that could prevent drivers from exceeding the legal limit.

Instead, Congress repealed the national maximum speed limit in 1995. Since then state after state has raised speed limits on many roads, costing thousands of lives. A petition to require controls to cap the top speed of large commercial trucks has languished for three years.

Meanwhile, distracted driving and cellphone use behind the wheel are getting all the attention. With much fanfare, states are enacting bans targeting various aspects of phone use by drivers, especially texting. Yet, there is little evidence that the laws will work.

Jill Cooper:

Behavior like driving under the influence, excessive speed and distracted driving result in needless tragedies, and certain populations suffer a disproportionate burden.

The leading cause of traffic fatalities is the D.U.I. Several decades ago, few Americans questioned the practice of driving after a few drinks, but today the vast majority express support for prevention. Important changes, like cutting the legal blood alcohol content (or concentration) to its current level of .08, imposing a higher minimum drinking age, suspending licenses, adopting zero tolerance laws for underage D.U.I. and setting up sobriety checkpoints, have helped decrease the toll that this problem takes.

J. Peter Kissinger:

Research confirms that a deep-seated culture of complacency exists toward highway safety and provides valuable insights into why.

First, unlike airplane crashes or large oil spills, traffic crashes are not outrage-evoking events. They happen in small numbers, are geographically dispersed and aren’t considered headline-grabbing news. Second, while Americans generally favor health and safety, they often dislike restrictions on personal freedom or comfort.

Third, there is a general apathy to the risks associated with traffic crashes. Most drivers consider themselves above average and substantially “in control” of their likelihood of crashing. Many also have a “do as I say, not as I do” attitude. For example, nearly 80 percent of motorists rated distracted driving as a serious problem, yet more than two-thirds of those same individuals admitted to talking on the cellphone while driving in the past month, and 21 percent even admitted to reading or sending text messages while driving.

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New York designer Tina Roth Eisenberg profiles photographer Arnold Odermatt:

Swiss police officer and photographer Arnold Odermatt became famous in his retirement on the publication of Karambolage, his photographic journal about the traffic accidents that were part of his professional life in the Swiss canton of Nidwalden.

Arriving at the scene of an accident, Odermatt would take one set of photographs for the insurance or police reports, and then take another for himself. His reasons for doing so are mysterious, but the results are often strangely beautiful.

Jaime Lerner‘s TED talk regarding urban congestion. From the TED website:

For many city governments seeking visible improvements in their congested streets, the pace of change is measured in months and years. For Jaime Lerner, it’s measured in hours. As mayor of Curitiba, he transformed a gridlocked commercial artery into a spacious pedestrian mall over a long weekend, before skeptical merchants had time to finish reading their Monday papers.

Since then he’s become a hero not only to his fellow Brazilians, but also to the growing ranks of municipal planners seeking greener, more sustainable cities. His dictum that “creativity starts when you cut a zero from your budget” has inspired a number of his unique solutions to urban problems, including sheltered boarding tubes to improve speed of bus transit; a garbage-for-food program allowing Curitibans to exchange bags of trash for bags of groceries; and trimming parkland grasses with herds of sheep.

In addition to serving three terms as mayor of Curitiba, Lerner has twice been elected governor of Parana State in Brazil. His revolutionary career in urban planning and architecture has not only improved cities worldwide, but has also brought him international renown. Among his many awards are the United Nations Environmental Award (1990), the Child and Peace Award from UNICEF (1996), and the 2001 World Technology Award for Transportation.

The Transport Research Laboratory in Wokingham, England studied the effect of listening to sports radio on driving habits. UPI.com reports ‘Radio Sports can Distract Drivers‘:

Reaction times were slowed by up to 20 percent when drivers were listening to sports, adding nearly 20 feet of additional stopping time for a car traveling 70 mph, The Daily Telegraph reported Friday.  “To put this into context, this increase in distance traveled is 10 per cent further than the additional stopping distance when driving with a blood alcohol level at the U.K. legal limit,” the report read.  The researchers said incidents involving hard braking nearly doubled when drivers were listening to sports.  “This suggests that the motorists were not paying enough attention to the road and had to make [a] late decision to respond to the conditions and drivers on the road around them,” the researchers wrote.

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The artist Christo is in the news again with his proposed art installation ‘Over the River’. The New York Times reports:

Assessing a work of art using in-depth technical analysis sounds a bit like writing a scholarly treatise about a joke. If you peer inside too deeply, armed with numbers and equations, does “Mona Lisa” still dazzle? And is “A man walks into a bar…” still funny?

But that, in a nutshell, is the question that faces the artist Christo and a giant federal agency called the Bureau of Land Management. On Friday, the bureau issued what may be the first ever draft environmental impact statement purely about art — specifically a project called “Over the River,” which Christo has proposed building along a stretch of the Arkansas River in southern Colorado.

The project involves laying fabric panels along 42.4 miles of the river. The environmental review analyzed that notion to its nub — from the projected size of the crowds, to the specific spots for anchoring fabric pieces, to what the document described as “temporal considerations,” specifically the timing of the phases of construction and operation of the artwork.

Christo, whose outsize environmental constructions have made him an internationally known, but not always well-understood, figure in the art world for decades, expressed delight. An environmental assessment, he said in a telephone interview, and the struggle to get permission to make his art are in fact part of the artistic vision itself for “Over the River.”

From ‘Over the River’:

The artist.

‘The Gates’ in Central Park.

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Only ten years ago China consumed roughly half the energy consumed by the United States. Fast forward to 2010 and China has now surpassed the United States in energy consumption according to some studies. For more than 100 years the United States led the world in energy consumption. The Wall Street Journal reports on the staggering Chinese growth and what it all means for China, the USA, and the rest of the world.

China’s ascent marks “a new age in the history of energy,” IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said in an interview. The country’s surging appetite has transformed global energy markets and propped up prices of oil and coal in recent years, and its continued growth stands to have long-term implications for U.S. energy security.

The Paris-based IEA, energy adviser to most of the world’s biggest economies, said China consumed 2.252 billion tons of oil equivalent last year, about 4% more than the U.S., which burned through 2.170 billion tons of oil equivalent. The oil-equivalent metric represents all forms of energy consumed, including crude oil, nuclear power, coal, natural gas and renewable sources such as hydropower.

The Wall Street Journal opines:

China’s rapidly expanding need for energy promises to have major geopolitical implications as it hunts for ways to satisfy its needs. Already, China’s rising imports have changed global geopolitics. Chinese oil and coal companies have been looking overseas in their quest to secure energy supplies, pitching the Chinese flag in places like Sudan, which Western companies had largely abandoned under international pressure.

The most ambitious effort to secure overseas energy supplies was the failed 2005 attempt Cnooc Ltd. to take over California-based Unocal in an $18 billion bid, which was trumped by politics and rival Chevron. Despite a short pullback in the aftermath of that failed deal, Chinese companies have expanded overseas, buying assets in Central Asia, Africa, South America, Canada and even small stakes in the Gulf of Mexico. While their overall overseas footprint is still small compared with that of big international oil companies, these companies are expanding with access to cheap credit through China’s state-owned banks.

Voracious energy demand also helps explain why China—which gets most of its electricity from coal, the most polluting of fossil fuels—passed the U.S. in 2007 as the world’s largest emitter of carbon-dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases.

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Wired magazine profiles New York City traffic guru Charles Komanoff:

Charles Komanoff has spent three years building a model of the traffic patterns in New York City. The result is an exhaustive accounting of every mile traveled, every slowdown encountered, and every hour wasted. (Above), a rundown of traffic on an average weekday in Manhattan’s central business district.

Komanoff is a dyed-in-the-wool stats geek, and the BTA demonstrates his faith in data. By measuring the problem—the amount of time and money lost in traffic every year—we can begin to solve it, he says. We can turn the knobs on the entire transportation system to maximize efficiency. Komanoff’s model suggests a world in which everything from subway fares to bridge tolls can be precisely tuned throughout the day, allowing city planners to steer traffic flow as quickly and smoothly as a taxi driver tooling his cab down Broadway on a quiet Sunday morning.

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Advertising Age has an interesting article about the declining percentage of teen drivers on the road:

In 1978, nearly half of 16-year-olds and three-quarters of 17-year-olds in the U.S. had their driver’s licenses, according to Department of Transportation data. By 2008, the most recent year data was available, only 31% of 16-year-olds and 49% of 17-year-olds had licenses, with the decline accelerating rapidly since 1998. Of course, many states have raised the minimum age for driver’s licenses or tightened restrictions; still, the downward trend holds true for 18- and 19-year-olds as well (see chart) and those in their 20s.

Hat tip: Tom Vanderbilt

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Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic, writes at Slate about the evolution and possible future of stop signs as a traffic device. It’s good to remember that all of these traffic elements we take for granted  (stop signs and drivers licenses to name two) evolved and changed over time.

Like many forms of traffic instruction, the stop sign has murky origins. It was adapted from railway controls but without rigorous scientific testing. As Kenneth Todd has pointed out, “the traffic control system developed piecemeal. … [W]hen large numbers of automobiles burst on the scene early in the century, political pressures, guesswork, and panic measures served as substitutes for scientific expertise.”

Indeed, historian Clay McShane writes that in 1914, “Detroit police sergeant Harry Jackson cut the corners off a square sign to create an easily recognized octagonal shape for first red stop sign or ‘boulevard’ stop.” (The signs were controversial: McShane notes that “Illinois courts briefly ruled stop signs illegal in 1922 as a violation of the rights of individuals to cross streets.”)

By 1927, a rough standardization of the sign was set in place by the American Association of State Highway Officials. An octagonal shape, with red letters on a yellow background. It wasn’t until nearly three decades later that the current design—white letters on a red background—was settled upon, in a 1954 supplement to the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices, the operative rulebook for traffic engineers. Is the current design as good as it could be? There are two ways to think about that problem. We must ask: Do drivers see stop signs? And, more importantly, what do they do when they see them?

Vanderbilt’s own blog is an excellent transportation resource.

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From TED.com:

Robin Chase founded Zipcar, the world’s biggest car-sharing business. That was one of her smaller ideas. Here she travels much farther, contemplating road-pricing schemes that will shake up our driving habits and a mesh network vast as the Interstate.