The United States Department of Transportation proposed to eliminate a mandate for replacing traffic signs based on the potential costs related to ‘menu costs‘.
The Washington Post reports:
Although the order came from Washington, the burden of paying for hundreds of thousands of new signs — at costs ranging from $30 to .Read more...
Tom Vanderbilt’s latest Slate column discuss Diverging Diamond intersections that we have discussed before here and here at the Hub.
There is, however, a cheaper, less disruptive approach, one that promises its own safety and efficiency gains, that has become recently popular in the United States: the diverging diamond interchange. There’s .Read more...
The book Nudge brought new attention to subtle changes that can improve everyday life. One such traffic-related nudge can be found in Chicago.
The curve at Lake Shore Drive and Oak Street in Chicago is a favorite nudge. The tight turn makes it one of the city’s most dangerous curves. To .Read more...
The mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, Arturos Zuorokas, has taken parking problems into his own hands using a tank to enforce parking rules. This humorous YouTube video highlights the man, the problem, and the tank.
H/T Fast Company
Now that ‘Carmageddon’ is over in Southern California, how bad was the traffic? Freakonomics blogger Eric A. Morris weighs in on the results.
In fact, Carmageddon saw stunningly low traffic levels, with many who did venture out reporting they had never driven at such speeds in LA in their lifetimes. Moreover, .Read more...
The New York Times looks at the extensive highway work project expected to cause major disruptions this week.
You would think that Los Angeles, of all places, would know how to handle a catastrophe. But in just over a week, 11 miles of Interstate 405 — the north-south spine of the .Read more...
Los Angeles is considering pulling the plug on their red light cameras (RLC’s). Freakonomics blogger Eric A. Morris weighs in:
Do we need RLCs? First off, yes, there is a problem. Intersections are dangerous places. The Federal Highway Administration has estimated that red-light running caused 676 deaths and 113,000 injuries in .Read more...
Just outside my first apartment was a ‘Slow Children At Play’ sign and every time I walked past I would think about the ‘slow children’ in my neighborhood and hoped for punctuation that would call out to passing motorists to reduce their speed instead of judging these children.
Over at Slate.com, .Read more...
Tom Vanderbilt writes at length about merging philosophy in his book, Traffic. It seems that the Illinois Department of Transportation is now experimenting with some new ideas in merging.
The Quad-City Times writes about the new Illinois DOT signage:
There’s a new sign in town, and it may just change everything.
The Illinois .Read more...
Humorist P.J. O’Rourke takes aim at bicycles:
The bicycle is a parody of a wheeled vehicle—a donkey cart without the cart, where you do the work of the donkey. Although the technology necessary to build a bicycle has been around since ancient Egypt, bikes didn’t appear until the 19th century. The .Read more...
In what appears to be a new idea gaining traction in the transportation design world, the ‘Diverging Diamond Interchange’ has new proponents in Lexington, Kentucky. We highlighted this intersection design before at the Forensic Engineering Hub when it was implemented in Utah and we still can’t decide if it is .Read more...
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