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Posts Tagged ‘transit’





"You Should Walk Home"?

There is a brief vignette in the uninspired movie Killers in which an inebriated guest is about to drive away after a wild party at the home of the film’s two leads. One of the film’s leads advises the departing guest to walk home. Readers of SuperFreakonomics will realize this is bad advice.





Closing Time?

Can – and should – we do more to control alcohol?




Why You'd Rather Ride With a Woman Than a Man

Last post, I passed on some data showing that women are somewhat more likely than men to be involved in car accidents on a per mile driven basis. But men are far more likely (by between 50 and 100 percent) to be in crashes involving loss of life. Why are men’s crashes so much more tragic?



Worth the Wait?

Waiting may be fun when it involves opening Christmas presents or paying off your credit cards, but waiting for the bus is a miserable experience pretty much any way you look at it.
Long waits are one of the most important — perhaps the most important — barriers deterring Americans from riding mass transit.



Sex and the SUV: Men, Women, and Travel Behavior

Indeed, the conclusion of the slogan “you’ve come a long way, baby” ironically demonstrates that women had not come quite as long a way as they might have hoped. Even now, important gender differences persist, and they show up quite clearly in the realm of transportation.



Fare's Fair?

When does transit fare policy treat people unequally? When it treats them exactly the same.
Why?
At the risk of overgeneralization, there are two major constituencies for mass transit. First are wealthier workers who commute to jobs in city centers where parking is expensive. The other group consists of the very poor. Unlike the “choice riders,” who could drive if necessary, low-income “captive” riders often have no other option.



Unfree Enterprise

Lately, the lot of the New York cabbie has improved a bit. But there are still some major systemic obstacles that keep drivers and their passengers from getting the conditions and service they deserve. One crucial issue is that the system for licensing cabs seems less a product of American capitalism and more like something straight out of a Soviet Five Year Plan.



Why Does Driving Bring Out the Worst in People?

How is a car like the Internet?
A reader named William Mack writes in with an interesting observation and question. It echoes a conversation I recently had with a friend who had been on the receiving end of some road rage — in a New York City parking garage, of all places. The driver behind her simply couldn’t wait for her to pull in, so he rammed her.



Planes, Trains, and PTSD

The first public passenger railroad opened in England in 1825. By the 1860’s, railway accidents had killed, maimed, and otherwise traumatized so many that doctors had to coin a term to describe the shock suffered by rail crash survivors; they called it “railway spine,” and the debate that surrounded it planted the seeds for the study of what we know today as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder



High-Speed Rail and CO2

One of the less-publicized components of the stimulus package was an $8 billion commitment to develop a high-speed rail (HSR) network in America. This is no more than a down payment, given the very large sums needed to build HSR (University of Minnesota transportation scholar David Levinson estimates that the proposed California segment alone will cost $80 billion, or more than $2,000 per Californian; given my state’s financial problems, this is going to require a very large bake sale).



Paved With Good Intentions Contest: The Winner

It was an extremely close race, but t paciello, come on up and thank the academy. The readers voted your ode to the horrors of the Cross Bronx Expressway as the best description of the worst in American transportation. For your victory, you will receive a piece of Freakonomics schwag.



The Danger of Safety

In case you haven’t heard, an accident on the Washington metro claimed nine lives last week. But then again, chances are you have heard, as the crash got wide coverage over the airwaves, on the net, and in the papers (by my count, at least five articles appeared in The Times). This is usually the case when trains or planes are involved in deadly disasters.



Paved With Good Intentions: The Finalists

It wasn’t easy picking the finalists for our “Worst Roads in America” competition, but our intrepid judges Genevieve Giuliano and Mohja Rhoads, top transportation scholars at the University of Southern California, made their decisions and selected the posts below. Now it’s up to you to vote for the winner in the comments section.



Paved With Good Intentions: A Freakonomics Contest

Welcome to the Freakonomics “Paved With Good Intentions” contest, in which we pay loving tribute to the most abysmal roads in America.
Here’s how it works. Write a brief homage (no more than 150 words) to the worst stretch of road you know of. You have broad latitude in your definition of “worst.” It may be the most congested, the most poorly maintained, the ugliest, the most dangerous, the most confusing, the worst integrated with adjacent land uses, or any combination of the above. You may also devise a standard of your own. Tell us why your road is the best example of the worst in American transportation, toss in a bit of wit and literary flash, and post your entry in the comments section.



Bus-Riders of the World Unite!

Remarkable facts from a new paper by James Habyarimana and William Jack of the Center for Global Development: The World Health Organization (2004) reported that 1.2 million people died from road traffic injuries in 2002, 90 percent in low- and middle-income countries, about the same number as die of malaria. In addition, between 20 and 50 million people are estimated . . .



Taking Cities in Stride

Last post, I let you know about Walk Score, the website that tallies a district’s commercial, recreational, and cultural opportunities, then assigns it a numerical score based on its pedestrian-friendliness. Walk Score also ranks the 40 largest cities and provides neat walkability maps of them. Here are the 10 most pedestrian-oriented: Los Angeles, from Walk Score. 1. San Francisco 2. . . .



Los Angeles Transportation Facts and Fiction: Transit

Photo: ceeb Inside a Los Angeles bus. In the last posts, we learned that Los Angeles is not a poster child for sprawl, that the air has gotten a lot cleaner, and that the freeway network is surprisingly small given the region’s enormous population. What about the charge that Los Angeles’s mass-transit system is underdeveloped and inadequate? By U.S. standards, . . .



Los Angeles Transportation: Facts and Fiction

We at U.C.L.A. hear from reporters a lot, and they are often looking for a few quotes to help write a familiar script. In it, Los Angeles is cast in the role of the nation’s transportation dystopia: a sprawling, smog-choked, auto-obsessed spaghetti bowl of freeways which meander from one bland suburban destination to the next. The heroes of the picture are cities like San Francisco, or especially New York, which are said to have created vastly more livable urban forms based on density and mass transit.



Why You'll Love Paying for Roads That Used to Be Free, Part Two

In my prior post, I blogged about introducing variable tolls on America’s highways. The basic idea: fight congestion by imposing tolls that vary in response to traffic levels. When roads are too crowded, hike the tolls, keep some drivers out, and thus keep traffic free flowing at all times.



FREAK Shots: How Many Bumper Stickers Make a Bad Driver?

Driving a car can be depersonalizing. That’s why drivers use bumper stickers, bobble-heads, fish brake lights, racing stripes, etc. to show others on the road their personalities, explains Tom Vanderbilt in his book, Traffic. A recent study by Colorado State University psychologist William Szlemko found a link between road rage and the number — but not content — of personalized . . .



Is America Turning Into Europe Right Before Our Eyes?

Photo: Rhett Redelings Yes, it’s because of climbing gas prices. And yes, it’s because of environmental concerns. And yes, maybe I’m just noticing these things because gas prices and environmental concerns have primed us to notice such things. (This is called confirmation bias, and it probably afflicts us all.) But doesn’t it seem as if some U.S. cities are starting . . .



How’s My Driving? A Q&A With the Author of Traffic

Traffic and congestion have come up a lot on this blog lately. We even blegged for parking solutions and analyzed the effectiveness of traffic signs — according to Tom Vanderbilt, author of the book Traffic (due out July 29), they’re virtually ineffective and may even “allow us to basically stop thinking.” But dozing cows, he says, can work better than . . .



Our Daily Bleg: Some Good Parking Solutions, Please

We like to give readers the chance to ask their own bleg — i.e., to use this blog to beg for ideas or information. Here’s an interesting one from a reader named Philip . I look forward to your input; you can send your own bleg suggestions here. Many cities around the country have parking problems in their urban neighborhoods. . . .