“Dark Age Ahead” was published in 2004, when science and engineering experts still enjoyed some respect from the American masses, albeit a semi-religious variety based on credentialism, still-novel consumer technology, and not-yet faded memories of the mid-20th-century space race and medical breakthroughs. The rest of Prince Bush’s term wiped that out, and the Know-Nothing backlash against an educated African-American being President put a definitive end to it. Even a pessimistic curmudgeon like Jacobs (who died in 2006) couldn’t imagine that things could have gone bad so quickly.
That gave me the collywobbles.
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Darwin’s Corner?
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I think a bit more fair way to look at it is that different places have different driving cultures, and when they operate in isolation, things tend to work OK. Roman traffic is crazy, but somehow the Vespas and Ferraris and delivery trucks manage to coexist.
I’ve driven in Boston and while I was a bit stunned by how aggressive they are, they tend to be pretty consistent and predictable. However, Florida is a place where you combine drivers from all over. If you were to take a mix of Boston and Minneapolis drivers, you’d get big problems, and if you throw into the mix people from Haiti and rural Pennsylvania and retired NYC cabbies, you’ve got a nearly explosive mix of driving cultures.
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If you’re referring to your interstate highways, I heartily concur.
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I suspect municipal policy is driven by the desires of awful drivers for high speed limits, not to mention people who don’t want to pay taxes to support decent traffic control design.
I don’t know about the training of traffic engineers, but to define engineering as “manipulation without regard to truth” is to demonstrate a pretty low understanding of what engineering is – basically science applied to practical problems.
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She doesn’t define engineering that way, she points out that the term “also has an opprobrious connotation” and then suggests that this is the kind of engineering that’s going on in practise with traffic “engineers.”
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Get off my lawn.
don’t get me started on those.
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I shudder to think. Bad enough trying to drive in the Twin Cities when you’re used to driving in Detroit. We drive a lot faster in Detroit, but we’re probably half as aggressive as Boston drivers.
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Why do so many of those cars lose complete control? 360º spins, up on sidewalks, etc. These are major intersections so the traffic speed isn’t (shouldn’t be?) highway speed.
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Mostly it seems the drivers are completely blowing thru the red lights at full speed and not braking at all. Even on surface streets it’s pretty easy to be moving at 50+ mph.
Look at this guy for example:
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On my drive up and down interstate 5 last night, near Santa Nella, there was a car honestly resting on its side in the median, perpendicular to the ground. Two highway patrolmen were standing there looking at it. I presume saying, “Wouldja lookit that.”
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My neighborhood is experiencing a race to the bottom because there’s zero traffic enforcement, so that other civil forces try to slow traffic using engineering like speed bumps, all way stops, lane reduction and corner bump outs, which only frustrates the scofflaws and makes driving, biking and walking even more dangerous. It’s gotten so bad that there is two types of drivers here: those that ignore stop signs and those that stop at every block, even when there’s no stop sign, in terror of the former.
What’s crazy is it that we’re on the doorstep of the Holland Tunnel and traffic cops could fill the city coffers from out of towners if they’d just bothered.
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Possibly, especially if texting is involved, but when it comes to phone calls, holding the phone isn’t the issue but rather how the driver splits their attention between driving and engaging in a conversation.
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I’m gonna be a slight truther on the crash at 0:19. The light was very nearly yellow when the red-light-runner went through; it was a stale yellow until a moment before they went through. Not too far from what I see drivers pull on a daily basis in NYC of all places.
The person waiting to make the left turn should have waited for traffic to fully clear before continuing through the intersection, but instead moved and slightly bumped the late straight-through car, sending it careening into a lightpole. I might give the turning driver 55%-60% of the blame this go-around.
The light placement is standard for Florida. But it can be confusing to out-of-state drivers used to them on the side of the intersection.
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Y’all realize slightly more than a third of the people in Florida (up from one in five when I was a kid) are from Florida? Where do you think all these a-holes are coming from? Hint: your neighbor is probably getting away from your shitty weather right now.
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my grandfather (who lived in flordia) stopped stopping at stop signs years before they pulled his license. My parents wrote the state several times requesting the revoke his license for his own good without much luck. he was a danger to himself and others but refused to stop driving.
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