I’ve complained before about the regulations with electronics and flight. I’d heard that there is some testing in the works for Kindle devices and was wondering if maybe they were considering lightening up on it.

Not United, though, that’s for sure. In fact, they’ve changed up their pre-flight lecture routine to… clarify… how serious they are about this. They repeat like fifty times that “off means off (and not Airplane Mode)” and have added rather than subtracted to the rules: no cell phones on - even in Airplane Mode - at any point in the flight.

As someone who uses their phone for a host of purposes, this is lame.

It’s also rather counterproductive. Presumably, they make a special case against phones for fear that people won’t actually turn the radios off. But the same can be said for tablets, which are allowed. Or computers, which are allowed.

A lot of this goes to what I think is the impossibility of drafting any sort of rules on this with any consistency.

It’s not unlike a large software company that I used to work for. They prohibited Pocket PCs for security reasons. But they allowed smartphones for productivity reasons. At the time, a smartphone was a Pocket PC with voice/data capabilities and a camera.

Due to ongoing sleep deficits, the inability to use (certain) electronics did not really turn out to be an issue this time. I was usually asleep during take-off and landing did not take long enough for boredom to set in before I could turn my cell back on.

For once, I won’t go into the entire story, but the four day adventure of my trip back to Genesis actually got started the night before, when I determined that I was not going to be able to get my wallet in time. No wallet, no ID.

I also could not locate my passport book or passport card, which made matters worse. What I could find, however, were three expired drivers licenses (Cascadia, Estacado, and Deseret) and my expired passport.

In a sane world, that would have been enough. The point of having identification at the airport is not to make sure that you have your papers in order (unless you’re leaving the country). The point of having identification at the airport is to ascertain or validate your identity.

Your driver’s license or passport need not be current in order to do this. It could have expired yesterday. It could have a hole punched through it because you relocated. You did not cease to be who you were when you got a new license or a new passport.

Granted, if you’re talking about identification that is fifteen years old, maybe the license isn’t the best way to ascertain your identity. But two of the three licenses I had would have been valid had it not been for a relocation.

Fortunately, I found my current passport book. Mom pestered me a great deal to get it renewed last year and I owe her some gratitude because I wouldn’t have had it had she not been such a pain about it.

Anyhow, even this only got me so far. The guy at the airport demanded another form of identification after I handed him the passport. Even though the passport is every bit as valid as the driver’s license that was missing. He decided to quiz me on the contents of the passport and let me through. I got the feeling he was expecting a “thank you” for letting me fly.

I wanted to say, “Dude, I had a ticket and valid identification. You are supposed to let me fly.”

I fear that at that point, he would have found a reason not to. But seriously, if the TSA is not going to follow the list of acceptable identification, why bother having a list?. (And beyond that, what logical reason is there to fear someone with a passport compared to a driver’s license? As far as national security goes, it is much more important that we be able to have faith in the legitimacy of a passport than in the legitimacy of a driver’s license.

I got pulled over yesterday for the second time in six months. Which is kind of funny for three reasons. First, because I intentionally speed less than I ever have in the past, and I don’t usually toy around with the 10mph grace period anymore. Second, because I live in a state that is known in the region for being lenient on speeders. Third, I drive less than I usually do. Despite 1 and 2, I’ve gotten pulled over on comparatively open highways for 10 and 11 over.

The last time, it was a relatively brief affair. Arapaho has a law that says if you get pulled over for 10mph or less during the daytime in good weather, you just pay the cop on the spot and it goes away (insurance never finds out about it). At first I was wondering if it was just a matter of the cop making a little money on the side, but he gave me official documentation and everything on it. It was one of those cases where I was going 85 in a 75, downhill, without intending to go 85.

Yesterday, I was taking Clancy to the doctor out in Alexandria. We were running a little behind, but even then I was sticking to 75 in a 70. I even commented, just a couple minutes before getting pulled over, that no matter how close the car behind was going to follow me and no matter how impatient they were, I was going to stick to 75. Apparently, I didn’t. The cop did a Uey and I looked down and saw that I was going about 80. So I got pulled over and the speed demon who’d been following right behind finally got rid of me blocking his way.

I told the officer about the appointment. If I’d been thinking, I would have said, “Officer, my wife, has a doctor’s appointment in Alexandria at 4:30. I apologize for going so fast. She was busy working the emergency room last night - she’s a doctor*, you see - and we ran behind so that we could make her appointment establishing care with the obstetrician that’s going to deliver our baby!” (How would he know otherwise?) Instead I just explained that we were falling behind and she had the appointment and we’re really sorry. It worked. He checked my license and he let us go. He said, “81 is a little too fast. Could you pare it down to 75?” “Yes, sir!”

It was rather fortunate that I put the updated registration sticker on my car a week ago. I lost the paper documentation for the latter part of license and registration, but I could point to the sticker. It was also a reminder that I need to put my wife’s registration sticker on her car.

* - Police officers tend to be lenient with doctors. Especially when they do emergency room work. Clancy said that he might have resented it if I’d laid it on too thick, so maybe it’s for the best that I didn’t.

As I have mentioned in the past, it’s a bit ironic that so many of the white cross arguments involve Utah. By “white cross” arguments, I mean the desire on the part of secularists to do away with the tradition of white crosses to mark the death of someone. The ironic thing about Utah is that it is the one state in the continental United States where the cross is not a symbol of the dominant religion (Mormons don’t really do crosses). In fact, it’s Utah first and foremost that I look at and actually believe that no, the cross does not have to be an establishing symbol of a specific religion (or series of religions). If that is what Utah were going for, they’d have little tooting Moronis on the site of the road. Or something.

As far as such crosses go, I can understand the objections even though I don’t actually share them. If anything, Christians themselves should be kind of anxious about their holy symbol being used for something that isn’t religious in nature. Sort of like the secularization of Christmas.

Arapaho makes extensive use of roadside crosses. And there is more of an establishment concern here than elsewhere, because they are put up by the state. There is one stretch of dangerous highway where my wife and I counted 30-something over just a few miles. They were put up by the state to underline, once twice and thirty-something times to drive carefully.

And part of the problem is that there is no other symbol that you see on the side of the road and know immediately what it means.

Which brings me to the point of this post: If crosses are really a problem, those that want to take the crosses down need to come up with a replacement. That would sell me on the issue. Instead of saying “Take down that cross” they should say “How about we use this instead.” I don’t know, and don’t really care what is used. It could be just a white stake in the ground. Something immediately recognizable and identifiable. Arapaho can put up a sign as you enter the Danger Zone saying (more concisely so that people don’t get into accidents as they try to read the sign) “Hey, you’re about to see a bunch of white stakes in the ground. This is where people died. So drive carefully!”

I got my auto registration for my Forester, Nader, and was in for a shock: It’s $325! Now, that won’t impress you Californians out there, but considering we just recently paid less than a third of that on my wife’s car, Ninjette, it was an unpleasant surprise. It was hefty last time for Nader, but I figured that was due to the fact it was a new car registration. It turns out that the state is engaging in affluence-discrimination. A form of progressive taxation under the idea that if you can afford a newish car (less than five years old) you must be fishin’ loaded. My inner conservative is outraged as this is yet another way our increased income is being chipped away at. My inner liberal points out that my paying $225 to the state ($100 is local) allows someone barely getting by on a clunker* to pay $30 (and less on the county, though I can’t find the exact number). Intellectually, the liberal wins. The conservative hasn’t calmed down yet.

Anyway, I hadn’t heard of this before. I thought three-digit registration was something that only blue coastal states did.

* – Ironically, this puts us in both categories, since my car is relatively new and my wife’s is almost old enough to get its own drivers license.

—

When I got back to the airport in Deseret, I was happy to see that Nader was dirty as all getout. (I was not so happy that Nader’s battery was dead.) I feel like a bad Subaru owner when Nader is clean. Go to a Subaru dealership, and the pictures they have all over the walls are not of a clean car, but a picture of the dirtiest one they can find. In-keeping with the image and all that. I don’t exactly go offroading. I wouldn’t let it get dirty just to assuage my insecurities, but the below-freezing weather has made a carwash a bad idea. So, for now anyway, I feel like a proper Subaru owner.

—

At Ataturk’s, a guy roled up in a Subaru Forester of the same color as mine. My first thought was “Hey, cool.”

My second thought was “You don’t see many of those down here.”

My third thought was “Why the hell would anybody down here by a Subaru?”

We bought ours strictly for climate reasons. Otherwise, no reason to care about the AWD. And without caring about the AWD, some of the competing cars are competitively priced. We probably would have gone with one of those.

The New Republic has a piece of Mitt Romney’s latent urbanism. I found this paragraph noteworthy:

Then there was the day Romney and Foy were together at a ribbon-cutting for a traffic-calming project and Romney started lamenting that Salt Lake City’s streets were too wide because they were designed in the days of wagon trains that needed to be able to turn around. “He thought that that was a problem and that New England had thankfully not had wagon trains, so its streets were more tightly knit … and more pedestrian-friendly,” Foy remembers.

Though Salt Lake City is not pedestrian friendly, the wide berth of its city streets is perhaps one of the greatest strengths of the SLC auto transit system. It’s absolutely amazing. One of those anachronisms that proved the city particularly well-suited for the age of the automobile. That’s not to say that there isn’t significant traffic downtown, but (a) it’s still considerably better than most places I’ve been and (b) due to the fact that all of the streets are so wide, it’s remarkably easy to avoid the worst spots. Or was when I was driving down there regularly. The freeway system is nothing but headaches. I look forward to getting off the interstate and onto the city streets. There aren’t many places I would say that about. At all.

To deal with the increasing downtown traffic, though, they’re doing something rather neat with the busier areas in order to cut down on left-hand turns (h/t Abel). They show a sign for the “thruturns” and I swear that I have actually seen it before but didn’t know what it meant. Now I know! It’s a pretty great concept, where you get to take a protected u-turn away from the congested intersection. It’s the exact sort of thing I do on a pretty regular basis when I can’t get to the right lane in time, except it’s implemented into the system.

Colorado tried something interesting where they sped everybody up by keeping and enforcing a 55mph speedlimit. By enforcing, I don’t mean straw-picking to get a ticket, but rather police cars out there actually making sure nobody is going faster than 55. If the age of antcars ever come, this should prove to be a real timesaver.

The Atlantic endorses congestion pricing. I am actually sympathetic, though tired of hearing about how “increasing the size of freeways doesn’t speed traffic up.” It’s not true anecdotally, and arguably not true at all or at least not true in any universal sense.

The folks at the Frum Forum have retracted their article in opposition to red light cameras, saying “they work.”

I don’t actually disagree with that. And honestly, if done in conjunction with other things, such as longer yellow lights and preferably a light timer, I would support them. There are two counterarguments to lengthening yellow lights. The first is that it causes all kinds of traffic problems because of the “very specific formula they use.” Which is interesting, because they don’t seem to have a problem shortening the duration of yellow lights. The second argument is that people adjust to the shorter duration and it doesn’t make any difference. Here’s a quote:

We did notice immediately that the number of violations dropped significantly. But within four days what we found was that people had changed their driving habits. They knew that they had extra time. And it was virtually the same number of red light runners occurred within 4 or 5 days after we changed that light.

Does this jump out at anybody else? Four or five days? How many people are going to even notice such a change, much less adapt to it? At least some drivers probably haven’t even driven through the intersection during these five days. It would have been more credible if he’d said “within six months” or something. Five days? That’s just… not credible.

And I don’t have to, because it’s been studied. The National Motorist Association, which is critical of red light cameras, has a host of studies on the subject, including one in Fairfax, Virgina:

Skrum continued, “Fairfax County records show that ‘events,’ red light violations, captured by the camera fell from an average daily rate of 52.1 per day before the yellow time increase to just 2 per day afterwards, a reduction of 94 percent.

“Fairfax County records also show that citations being issued dropped to just 0.82 citations a day on average during the 67 days after the yellow time was increased.

“This camera was activated February 8, 2001 by Lockheed Martin under an agreement with Fairfax County. The Virginia Department of Transportation is responsible for operating these signals. The decision to install a red light camera at this intersection confirms that this intersection was considered a location of serious violations with increased potential for accidents.

I could actually be convinced that it takes more than 67 days for people to adapt… but they’re already on the record as saying “4 or 5,” so there you go. Now, the NMA is a biased source. But what about the Texas Transportation Institute? They determine the following:

A before-after study is described and the resulting data used to quantify the effect of increasing the yellow interval on the frequency of red-light violations. Based on this research, it was concluded that: (1) an increase of 0.5 to 1.5 s in yellow duration (such that it does not exceed 5.5 s) will decrease the frequency of red-light-running by at least 50 percent; (2) drivers do adapt to the increase in yellow duration; however, this adaptation does not undo the benefit of an increase in yellow duration; and (3) increasing a yellow interval that is shorter than that obtained from a proposed recommended practice published by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) is likely to yield the greatest return (in terms of a reduced number of red-light violations) relative to the cost of re-timing a yellow interval in the field.

Both #2 (highlighted) and #3 are important. If we are going to use red light cameras, part of the package has to be following the proposed recommended practices of the ITE or independent civil engineers of some sort.

There are two important things to note about the TTI. First, they have also studied red light cameras and have determined that they are effective (even taking into account the increase in rear-enders). So, unlike the NMA, they are not saying anything about yellow lights in order to further an argument about red light cameras. Second, the original article cites the authority of… the TTI… in making its case.

So what have we learned here? We’ve learned that maybe there is reason to believe that we should institute red light cameras. We’ve also learned that there might be alternatives. But really, these alternatives are not mutually exclusive. We can do all of them. And if the goal were public safety, we would do them as a matter of course.

Above I mention light timers. By which I mean the thing they have on crosswalks that tell you how much time you have before the light changes color. The lazy cynical response to this is that it will just encourage more people to wait to the wire. This assumes, however, that everybody who runs red lights does so intentionally. I don’t think that’s the case. I think the ambiguity of not knowing how long you have causes people to ramp up because by the time the light turns yellow, they don’t know how long they have to get through, and they weren’t ready for the yellow light to begin with. I’d happily accept the results of a study on the subject, though, provided that it’s by an organization like the TTI or ITE rather than by someone with a real skin in the game.

It’s amazing how empty this house feels but for a twenty pound mutt. I dropped her off with the Alvarez’s this evening. I got a text from Jack saying that she and their 70lb rottweiler are getting along swimmingly (which is a bit of a surprise, since when they usually see one another, Lisby growls the other dog into submission).

I will be leaving tomorrow. Clancy is slated to leave on Friday. I’ll be picking her up and we’ll be going to the Corrigan Compound (a group of houses on a private drive owned by her extended family on her mother’s side) for a couple days. I will be staying in Colosse for several days after she gets back. It’ll be a bit of a working vacation, as I have some Commodus stuff on my plate. Or I should, anyway. Also possible: Clancy can’t make it at all and I spend the entire time in Colosse. Also possible: I go on a business trip and spend little time in Colosse at all. Everything is in flux.

I posted just today about airline fees. By coincidence, we had to change out her flight and got dinged with the penalty. My criticism doesn’t really apply, though, since we’re only a couple days out. Charging us $150 is more than fair under these circumstances. Less fair is Delta not being up front about the cost of the new flight, throwing in an additional $250 at the end of the call because the price they gave us didn’t include the return trip (??!!). She will be flying US Airways. We never want to give Delta our business again (this is not the first Delta-related incident), but they have our money. So we’ll have to fly them again at some point. While I don’t begrudge them their $150, it’s annoying that they keep that and the money. On the other hand, Delta is a difficult airline to avoid out here with Deseret’s capital being one of their hubs.

The Atlantic has a list of the worst airline fees. I agree with the commenters, that some of them aren’t bad. In fact, some of them improved. Others, though are quite aggravating.

1. Pet aboard fee - In some cases, it costs more to fly the dog than it is to fly me. That strikes me as a bit excessive. On the other hand, It’s something that they’re very up front about and that you can make arrangements accordingly. Charging a fee for pets is definitely fair. And not something new.

2. Unaccompanied Minor - I am sympathetic to this one. You have liability concerns, for one thing. And kids require more attention and are more likely to make flights unpleasant for others (dealing with complaints costs money). Is $100 fair? Not sure. Like the dogs, though, you know well ahead of time.

3. Carry on Baggage Fee - I’ve commented on this one before. The long and short of it… I have no problem with it. It’s easier to plan around and the financial incentives should be towards checking, and not carrying on, baggage.

4. Pillow/blanket - Rubbish. I have never even taken advantage of this “service”, but still: rubbish.

5. WiFi fee - How quickly the world owes us something.

6. Non-alcoholic beverages - At least, unlike sporting events and the like, you can bring your own. I think that water of some sort should be guaranteed, but not necessarily soft drinks.

7. Headset fees - This is actually an improvement. Does anyone else remember when you used to have to put down a deposit on a rental that was more than the $3 that Continental is charging? I don’t even blame them for that. As with the WiFi, they need to be able to pay for these things and passing it on to the customers seems fair. I do find the “gotcha” aspect to be irritating (you’re paying $3 because you forgot to bring them from last time and not because you want a second pair). But it’s cheap enough not to be a problem. Especially considering that the pricing is probably in line with what it costs them.

8. Meal/snack fee - If you want to pay for the food they’re selling, you deserve what you get.

9. Preferred seat fee - I do find this one somewhat aggravating, and petty. A sort of “we’re going to intentionally make things difficult for you if you don’t pay up” screw-you sort of thing. Paying extra for exit-row seats is completely fair, though.

10. Ticket Hold fee - I’m not sure about this one. I don’t think “buy your ticket or take your chances” is unfair, though it seems to me that if you’re doing so far enough in advance, it should be a courtesy.

11. Phone booking fee - $25? WTF?

12. Priority seating - Perfectly voluntary pricing discrimination at its best. No problems here.

Here’s what I don’t get, though. How can you list some of these penny-ante things without getting into what I believe is the worst:

13. Cancellation fees - If I cancel at the last minute, I should have to pay them something. If I cancel six weeks ahead of time, though, that’s pretty ridiculous. They have plenty of time to sell the ticket again. Whereas a lot of the others mentioned are completely voluntary, this is a case of turning the screws on someone who simply doesn’t have much choice. Even when no harm is done. It’s the sort of back-end pricing that annoys me. I might be more accommodating if the fees were remotely reasonable, but they aren’t. Change of plans? Screw you! Because we can!

Update: Apparently, US Airways charges an extra fee if you want to sit on the front half of the plane. No extra-legroom, or anything. You just sit near the front. We don’t get it. Last on and first off isn’t work $25, in my book. Not when for $40 you can get decent legroom.

Walter Olson brings back the “Cash For Clunkers is why used cars have become so expensive” argument:

Guess what’s the newest trouble to hit the car business? As news outlets around the country are reporting, the price of used cars has lately soared to a modern-day record, with some cars commanding more used than they sold for when new. News accounts commonly finger the Japanese earthquake and high gas prices as reasons, but there are some problems fitting either reason to the case. While the earthquake affected the supply of new cars, it’s the previously driven kind that has scored the more impressive price jump. And while the rise in gas prices would explain a relative shift in buyer demand from SUVs and trucks toward smaller vehicles — which has indeed happened — the strength of the used-vehicle market lately has been such that even the thirstier vehicles have advanced in price, $4 gas or no.

No doubt there are multiple reasons for the price spike, including the severe general slump in new-auto sales in recent years, which has reduced the volume of newer cars coming onto the resale market. But — as Washington scrambles to take undeserved credit for whatever passes for normalization in the auto business these days — it’s worth remembering that an artificial scarcity of used cars isn’t just bad for the poor as a group: it’s bad in particular for the upwardly mobile poor, since in most of the country landing a job means needing to line up transportation to get to that job. When it suddenly costs $6,000 instead of $3,000 to get wheels, the move from unemployment to a paying job faces a new and discouraging barrier.

At least he points out that there are “multiple reasons,” which is something that a lot of C4C critics have glided over in the past. Even so, he acts like C4C is the driving factor when there is comparatively little reason to believe it’s more than just a contributor. I wrote about C4C here and here. My basic view is that Cash For Clunkers was an idiotic proposal, a poor way to go about reducing emissions and destroying a lot of capital along the way, but that it’s hard to blame all - or most - of the increased cost of used cars on the law. I previously pointed out that some of the cars where the price increase is the highest, late-model used cars for instance, were not the ones taken off the road. While it’s possible that there is a cascading effect (people can’t buy a targeted, fuel-inefficient vehicle and instead buys an ineligible care taking that one off the road) you would still see the biggest impact on the cars that were targeted and more impact on cars from that period and not more recent cars. Instead, it’s the other way around, suggesting that the biggest reduction in used car availability (where increased demand is meeting decreased supply) is a result of people buying late-model used rather than new vehicles and - more likely - holding on to the car that they have.

Olson cites this article, among others:

Bill Visnic, analyst and senior editor at Edmunds.com, said the auto industry went from selling 16.5 million new cars annually before the recession, down to 10.5 million in the depths of the crisis. He said the average age of a used vehicle on the road today is in excess of ten years old, as well, meaning that overall more consumers are keeping their older cars.

“About five million people or so dropped out of the market,” Visnic said. “A vast number of those people would have been trading in a used car when they bought a new one. That’s a big whammy when the replacement rate has been lagging so much.”

Consumers looking to buy used cars will find that prices are up markedly, Visnic said. The Wall Street Journal reports that prices for used cars are up 5% this year at wholesale auto house Manheim. He said the Car Allowance Rebate System, which was introduced in 2009, also set off the price hike in the used market. The government program dubbed “Cash for Clunkers” offers economic incentives to U.S. consumers for turning in their used cars for a newer, more fuel-efficient vehicle. In turn, instead of ending up on the used car lots across the country, those vehicles went to junkyard graves.

So there has been a reduction of 6 million car sales per annum. Cash for Clunkers may be responsible for - at maximum - 1/7th of that. That assumes that everyone who totaled their car in 2009 would have sold it in 2010. Given that a frequent (and valid!) criticism of C4C is that it didn’t even increase the sale of new cars because it merely time-shifted purchasing (they bought in 2009 what they might have waited a couple years to get rid of), it seems likely that a lot of them would still have the car.

Be that as it may, it is likely that it is contributing to the problem to at least some extent. The “lost capital” that I lament is going to have some effect. And it is another reason to dislike this bit of free pudding policymaking. But there are a lot of other factors at work (an economy that went to hell, primarily) that swamp the effects of the policy.

The folks over at The League have kindly given me a forum to talk about why I believe that the end result of increased fuel costs, fuel taxes, or road taxes will result in the strengthening of the suburbs at the expense of cities:

Peak Oil has been right around the corner for decades. Global warming requires a response that is going to make energy – oil in particular – more expensive. Commuters and drivers are subsidized with general funds. The solution to all of this is, of course, to stick it to the commuters. It’s nothing personal (ignoring everything negative we’ve said in the past about suburbanites), but we’ve got problems and it’s going to be up to them to change their lifestyles (which, coincidentally, we’ve never really approved of anyway). They’ll just have to take public transportation and live in walkable neighborhoods, like we do (or would like to, if it weren’t for the car culture making it nigh-impossible).

There seems to be an assumption, on the part of a lot of urbanists*, that solidifying our future (in terms of energy needs and/or the environment) or basic fairness (in terms of taxing negative externalities or subsidizing roads) will lead to a world more of their liking. If we just taxed gas or stopped requiring highways and parking (or if gas simply gets more expensive), the world will simply have to acclimate to their preferences.

As it happens, I do not oppose a carbon tax. I am in favor of increasing road taxes and fees so that the car culture subsidizes itself (though I do worry about it being regressive taxation). But I get off the train when we talk about the effect that these policies are going to have. Namely, while road construction and maintenance (for instance) subsidize suburban residents, they also subsidize downtown business. While the growth of suburbia was assisted by tax policy, now that people have gotten used to it, and now that our urban/suburban infrastructures have been built, I have enormous difficulty seeing mass conversion to smaller abodes, more restricted mobility, and so on. Not without a fight, anyway.

“But whether they want to or not, they’ll have to!”

Except that they won’t. Arguably, they will not be able to.

First, props to Missouri on this:

Modifications to the bill must be approved by the House before becoming law, but the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) has already begun increasing yellow signal timing with very positive results. In Arnold, the first city in the Show Me state to use automated ticketing machines, yellow timing was increased from 4.0 to 5.0 seconds at three intersections along Missouri Route 141 on February 24. Smaller changes were made on April 15, including a boost from 4.0 to 4.4 seconds at northbound 141 and US 61/67, a 4.0 to 4.5 second change at northbound US 61/67 at Rockport School, and from 4.0 to 4.7 seconds at southbound Vogel Road at Richardson Road (4.3 seconds at the northbound approach).

The impact of the longer yellow at red light camera monitored locations was felt immediately. In January, before any signal timing had been changed, American Traffic Solutions recorded 875 alleged violations in the city of Arnold. At the end of April, that figure fell 70 percent to just 266. Jefferson County Councilman Bob Boyer obtained the ATS statistics after learning that MoDOT had extended the yellow times.

“This recent bit of information goes further to prove the point that there are other safety measures that can be implemented if safety, not money, is the focus,” Boyer said.

Whenever you talk about lengthening yellow lights, there’s always somebody that says that people will simply adjust. And sometimes people will. But study after study has suggested that in the aggregate, longer yellow lights reduce lightrunning as well as accidents. They also reduce revenue, which is part of the problem. So congratulations to Missouri for getting this right.

On the other hand…

[I]n Missouri, it is common that municipal prosecutors will regularly “amend” moving traffic violations, which incur points against one’s driver’s license and potentially raise car insurance rates, to non-moving violations which do not incur said points and insurance rate hikes. Of course, the prosecutor only does so under two conditions:

1) The fine for the “amended” violation is exorbitant compared to the moving violation fine–and compared to the usual fine for the actual non-moving violation, and

2) The victim–er, ticketed person–must have hired legal representation for the prosecutor to negotiate the amended complaint. (Non-lawyers, don’t try representing yourself. Prosecutors won’t do it. I tried…once upon a time when I was younger, drove less carefully, less wise, didn’t inhale, etc.)

Now, one may counter that this behavior is not “extortion” because it is not illegal for the prosecutor to negotiate an amended charge as part of a plea bargain, nor is the prosecutor directly benefiting from the extorted fees. However, this activity is a plea bargain only in the most superficial sense, since a miniscule percentage of moving violations are ever actually contested with a not-guilty plea to begin with and individuals engaging in this ‘bargain’ have no intent to contest the moving violation. In a game theoretic, it’s almost never a credible threat so there is virtually no chance court time will be used or the alleged criminal will go unpunished. And while the prosecutor may not directly pocket the huge fines, those fines comprise a non-trivial portion of many municipalities’ revenues, which do flow back in part to the prosecutor’s budget.

This is not entirely unlike what they’re doing in Delosa, wherein you can avoid having your ticket turned over to your insurance company under certain circumstances. This makes people less likely to contest, but also helps them skirt state laws about how much revenue a town can get from tickets (they can “only” get a third of overall revenue from traffic enforcement). On the one hand, this is great because it helps you keep a clean driving record. On the other hand, it allows them to write up more tickets. In the case of Missouri, it sounds like an odd freebie for lawyers.

As I’ve mentioned before, I got out of a ticket for which I was dead guilty by hiring a lawyer once. If a lawyer knows what they’re doing, they can make it not worth their trouble. Trying to defend yourself, though, is pretty foolish.

The State of Texas is looking at raising speed limits to be the fastest in the nation:

The Texas House of Representatives has approved a bill that would raise the speed limit to 85 mph on some highways. The bill now goes to the state Senate, the Austin Statesman reports. {…}

Texas currently has more than 520 miles of interstate highways where the speed limit is 80 mph, according to the Associated Press. The bill would allow the Texas Department of Transportation to raise the speed limit on certain roads or lanes after engineering and traffic studies are conducted. The 85 mph maximum would likely be permitted on rural roads with long sightlines.

Texas is currently one of the only two states currently allowing 80mph speed limits on a few stretches. Utah is the other.

The two main groups against it are the insurance companies and environmentalists. Though I could have sworn I saw 80mph speed limits on my original move from Delosa to Deseret, I can’t find anything to back me up on that. So I guess I have never driven on an 80mph road. I would think that you would want to be careful about where you put them, but there are some stretches of road that are asking for it. Particularly in the great plains region. When moving to Deseret, I took a route that had me going north through (a tip of) New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming instead of the GoogleMaps approved route that takes you through Kansas, Nebraska, and so on. The main reason for the detour was the scenery, but if the great plains had 85mph speed limits, I probably would have gone that route.

I know that Mike Hunt, Dave Hackensack, and others have suggested that there shouldn’t be any laws against drunk driving. Well, your cause has a champion!

When first tipped to the video, I thought that I might actually agree with him because he was against some new DUI law and I think we already have enough on the books (unless we’re talking about a new law to differentiate between buzzed driving and drunk driving). I don’t typically respond to political stuff on Facebook (or I try not to) anyway, but it’s sometimes after a fair amount of kvetching over what, if anything, I would say in disagreement with the Facebook Friend. I find it interesting that in this case, there was simply no way that I was going to say anything even though I thought I might agree with the video in question. The stigma against “defending drunk drivers” is really that great.

In any event, the law in question is actually a new law I can support. They want to extend prior act consideration from five years to ten. Apparently, Montana’s law currently says that a judge can consider previous offenses in the last five years and this would extend that to ten. I think that extending it to ten is probably a good idea. Caught once and you might have just been unlucky. Caught twice and there’s a good chance that you do it with alarming regularity. I can’t remember the exact statistic, but something like two-thirds of single-DUI arrestees meet the definition for being an alcoholic and when it comes to people twice caught, the number is north of 90%. Those really are the people that we need to be worried about.

Unfortunately, I can’t link to the original article, but a long while back Joan Didion wrote a blockbuster piece on the creation of HOV Lanes. From Jon Last:

Caltrans decided that it would prefer to eliminate 7,800 of those vehicles—that was, literally, their precisely-stated goal—by forcing people to carpool. Thus the Diamond Lanes reserved 25 percent of the available highway space for 3 percent of the vehicles. As you might imagine, pandemonium ensued.

Traffic on the Santa Monica ground to a halt. The number of accidents increased by about 400 percent. The public flipped out. Lawsuits were filed; people scattered nails in the Diamond Lanes in protest. Apparently, people thought that Caltrans was trying to surreptitiously make their lives harder to achieve some statist social-engineering target. Why would they have ever gotten that idea?

Well, for starters, Caltrans leaned on the municipal engineer of L.A.’s surface streets. They didn’t have jurisdiction over these local roads, so they wanted him to create a “confused and congested situation” (their words) on the surface roads so that drivers would be forced onto the gridlocked freeways. And Caltrans knew that the freeways would be gridlocked, because that’s the way they wanted them.

From the other coast (and thirteen years ago), Joe Sharkey wrote:

In New Jersey, many motorists are annoyed because they’re suddenly faced with longer commutes on Routes 80 and 287 and in the newly opened stretch of the Turnpike where the HOV lanes opened in December. But often, their ire is directed at the next lane, not the highway planners.

‘’People punish others for using the HOV lane,'’ Mrs. Sanchelli said with a nervous laugh. ‘’In the HOV, you’re all the way over in the left. And a lot of times, they won’t let you back in. They’re brutal! Usually, I get off at the Morristown 287 exit on 80, but when they don’t let me over, I have to go down to the Lake Hiawatha exit a mile down, which throws me off by 10 to 15 minutes.'’

She said she would join a real car pool but, ‘’I don’t know anybody around me whose hours fit. I couldn’t even car pool with my husband, who goes in at 7 A.M.'’

Which really is the biggest problem with carpooling. Especially sprawling cases like Colosse where husbands and wives leave in different directions at different times. Back when I was living in Cascadia and commuting through awful traffic to get from Soundview to Enterprise City, I seriously considered looking into joining a carpooling club. But ultimately, I couldn’t because my hours varied too much. Even in jobs with more standard hours, sometimes I would want to hang around work city a while before going home. There are a whole lot of reasons that our lives cannot revolve around carpooling.

There has been a recent shift away from HOV to HOT (High-Occupancy Toll) lanes. Combining the two seems like a pretty good fit. Allowing those willing to pay more to get through quicker seems like a reasonably good “voluntary tax.” When I was working at Wildcat back in Colosse, my commute involved either driving on a toll-road or sticking to the free access road. Most of the time I did the latter, though when I was running late or in a hurry, it was really nice to have the former option. I am pretty indifferent to the notion of HOV lanes, but if we’re going to have them, stuffing them in with toll lanes seems like a good way to go.

The Trumans are now a two-car household again. I didn’t sell Cray, the 2-door late 90’s Escort that carried me through Cascadia. We didn’t trade it in when we purchased the Forester because I didn’t really want to complicate the sale and that I could do better selling it myself. Also, we didn’t know where the title was. But then I found the title and… every time I was going to sell it, something prevented me from doing so. Typically, it involved a problem we were having the Camry door. Between the constant battery problems we were having with Cray and the Camry’s door problems, we had three cars between us and I was still sometimes having to drive her to and from work. We got the Camry’s door fixed, but even then wanted to wait until the next freeze to make sure that the door was fixed as advertised.

Then the pieces fell into place and the sale began. I put a sign on the door with FOR SALE and $900 OBO in big type as well as more information in smaller type (CD/MP3/Aux player, 120k miles, needs new battery). I just parked it in front of the house, figuring that if it didn’t sell soon I would park it on Main Street. I was about at the point when I got a call about it.

I had envisioned selling to car to either a high schooler as their first car or a struggling college student. The potential buyer was more of the latter, minus the college bit. She took it for a test-drive (the battery fortunately worked) and then a few days later had her boyfriend take a look at it. She didn’t have the money on hand. I told her that if she could put down $100 deposit, I would hold it for her. She was very much the type of person that I wanted to sell the car to. She and her boyfriend looked at the car as though it were positively new.

They gave me the deposit on Sunday and it was as though a switch went off. Suddenly I was getting calls right and left on it. Offers for $900 on the spot rather than $750 as soon as she could scrape the money together. One guy who wanted to buy it for his grandson. Another whose wife apparently knows Clancy. A couple that I didn’t return. But… I’d told the girl that I would hold it for her. It was looking a little spotty there for a while, but she came through by the middle of the next week.

So now Cray has a good home with someone that will appreciate it. I felt better about that when I talked to the guy who was going to buy it for his grandson and he said that his grandson wasn’t interested in anything old or smaller than a pickup. So if I’d sold it on the spot, it would have gone to someone that hated it. I don’t know why such things matter to me, but they do. So long as it actually works. I’d rather give it away to someone that can’t afford it and won’t appreciate it than sell it to someone that would dismantle it. Which is why I have 8 or so desktops in the computer room and a couple of working but not particularly useful old laptops.

It’s common practice in the United States for men to be charged more for automobile insurance than women. Apparently, that’s about to change in Europe:

The decision means that women can no longer be charged lower car insurance premiums than men, and the cost of buying a pensions annuity will change.

The change will come into effect in December 2012, although customers could see premiums alter in the interim.

Representatives of the insurance industry said they were disappointed.

The court was ruling on a challenge by a Belgian consumer group Test-Achats.

It had argued that a current exemption for insurers contradicted the wider European principle of gender equality.

It’s not all gravy for men, though. Men had previously received greater pension annuities on the basis that they are less likely to live as long to collect them. So the end result is that men get less pension for their work, in the aggregate.

I have mixed feelings about this. My natural inclination is to see the first part as being relatively fair but to be outraged about the second. My mental wiggle room on this is that driving is something that each individual has a good deal of control over and so you can take a look at my driving record and compare it to a woman’s driving record of the same age and determine who is a better driver*. On longevity, though, behavior certainly plays a role but biology seems to favor women and so not only do men die younger, but now we leave money on the table when we go!

But really, this is splitting hairs. Either you accept aggregate probabilities as a legitimate factor or you do not. And so I am mixed. In the case of gender, I actually lean towards discrimination being okay within certain contexts. I am iffier on other topics. I’ve complained in the past about some of the criteria that auto insurance companies use (precipitated by a huge increase in my auto insurance rates due to some mythical problem with our credit) such as housing (if you live in a poor neighborhood, you may dinged whether you are a safe driver or not even though the correlation is without causation).

* - Along these lines, I have no problem with discrimination among the young, where driving records are less firmly established. And really, this may undercut my thoughts on the matter because I’m not sure how prevalent the discrimination is as you get older and have established your own driving record.

According to Consumer Reports:

The overall top five — Honda, Subaru, Toyota, Volvo and Ford — all received reliability ratings of Better Than Average. No automaker earned the highest rating, Much Better Than Average, and none the lowest, Much Worse Than Average. {…}

Subaru was awarded an overall score of 73. Only one model, the sporty Impreza WRX, was cited for below-average reliability.

Subaru is probably helped by the fact that they release only a few different models and so can focus on making the best of what they have. It’s the upshot to the downside that they only participate in a relatively niche market: no minivans, no fuel-efficient compacts, and so on. I’m still not sure what Subaru is going to do when the CAFE standards go up. According to some market information I got in the run-up to purchasing the Forester, they’re working with Toyota (which has a stake in Subaru and a business partnership that has Camrys being made at a Subaru plant) to roll out some more fuel-efficient vehicles. Hard to do with standard AWD, though.

Clancy comes from a Toyota family and I come from a (mostly) Ford one, so it looks like we are well-represented across the board. When I was younger, we came from a Chrysler family. They didn’t fare so well:

For the third consecutive year, Chrysler earned the lowest overall score, with a 43. Despite Mr. Champion’s affinity for the company’s new products, he cautions that “reliability is still going to be an issue.”

Which is a shame, because for my money Chrysler makes the best looking cars on the market.

Curiously omitted were Mitsubishi and Suzuki. Kia was also excluded, but they may have been rolled in with Hyundai, which it is partially owned by.

Another article on the dangers of “distracted driving”:

“The dangers of driving while talking on the phone come not from our hands or from our eyes, but from our brains,” they wrote in The Seattle Times. Simons’ research backs this up.

In one of his driving experiments at the University of Illinois’ Beckman Institute, participants drove on a simulator depicting a four-lane, divided highway. Their sole task was to follow the car in front while performing a counting task. In this case, Illinois researchers found that if drivers are distracted while simply following traffic, they instinctively give themselves a little extra space with the car in front.

“This suggests that distractions wouldn’t be as bad as long as drivers don’t have to make any decisions and provided that nothing unexpected happens,” he says.

But unexpected things do happen, and distractions like talking on the phone can make you slower to respond. Problems also arise when drivers have to make a tactical maneuver, such as passing. If drivers are being distracted in these situations, Illinois researchers found that they usually drive too close—dangerously close.

Though it’s true that unexpected things do happen, it is not the case that they happen on a random distribution. People often tend to discuss this issue in black and white terms. It’s dangerous! Don’t do dangerous things! Of course, driving is dangerous. Life is a series of tradeoffs. Rather than suggesting that people should limit their cell phone conversations to when they are in potentially hazardous situations, we have the Secretary of Transportation trying to find ways to jam the signal (thereby preventing passenger and emergency phone calls). Cause danger is danger and all that.

On the other hand, as heretical as it may sound, not only does talking on the cell phone while driving not always pose the same hazard, it’s quite possible that sometimes it can result in safer driving:

When engaged in a secondary verbal task, drivers showed improved lane-keeping performance and steering control when vigilance was lowest.

This fits entirely within my experience. Even before phoning while driving became a no-no, I found myself rather uncomfortable doing it if I was driving on unfamiliar roads, times when surrounded by cars, and/or places of frequent stop-start. On the other hand, when driving on a long stretch on a freeway with light traffic, the hazards seemed pretty minimal to me.

Something like 70% of Americans with cell phones cop to either talking on a cell or texting while driving. Unless Secretary LaHood gets his insipid signal-jammers installed in cars, it’s not something that’s going to go away any time soon. It’s my hope that most people are instinctively aware when phoning while driving is more hazardous or less. Maybe our public relations campaigns should focus on that. It’s unlikely to happen, though, because of a relatively puritanical itch that people without cell phones and those that have them but never use them in the car have. I don’t want to do it, therefore you should never. And another group of people that supports these rules but doesn’t follow them because they can handle it but those other drivers are crazy.

Keep in mind, though, that if you listen to sports in the car, or you eat in the car, you are likely similarly distracting yourself. In fact, I personally find that the same rules I used to follow for cell phone usage I follow for eating. And to a lesser extent, with audiobooks. I tend to reserve these things for the freeways.

But as the chicken littles talk about how the sky is falling, there are a few important things to remember:

First, that there are tradeoffs. The second study linked aside, maybe in a perfect world nobody would multitask behind the wheel. They wouldn’t talk on cell phones. Or eat or smoke or listen to anything. Just keep an eye on the road. Realistically, though, we spend a lot of time in our cars. Making that time more pleasant is not without its own value. Being careful is one thing, but being miserable while doing it is another.

Second: The roads have never been safer. Accidents are fewer and farther between than they have ever been. The same goes for injuries and fatalities. And for all of the dangers that cell phones are alleged to cause, all three statistics have been on the decline ever since they were first introduced. I don’t think that this is because of cell phones, but it is true regardless. So let’s stop freaking out. {h/t OTB}

As you may recall, I bought a Subaru Forester relatively recently. On the whole, I am liking it a great deal and not feeling much in the way of buyer’s remorse. I probably wouldn’t have gotten it if I lived in a warmer client, but it’s suiting our needs pretty well. We’ll see how adding kids and maybe another dog changes that equation.

Pros:

• Price Point. There were other vehicles that offered AWD. But in addition to the Forester being part of a line that takes it more seriously, it was one of the least expensive. To get AWD and the other things I wanted (towing capacity, for instance), Toyota and Honda pushed you towards the more expensive models. With the Forester, I was able to get the base model. Even if I’d had to get the middle-tier, it was still significantly cheaper than most of the alternatives.
• Dealership. They’ve been great. My dealings with the Ford and Toyota dealerships have been lackluster. The fact that I am under warranty helps, but for the fact that Ford was making money off me when I wanted them to do this or that. Meanwhile, the dealership is giving me things they are not obliged to. I don’t know how universal this is, but the Redstone dealership has been great.
• Size & Overall “Feel”. Being a “small car guy”, I was worried about driving a bigger car. I wanted the cargo capacity and we will hopefully be needing something family-friendly over the next year or so, but I wondered what the tradeoff was. Turns out that there isn’t any. I feel just about as comfortable driving this as any of the other cars. It doesn’t have the feel of unwieldiness I was concerned about. It’s not as maneuverable as the Escort, but that’s likely a physical impossible. What it lacks there, it makes up for in terms of visibility and allowing me to sit completely upright.
• Three DC Connectors. Well, connectors in general. There are three DC connectors, one in the front, one in the storage compartment in the middle of the seats, and one in the back. Having my power-splitter almost feels like overkill. I also like that they have a DC connector and auxiliary jack in the middle storage compartment, making the plugging in of my smartphone (and placing of it in the cupholder) very convenient.
• Cheap to insure. I was expecting that to bite harder than it did. It’s about the same cost to insure as the Camry, despite the Toyota being 15 years old and only worth a few thousand dollars in an accident. The Escort was notably cheaper than both, though.

Cons:

• Transmission/MPG. On this, I was warned. Its posted mileage is 27/21, though for us it’s really more like 24/18. It’s attributable to the mountains as much as anything. The gains I should be making on the Interstate are lost due the constant ups and downs. This is aided by the lackluster transmission (only 4-speeds) that causes huge spikes in RPMs and drops in mileage. I seem to be averaging around 22mph. That could be much worse, but I suspect it would be better with a CVT.
• Stereo. On this, too, I was warned. It was less than a couple of days before I informed the dealership that I wanted an upgrade. The speaker setup in the Escort and Camry are both better, despite each being over a decade old and having a cracked base speaker (requiring me to shift sound output away from that speaker). After hearing about it, I was thinking it was something that I might want to replace at some point, but it became pretty urgent pretty quickly. Also, the video display is really weak. It doesn’t read ID3 tags for MP3 files and the file name doesn’t scroll so you only get the first several letters. We’ve upgraded the speaker setup, which is enough for now, but will probably upgrade the player later.
• Keys. It has a separate dongle for the power locks and no option to upgrade to put it in the key itself. The dealership loaned me a Legacy when they were upgrading the sound system, and it had the single unit with both keys and power locks. I asked if I could buy one for the Forester, but it’s not even available. It would make sitting down on my keys a lot easier if it were. I don’t know what I’m going to do when we replace the Camry and I have two of those things in my pocket, if her replacement car also doesn’t have the two-in-one.
• Susceptibility to wind. While I do like the size overall, Arapaho is windy and the Forester’s size causes it to catch that wind in a way that the Escort didn’t. It’s unavoidable and simple physics, but kind of a pain in the rear on a windy day. A couple times I thought that the alignment was off. Turned out it was just the wind blowing the car.