Posted in organizational behavior, pedestrian on January 26, 2020| 1 Comment »
Los Angeles sidewalks are so decrepit that it took a class-action ADA lawsuit to force the city to repair them. One thing the lawsuit didn’t do, unfortunately, is to speed up the bureaucracy. In order to repair sidewalks, the city said it first needed a full-blown EIR study:
CEQA, of course, does not require EIR studies for sidewalk repair. This is classic bureaucratic sandbagging.
Posted in highways on January 13, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Another mind boggling metric of our dangerous roadways: over 500 Americans are killed each year from cars crashing into buildings. There are over 3,600 serious injuries from such crashes. Federal road “safety” agencies don’t bother to measure the problem let alone propose solutions (which is probably just as well as they would have restaurant patrons wear helmets and bright colors).
So it is left up to private groups, such as the Storefront Safety Council, to highlight the issue and propose solutions.
Posted in transit, tagged China, HSR on January 1, 2020| Leave a Comment »
One of the new lines runs to inner Mongolia:
The 174km (108-mile) line has a maximum design speed of 350km per hour, and links up with a high-speed service to Lanzhou, in the northwestern province of Gansu. It stretches westward, connecting with other high-speed routes across Shanxi, Hebei and the eastern part of Inner Mongolia.
With the introduction of the services, the trip from Beijing to Hohhot, capital of Inner Mongolia, is expected to take two hours and nine minutes, a fraction of the nine and a quarter hours it takes now. The new service is expected to foster economic and social development between Inner Mongolia and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.
Posted in pedestrian, tagged distracted_walking, Honolulu on January 1, 2020| Leave a Comment »
This is what happens when road safety programs prioritize the wrong things:
Two years ago, Honolulu made it illegal — with few exceptions — to cross the street while fiddling with your phone or other device.
It was the first major city in the nation to enact a so-called “distracted walking” law. And since it went into effect, police have issued 232 citations under the law.
But has it actually made roads safer for pedestrians? That’s up for debate. Pedestrian fatalities on Oahu roads actually soared last year and don’t appear to have significantly dropped off in 2019.
Systemic Failure 