Trump was not the only one to throw out the pandemic playbook

How it started:

ALBANY — County officials who have for years been planning for a mass vaccination said they are seeing that training and preparation — much of it funded by millions of dollars in federal grants — pushed aside as the administration of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has retained control of the state’s coronavirus vaccination program, including having hospitals rather than local health departments administer the doses.

Interviews with multiple county officials over the past week confirm that many are unclear why the governor’s administration has not activated the county-by-county system, a plan that included recent practice sessions in which members of the public received regular flu vaccines at drive-thru sites.

How it’s going:

New York governor Andrew Cuomo has threatened to fine hospitals up to $100,000 if they don’t speed up coronavirus vaccinations. Speaking at a news conference, Mr Cuomo the state’s hospitals will be slapped with the fines if they haven’t used their full allocations by the end of this week, and if will face further fines if they don’t distribute future vaccinations within seven days.

“I don’t want the vaccine in a fridge or a freezer, I want it in somebody’s arm,” he said. “If you’re not performing this function, it does raise questions about the operating efficiency of the hospital.”

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Reason #23412 why Los Angeles still hasn’t repaired its sidewalks

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.

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Ok boomer

Man, if you thought your local city council had some nutcases…

This was from a 2017 meeting in Tampere, Finland. Incidentally, the Mayor presiding over the meeting went on to become Transport Minister, and will be the country’s next Prime Minister .

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The escalating costs of escalators

Perhaps one reason why it takes so long to replace a worn-out BART escalator:

 

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Berkeley celebrates pedestrian safety month with police crackdown

This past week, Berkeley police were out in force writing $250 tickets to cyclists for rolling stop signs on Milvia and the Ohlone trail. For those who don’t know Berkeley, these are the two of the safest places to walk or ride a bike in the city.

In a Tweet, Berkeley Mayor Arreguin denied responsibility for the crackdown. As he pointed out, it is actually city policy to use limited police resources on dangerous driver behavior.

But the Mayor and Council are not exactly blameless here. This crackdown is the result of a state grant City Council applied for. Each year the California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) gives money to local law enforcement to conduct these kinds of stings. As one of California’s most dangerous cities for bikes/peds, Berkeley routinely receives OTS grant money. Apparently, one condition of the OTS grant is that recipients conduct targeted enforcement against bikes/peds. Berkeley and other cities have regularly used OTS funds for this purpose.

So in accepting the OTS grant, it was inevitable cyclists and pedestrians would get caught up in a dragnet, and many on the Berkeley City Council surely knew this because they’ve heard complaints about it before. One year in particular stands out, when an OTS-funded jaywalking sting was conducted near UC campus. Quite a number of UC students attended a City Council meeting that evening to vent frustration at the exorbitant fines.

The OTS is one of those highway agencies few have heard of, but which desperately needs reform. The OTS promotes outdated safety advice bordering on victim-blaming. OTS admonishes pedestrians to wear bright colors and carry flashlights. Bike helmets are heavily promoted, and the OTS warns against distracted walking. So it is not surprising that OTS traffic safety grants would fund some dubious enforcement strategies. Cities that want to promote bike/ped travel should avoid OTS grant programs.

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Report on the catastrophic failure of Oroville dam spillway

An Independent Forensic Team has published a 584-page report on the catastrophic destruction of the Oroville dam spillway last winter. The report summary states the catastrophe was the result of long-running systemic failures at both the State and Federal levels.

The entire report makes for fascinating (and scary) reading, but there is one part that really stands out:

A contributing factor to DWR’s overconfidence and complacency was a somewhat widespread belief within DWR that the SWP was designed by the “best of the best” – a belief passed on through two generations to the current generation, and possibly increasingly mythologized by each generation. While it is true that DWR recruited nationally to hire qualified engineers and geologists from other organizations, it is unlikely that DWR was able to fill all of its key engineering and geology positions with the “best” people, given the rapidity with which DWR needed to scale up its organization during the 1960s.

The most relevant possible illustration of this aspect is that, as reported to the IFT in an interview, the principal designer for the Oroville spillways 1) was hired directly from a university post-graduate program, with prior engineering employment experience limited to one or two summers for a consulting firm, 2) had no prior professional experience designing spillways, but had received instruction on spillway design in university coursework on hydraulic structures, and 3) likely did not consult technical references regarding spillway chute design, and instead relied on notes from his university coursework in hydraulic structures. If this information is accurate, the IFT finds it striking that such an inexperienced engineer was given the responsibility of designing the spillways of what is still the tallest dam in the US.

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Why weren’t trains used to evacuate people from hurricanes?

The World Socialist Web Site is asking the same question I’ve been thinking about: why weren’t trains used to evacuate people from the path of hurricanes Irma and Harvey? The highways were really the only way out of Houston and South Florida, and highways are notoriously inefficient for moving large numbers of people. And that presumes access to a car, which a lot of people don’t have:

For millions, their only way to flee is by car. Gas shortages have spread across the state, and drivers confront extremely heavy traffic that burns through gas with little progress. From southern Florida, there is only Interstate 95 or Interstate 75 to head north, both of which have had extensive delays for days. On Friday, northbound delays covering hundreds of miles were visible on I-75 and I-95 even into Georgia and South Carolina.

This “fend for yourself” method of evacuation presents an enormous inequality, where working people must spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to head to safety, assuming they even have a car. As a retirement destination, Florida also has many residents over 65 years old. This includes residents in nursing care, or with physical or mental impairments, that make them unable to drive or fly.

Why haven’t passenger trains, which could carry a thousand people a time, been sent to Florida to help? Residents without money or the ability to travel by car or plane could be taken to designated points of shelter and food.

Prior to Hurricane Gustav in 2008, there was a small successful example of this, as some 2,000 residents of New Orleans were taken to Memphis, Tennessee on special trains. A worker who participated in the rail operation noted that “At least 50% of the passengers were elderly, many in wheelchairs, on walkers or canes and generally unable to move very well without some assistance.” On a return trip, many passengers brought more luggage, as they could buy essential supplies in Memphis that would have been out of stock or priced-gouged in New Orleans. With baggage cars and plenty of space, the train accommodated this for free—compared to an airline that would charge $50 per bag.

It should also be noted that car evacuations are quite dangerous due to car crashes. It is not unusual for hurricanes to cause as many casualties through car crashes (often hundreds of miles away) as the storm itself.

Residents fleeing Hurricane Rita

 

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Buttle or Tuttle?

Back in 2012, the Legislature cancelled a $2 billion upgrade of the State’s court computer system — but not before wasting $500 million on the boondoggle. And it seems nothing has been learned from the snafu. There is now a new system from Texas-based Tyler Technologies, and it also has problems:

One of the state’s early adopters of the new technology is Alameda County. The county’s public defender, Brendon Woods, is now supporting many clients who have been affected by the issues.

“We had a client who took a [plea] deal and he was supposed to be released the day before Thanksgiving. The system wasn’t inputted properly. He was held an extra four days.”

Minor driving offences were incorrectly appearing as serious felonies,  meaning if an affected person applied for a job, they are likely to be flagged as having a serious criminal record.

Mr Woods added: “We’ve had clients who were supposed to register as drug offenders, the system shows them as registering as sex offenders.”

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Truth in Engineering

While Volkswagen is sticking to their story that Dieselgate was merely the work of a few “rogue” engineers, analysis of the ECU code suggests otherwise. In this presentation from a Chaos Computer Club conference, a hacker does a walk-through of the ECU defeat code. The defeat code was sophisticated, and clearly required the support of an entire organization.

Someone better go to jail for this.

(If you are impatient, you can skip ahead to 56:00 to see the Smoking Gun.)

 

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Bridge-Gate Gets Interesting

The Bridge-Gate scandal is getting a lot more interesting. The Christie administration illegally obtained private travel records to attack political opponents:

[Senator] Lautenberg carried a reputation as the political nemesis of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican who had appointed Baroni to his perch. Baroni swiftly attacked the senator: How could Lautenberg justify his opposition to raising tolls when he had himself enjoyed free passage across area bridges and tunnels?

“Respectfully, Senator, you only started paying tolls recently,” Baroni said, according to a transcript of the exchange. “In fact, I have a copy of your free E-ZPass,” he continued, holding up a physical copy of the toll pass Lautenberg had received as a benefit from his tenure as a Port Authority commissioner. “You took 284 trips for free in the last 2 years you had a pass.”

Within days, Christie himself disclosed further detailed information about Lautenberg’s private travel records. At a press conference, he alleged that the senator didn’t “pay for parking at Port Authority facilities” and said Lautenberg went “through the tunnel to New York three or four times a week in 2005 and 2006.”

As the IB Times notes, EZ-Pass records can only be accessed through court-order or criminal subpoena.

 

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