Archive for October 21st, 2008

Two recent entries have crossed my desk. One, from Martin Parr, who I interviewed some years back. Parr, who makes the banal seem lurid, and vice versa, turns his lens now on the humble parking space. Pictured at right is Mexico City, home of course to the famous “viene viene” boys, who hang around street corners and wave drivers into spots that they’ve secured with chairs, as pictured.

The description for Parking Spaces reads so:

“Between 2002 and 2007, Martin Parr photographed ‘the last parking space’ available in 41 countries – somewhere you could have parked your car, had you been there at the time. Using a compact camera, and driven by wanting to express “the individual frustration of finding somewhere to park, but on a global level”, this is the latest body of work in Martin’s methodical personal address to the issues of globalisation – the desire for a precious parking space being a banal unifier of the middle classes the world over.”

Meanwhile, the always interesting Mikael Colville-Andersen over at Copenhagenize has contributed Stripey Streetness, which, as the description notes:

“A splendid photo series about the zebra crossing as an instantly recognisable symbol in the urban landscape. 130 photographs from 10 countries celebrating that striped zone created in order to keep people out of harm’s way by providing safe passage across city streets. Painted bridges that guide the bustling masses of pedestrians through a city. The zebra crossing is not a destination it itself but it is an important tool in getting yourself from A to B. It funnels all types of people together into one space, for a few brief minutes of togetherness. We are strangers but while waiting for the light to change and for those dozen or so steps through the zone we are in a flock. This photo series shows city life and city people framed within the zebra crossing. People coming and going and waiting. All of them telling us stories with their body language. Wide strides or short steps. Hunched shoulders or head held high. The zebra crossing becomes a stage on which people around the world are brought together.”

Not sure if he’s got Shibuya in there…

“Already in 1285 central government intervention decreed in the Statute of Winchester that a passage should be cleared for two hundred feet on each side of the road ‘so that their neither be dyke nor bush whereby a man may lurk to do hurt’ — a provision of sight-lines on a scale even dwarfing that of modern motorways.”

That’s from Sylvia Crowe’s The Landscape of Roads, 1960.

Bloomberg notes a colossal jam in Moscow:

Traffic jams paralyzed practically all the major arteries of the capital on Tuesday morning,” state broadcaster Vesti-24 reported. “The overall length of traffic jams in the capital at 9:45 a.m. exceeds 500 kilometers.”

It added:

“Sao Paulo, which is Brazil’s and Latin America’s largest city, with a notorious traffic problem, posted a record on May 9 when 266 kilometers of traffic was at a standstill, according to the state’s traffic department. That’s about half the figure in Moscow this morning.

Apparently, they don’t mince words in Australia. Story here.

As was recently reported in the Washington Post, Montgomery County, Md., is planning an overhaul of its “road code,” the sort of thing that seems like a bureaucratic footnote but then goes on to have major implications in the built environment.

Among the major issues, the newspaper reported:

The panel recommended that roads in urban areas be designed for speed limits of 30 to 40 mph, saying anything slower would be unrealistic and difficult for police to enforce. The panel also said trees should be planted farther from curbs on roads with 40 mph speed limits because of the danger they pose to motorists who hit them.

What strikes me in discussions like these is the weird disconnect between design and driver behavior. One of the reasons it can so often be difficult to enforce lower speed limits is that these limits are posted on roads that are intensely over-engineered. The supposed “fix,” as suggested above, is to assume that drivers are going to drive at a certain speed, and so to then rearrange the entire landscape — removing trees, etc. — to allow them to do so “safely.”

Of course, on the road “designed” for speed limits of 30 to 40 mph, they will inevitably drive faster. But then, of course, if someone crashes and kills a pedestrian or another driver, it’s an “accident,” it’s down to driver behavior; if they smash into a tree, it’s deemed poor traffic safety engineering. As the work of Eric Dumbaugh has found, looking at streets like the one above, at Stetson University in Florida, often the worst safety performance comes on the roads that are deemed “safe” by traffic engineers, while the best can come on tree-lined streets like the one above (which had no crashes and speeds below 30 mph during the five years he looked at it).

We consistently get urban speeds wrong in the U.S. In Germany, the land where speed is supposedly worshipped, the speed-limit free sections of the autobahn are contrasted by a mandatory, heavily enforced 30 KPH (that’s 18 mph, folks) limit in residential areas.

Another classic specter the article invokes is emergency response times. Any time a group seeks to lower speeds on a road, there are dark projections made of people being killed in fires because firefighters will be held up on traffic calmed streets. Well, for one, have you ever seen these vehicles on the way to an incident? They often don’t actually drive that much faster than anyone else — particularly since cars frequently don’t get out of the way in time — but I wonder if the lights and sirens and the panic they induce may make us overestimate their sense of urgency. In any case, studies have suggested that emergency-response teams are as likely to be help up by random traffic delays and the like as anything else.

But the larger issue is risk. As Reason magazine has pointed out, the risk of dying in a fire in the U.S. is roughly the same as drowning: In one year, 1 in 88,000, and, over a lifetime, 1 in 1100. The risk of dying in a car crash, according to the article, is 1 out of 6500 in a year. The risk of being killed while being a pedestrian? “A one-year risk of one in 48,500 and a lifetime risk of one in 625.”

Designing roads to meet some supposed emergency response criteria, for that dramatic last-second rescue, actually helps raise the risk of dying in a much more common way: In traffic.