Archive for July 27th, 2009

After my recent Slate article about roundabouts, part of which I spent delineating the differences between the traffic circles of yore and the modern roundabout, reader Anders sent in this photograph of this startling construction in Shanghai, decidedly the former category. He writes:

This is a traffic circle in the Yangpu district of Shanghai called Wu Jiao Chang, where 5 roads intersect (which is the basic meaning in Chinese). Every intersecting road has a light for entering the circle while there are also traffic lights within the circle.

A bit of further digging notes that the colored form in the center is the work of an artist named Zhong Song:

According to the artist himself, he has engaged the site’s knotty condition: “there are five roads leading to the plaza, with a highway overpass on top, and a subway line underneath. There are three different levels of infrastructure, creating a complex fabric that affects the pedestrian nature of the area. So, the question was, how do we add the pedestrian element so people will animate the five different streets?”. To accomplish this task, the artist enveloped the 105-foot-wide overpass in an ovular steel frame clad with aluminum. Measuring 348 feet long, 157 feet wide, and 82 feet tall, it cloaks cars speeding along the overpass.

Has anyone spent time in this place (I missed it while in Shanghai)? When was it built? How does one even get to the center, to enjoy the animated neon oval? (I can’t tell but there seems to be pedestrian underpasses, which might make this some weird modern version of Eugene Henard’s famous carrefour a gyration in 19th century Paris).

At a time when hip kids across the world are spurning the joys of automobile ownership, this social reprobate blows a gasket at receiving an inferior ride for his birthday. I would expect nothing less from the offspring of Hummer owners, of course.

(via Streetsblog)

Virginia driver puts Honda Civic through the walls of the Leesburg, Virginia, office of the DMV.

Actually the driver was there to file paperwork for a car. But the story goes on to note:

Today’s incident was at least the second time that a car crashed into the Leesburg DMV. In March 2008, Nita Sureka drove her Volkswagen Jetta into the side of the building as she tried to park her car during a driving test.

A problem with traffic signals you’ve probably not thought much about: The new LED lights (which consume less energy) tend not to melt the obscuring snow that accumulates on them.

There’s so much to post on, but just a few personal things that transpired in my absence:

I extolled the virtues of roundabouts in my latest Slate column (and blathered on a bit more on the BBC’s Americana program).

I joined in on a conversation on the New York Times’ “Room for Debate” web page about whether cell phones should be banned while driving (I give a hesitant ‘yes’); this happened before the Times dropped this little piece of news.

I was briefly quoted in this Boston Globe story about a push in Massachusetts for a primary seat-belt law.

I read (and opined briefly about) Colin Ellard’s excellent new book You Are Here.

Off-topic here, but I reviewed a few books about the real estate crash in the Times Book Review (and even got one of those slightly cringe-inducing caricatures)

As the somewhat startling image to the right would suggest, I decamped recently to Martha’s Vineyard for some R&R (thanks to all those who have written, and I hope to be in touch soon). I was intrigued to note that the nav system kept navigating, even as the car sat suspended in the hold of the car ferry. It was rather mute, of course, stripped of its normal turn-by-turn street references and cast into an unfamiliar landscape of shoals and eddies, but there was something almost touching in the idea that the nav system kept wanting to show me where I was, in some strange homage to the sea-borne European “discoverers” who had first landed on this island — and the word “navigate,” one might note, has as its primary definition “to sail.” The image also recalled those half-dreamt moments aboard trans-Atlantic flights, when there’s a thin slice of white on the horizon, you’ve exhausted your books and the in-flight entertainments, and you gaze up at the video monitor at the little icon of the plane, which hovers terrifyingly over open ocean somewhere to the east of Iceland.

It didn’t take long to stumble upon the traffic folkways of this small place; e.g., the perpetually crowded and uncontrolled intersection at the corner of Main Street and Edgartown Road in Vineyard Haven, where drivers politely take turns in some improvised ritual, one that newcomers seem to grasp intuitively, a piece of self-evident social decorum not unlike, say, the shoes left at the entrances to the town beaches. It was a welcome respite from the agita of New York’s streets, and on a week mostly on a bike the biggest hazard I seemingly faced was a squirrel that darted out in my path, in search of some enticement across the road, but thankfully reversed course before things got ugly.

I soon began noticing curious bumper stickers that read, simply “Mopeds Are Dangerous,” showing an image of a moped in a circle with a line crossed through it. At first I took this to be some kind of ironic, Napoleon Dynamite sort of thing, not least because I haven’t seen much in the way of mopeds since the Puch I rode in the early 80s, and the scooters I did see on the island seemed sans pedals (not to put too fine a point on it). And then I saw the weird riffs: “Moms Are Dangerous.” “Jellyfish Are Dangerous.” But after talking to a local constable, I learned that the stickers are the result of an actual campaign, one that has organized after a number of motorized two-wheeler fatalities (and can I just point out the most absurd sentence in this article, describing an anti-moped rally: “One man apparently mistook the demonstration for an anti-war rally, and shouted obscenities at Mr. Feldman.”)

I’m of several minds about this. One the one hand, it’s a bit ironic to a find a sticker calling attention to the dangers of another form of a transportation on the bumper of the form of transportation that itself is responsible for the largest number of traffic fatalities (scooters pose most of their danger to their riders, and to no one else, unlike cars). On the other hand (oh, for a one-armed traffic blogger!), as I mention in Traffic, a place like Bermuda, which is similar to the Vineyard in certain respects (i.e., an island with relatively low speeds), has comparatively few traffic fatalities, but these are disproportionately comprised of foreigners riding motorized two-wheelers. It’s not hard to imagine why: Someone riding a vehicle they’re not particularly familiar with (and there’s little to no education process), on roads they’re not particularly familiar with, perhaps with another person riding on the back, perhaps after a long day in the sun and one-too-many blood-orange frozen margaritas down at Sharkey’s Cantina. And while I personally find scooters a fairly superfluous form of transportation (if you’re going to risk two wheels, why not at least get some health benefits — for yourself and others — out of it and ride a bike? Cue angry Vespa-driving reader response!), as an island cyclist I’m not sure I’d rather swap all scooters with cars.

In any case, I mostly clung to my bucolic up-island environs, where the traffic concerns were of a gentler nature.