The Evil Eyebrow

Category: World Events

  • This Week in Traffic: 21 March 2007

    Elderly Fail to Yield

    According to this news report, the U.S. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety published a study that says older drivers tend to have collisions due to failures to yield at intersections. They pull out at inappropriate times and are struck by oncoming vehicles.
    Other age groups are prey to different types of collisions. 35-54 year olds tend to rear end people
    An interesting quote, which I need to go to the IIHS report to find, is:

    To prevent such accidents, the Institute is recommending more left turn lanes and arrows at intersections and roundabouts.

    More misinformation about roundabouts! There shouldn’t be any need for (pavement) arrows at a well designed roundabout. Don’t get me started.

    I read the IIHS report, and it refers to roundabouts and fewer permissive (allowable on a green ball signal) left turns, but no arrows at roundabouts. Perhaps that was a grammar parsing error. “Signal arrows at Intersections, and more roundabouts” might be better.

    North Carolina Traffic Web Cams

    My friends in the Raleigh, NC area may be interested in this download. Let me know if it’s any good.

    Ad Censorship on Public Transit

    Kezins had this to say about the Denver Regional Transportation District proposal to ban violent video game advertisements on its vehicles.

    Blog Firestorm on Hampshire Congestion

    Apparently a road agency in Southampton installed some traffic signals and lit off furious public responses. Check out the comments.

    What freaks me out is this quote:

    Agency route manager Guy Berresford said: “The new traffic lights on the roundabout will ease congestion at this location…

    The British invented the modern roundabout, so why are they installing signals on something that is specifically designed to do away with them. I hope the writer is using the term “roundabout” in this case as a cover all for “round intersection.” Traffic Circle and/or Rotary does not equal Roundabout.

    Transportation Madness!

    York County, Pennsylvania is using an interesting tool to educate their public stakeholders as to the tradeoffs involved in transportation planning. To that end, they’ve developed the Transportation Madness bracket. Check it out.

  • Gregorian Calendar

    Here are some history and details about the Gregorian Calendar, brought to you by Matt Rosenberg, friendly neighborhood provider of weekly emails concerning geography.

    The most interesting thing (to me) in this article is that it took 170 years to propagate the calendar change throughout all of “western” Europe. That’s a long time for neighboring nations to be on different date-making schedules. Must have made signing treaties that much more tense. (“We’ll use our Calendar.” “No, we’ll use ours!” “Prepare for war…”)

  • Winter Solstice

    At 00:22 GMT on December 22nd, the world will celebrate once more its free annual trip around the sun. This equates to 18:22 (6:22 PM EDT) 19:22 (7:22 PM EST) December 21st for those of us sitting on the east coast of the United States.

    To commemorate this occasion, and its companion solstice during the summer, I usually provide my office mates with a few dozen Dunkin Donuts. This both let’s them know that the zenith of the sun will be rising again, and that I disdain their too-sweet Krispy Kremes.

    Perhaps I will stand eggs on their ends inside the donuts to round out the occasion.

    Whatever you do, even if it is a pale shadow of the Christmas and New Year’s holiday celebrations, make sure you remember the significance of this event. We are whizzing through space at a speed that is literally mindblowing, following a path ~942 million kilometers long every year. Standing on this big ball of rock coated in a skin of air, most of us have difficulty comprehending that it is a ball, and not a plane. Wrapping your mind around that is difficult, but doable with images from planes and spacecraft. Imagining the distances invovled within the solar system becomes much more abstract, and trying to encompass galactic or intergalactic scales is nearly impossible. The solstices (and equinoxes) are a good time to remember where we stand in the great scheme of things, “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy…”* But despite our cosmic insignificance, we are here and equipped to wonder why we are so insignificant, and that’s something.

    *Douglas Adams, The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy.

  • More Google Sightseening

    Here is a Google Maps image of a cruise ship that capsized due to a typhoon. Wow…

  • Asia -> Spain: Holy Crap that's a long way!

    I’ve been hearing a lot of press recently about the Canary Isands being the port of harbor for African illegal immigration to Europe. The geography makes good sense. The Canaries are only 150 miles (give or take) off of Morocco. Not entirely dissimilar to the Cuban and Haitian boat refugees trying for Florida.

    However, this load of people came a lot farther. All the way from (they suspect) Pakistan and Sri Lanka!

    Wow. I quail under the thought of what those people went through during their trip.