Russell's Blog

I want announce a little project I put together over the weekend. For want of a better name, I'll call it the Davis Crash Map. Basically, I analyzed the accident report spreadsheets from the City of Davis Public Works Department, and made an overlay for Google Maps to visualize the data. The spreadsheets are a bit difficult to analyze, so I'm leaving out the reports that aren't clear to me (about 15% of the reports). The reports that gave me some trouble seem to be randomly distributed over the city, so the overlay should still give an unbiased picture of what is happening.

In particular, this is map is intended to examine bicycle accidents. I hope people will look at this map, and think about how they behave on the roads, weather on foot, on a bicycle, or in a car. How you behave on the road has direct, and sometimes dire, consequences for you and for other people.

However, there is more to this than behavior. This is also a design question. Roads are not natural features. They are designed and built by people for use by people. As with anything that is made by humans, there are good designs and bad designs. These designs have a real impact on peoples' lives. In the case of streets, the impact on your life can be very literal, as this map shows.

Even good designs can always be improved. Davis is a pretty safe town in which to walk, bicycle and drive. But if you study this map, and think about it as you go about the town, it's also clear that things could be better.

I'm not a traffic engineer, or a civil engineer, or a city planner. I claim no expertise in those areas. I'll leave it to other people to make specific suggestions. However, I think it is important for the users of streets -- pretty much everybody -- to think about what kind of streets they want. This map should help give you a better idea of what kind of streets we actually have.

For some reason, people seem to get very emotional about traffic. I grew up in Los Angeles, home of the nation's worst traffic jams. Perhaps this is to make up for our lack of a professional football franchise. Passions about transportation, especially mundane things like parking spaces and HOV lanes, get people really worked up. Los Angeles is also famous for road rage, and nowhere is it in greater evidence than in the corridors of City Hall. Public meetings on traffic can make I-405 look like afternoon tea. In fact, thousands of people from all over the world tune into the internet broadcast of the Santa Monica city council meetings to listen to Californians scream at each other over the exact position of little blobs of paint on little strips of asphalt.

What the conversation needs, I think, is some perspective. Data can help provide that perspective, especially if it can be represented in a way that is easy to understand. Maps are good at that.

If you will indulge me, I'd like to share my perspective on this data. Each marker represents a traumatic event for someone. Under some of those markers, a life came to a sudden, violent end. I'd like to share a picture of what kind of event a marker on this map represents. You won't find a marker for this event because it happened in Norman, Oklahoma, a college town that is a lot like Davis.

Anna and me

In October of 2007, my little sister was riding her bicycle near her house. A lady in a Mercedes made a lazy left turn, and crossed onto the wrong side of the road. She hit Anna head-on. Anna went up and over the hood of the car, and face-planted on the windshield, breaking her nose and her front teeth. The lady slammed on the breaks, and Anna then went flying off the car and slammed her head on the pavement. That much is clear from where my mother photographed the tire marks, the blood stains, and scattered teeth.

Who designed this street, anyway?

The sequence of events afterward are a little unclear, since Anna does not remember anything from that day, or for several days before and after the accident. The police report includes several details that are impossible or don't make any sense; for example, the officer thought she was coming out of a driveway onto the street, but the driveway did not belong to anyone she knew, and was paved in gravel (extremely annoying to bicycle on). The report also places the accident on the wrong side of the street, which was obvious enough based on the tire marks and blood. Based on what her friends say she was doing -- biking from her house to a friend's house -- she would have just been pedaling along the side of the road. The details of what happened are somewhat unclear, other than the evidence left on the road and gouged onto my sister's face.

After hitting the pavement, she evidently got up and staggered around for a bit, and then collapsed. She stopped breathing, and officer on the scene couldn't find a pulse, and assumed that she was dead. This was the reason given for not immediately summoning an ambulance.

Then she suddenly revived and started mumbling. The lady who ran her down went into screaming hysterics, and had to be restrained (or evacuated, or something). It was only then that an ambulance was called. From the report, it appears that paramedics and police spent a good deal of time tending to the driver of the car, who was having an anxiety attack, instead of Anna, who was bleeding from massive head trauma.

Anna then spent the next several days in the hospital. My mother got on the next flight to stay with her. For the next several days, Anna went through long and short memory lapses and dizzy spells of various lengths. When I spoke to her on the phone over the next several days, she also had some kind of aphasia, which was very jarring to me because she is normally a very articulate person. And then there was the puking. Brain injuries often come with a heavy dose of overpowering nausea. She was on anti-nausea drugs for a long time after the accident.

It took a long time for he to start feeling "normal" again. Almost two years later, she's still not sure she feels completely normal. Fortunately, thanks to some really great work by her surgeons, she looks normal. Needless to say, she is both very lucky and very tough.

Anna's bicycle. The police kept it as evidence, but allowed my mother to photograph it.

You could say that I have a personal stake in this, and I will not claim to be unbiased. Many people who argue against safety measures that would slow traffic argue their case on the basis of personal responsibility. We are each responsible for our actions, they argue, and if you do something stupid, you are responsible for the consequences. Why should people who don't do stupid things be inconvenienced?

I agree completely. However, if one casts any real issue into the frame of personal responsibility, then things are rarely so simple. Everyone who could act in a situation has responsibilities, even if they are not they are directly involved. When you have the power to prevent something bad from happening, and you choose not to act, then some of the responsibility falls on you. Every unfortunate, stupid thing that happens involves a cast of thousands of silent, but not blameless, bystanders.

We have a responsibility to at least attempt to protect people regardless of what they are doing -- even if it is stupid. This is especially true when it comes to the things we build. We shouldn't, if we can possibly avoid it, build things that injure and kill people. If we can think of ways to make something we build less dangerous, we ought to give it a try.

Anna and Earnie, about a year after the accident.

My little sister was stupid not to wear a helmet that day. The lady in the car was stupid not to have been on the lookout for cyclists. But neither of them deserved what happened. Each of them is obviously bears some measure of responsiblity (and I have my own opinions on how those measures are apportioned), but the city of Norman also is also responsible. The city didn't even bother to paint a line down the middle of the road; what was the driver supposed to be on the wrong side of?

Yes, this is about personal responsibility. We, the public, build the roads. We are responsible for the markers on this map, and all the terror, trauma and tragedy they represent. Let's try to do better.

I was biking home today, and I decided to take a detour to enjoy the warm evening (and to avoid the not enjoyable warm apartment). About half way around the Davis Bike Loop, I remembered that I wanted to try out My Tracks. Here's the result : Neat!

After wandering off the Bike Loop a bit, I decided to head home. I was biking down Russell Blvd., and I witnessed a very scary car accident. The accident happened where I stopped recording the track, at the red marker. A guy in a cherried-out lifted F-150 was sitting at the traffic light (that's the point where I turned around). When the light turned green, he floored it. According to the other witnesses, he was racing with someone, or trying to catch someone who had cut him off. I couldn't see the other car because it was behind his gigantic stupid truck.

What I did see, though, was that he accelerated continuously until he reached the next intersection (the red marker), where he had a head-on collision with a girl in a 1990's Honda Civic trying to make a left turn. His engine was deafeningly loud even a block away, and I heard it roaring and down-shifting right up until the crash.

Looking at the damage to her car, it looked like he basically ran it over. The lift kit on the truck put his undercarriage about level with her roof, and there were even little ladders installed to climb up to the doors. After he ran over the Civic, he swerved around a bit, jumped the median, sideswiped a small SUV in the oncoming traffic, spun 180 degrees, and snapped his axle. When the axle snapped, I heard his engine redline for half a second and then cut.

Happily, nobody was hurt. The girl in the Civic was pretty much petrified, though. She was convinced that the accident was her fault because she didn't get out of the way.

I told her this was nonsense; the truck was going more than double the speed limit, and I'm pretty sure he didn't have his lights on (it was dusk, but not completely dark yet). She asked me about five times, "How much do you think it will cost to fix?" I told her, "Cost you? Nothing. He was committing maybe a dozen moving violations, and probably racing someone. His insurance company will probably be so happy not to have to pay medical bills that they will buy you a whole new car."

Maybe she could have been a little swifter completing her turn, but it's a busy street and there is a lot of pedestrian and bicycle traffic (it parallels a bike path). Making a quick turn is probably not a good idea. Or, maybe she could have waited until this asshole passed, but, as I pointed out, he was going maybe 50 or 60 in a 30 zone, and accelerating. She timed her turn right for reasonable traffic flow, but didn't account for total maniacs among the oncoming traffic. It would have been difficult to judge when he would reach the intersection she was turning through.

Oi!

As it turns out, Davis has been thinking about redesigning this stretch of Russell Blvd. for several years. If you look at the proposed design, it would have made this accident impossible or unlikely. You can't race on a one lane road, and a landscaped medium would have prevented the second collision.

After almost fifty-some hours riding the train, I have a few impressions worth sharing. I had a lot of time to think, and a lot of things to think about, so I'm going to break this up into a couple of posts.

I expected to get a great deal of work done in that time, and I accomplished absolutely none of it. Not a single jot. I basically spent the whole trip either looking out the window, or happily asleep. There is just too much to look at; breathtaking snow-capped mountains too numerous to name, scores of towns and a dozen cities, the vast arid emptiness of New Mexico, lonely volcanic prominences rising from Euclidean flatness, knots of green trees rioting in pocket valleys bracketed by sterile sun-blasted volcanic rocks, and the profane, hideous pointlessness of Texas cities.

The trip was a grand tour of the majestic beauty of our country, and an industrial colonoscopy showcasing a great deal of what is wrong and twisted about its economy.

I will spare you my gasping about mountains and trees. I lack the skill with words necessary to even crudely sketch such things. You simply have to see it. Instead, I'll tell you about the ugly and fascinating things I saw. They leave me truly awed.

The first thing that struck me was the vast and penetrating impact of exurban development.

It was heartbreaking to see just how much of the land is already destroyed. In California, luxury homes and golf courses fill every level patch of ground from the outskirts of incorporated Los Angeles to Palm Springs. Tuscon and Phoenix have similar, lower-budget penumbras of sprawling exurbs stretching two hundred miles in every direction. In the space between the outskirts of Palm Springs and the outskirts of Tuscon, people are busily making preparations to link these two cities with a continuous smear of houses. I was relieved to notice that many developments in the margins seem to be abandoned. One of them was nothing but rain-swelled chip-board and wind-tattered Tyvek nailed to dozens of identical frames. I regret that the photos didn't turn out.

That isn't to say that I don't have sympathy for the lives and fortunes that are suffering as a result of the economic pestilence that ruined these ventures, especially the craftsmen and laborers. But the fact is, nobody should be building out there. America's natural spaces should be treated like places of worship. Look at these houses huddling at the foot of this mountain:

These are money changers in the temple. I'm not against money changers in general, but they shouldn't ply their trade in my temple. Actually, this is quite a bit worse than the New Testament parable. The money changers could be thrown out and the sacred space restored. After the developers are thrown out, millions of their innocent dupes remain.

As beautiful as it is, this land is both exquisitely fragile and damn miserable to live on. Fragile because there is so little water, and miserable for its looming and contrarian propensity for devastating floods. Fragile because of the trophic poverty of the nutrient-starved ecosystem, and miserable for its tendency to erupt in sudden racing conflagration. Fragile because of the extreme sensitivity of the wildlife to disturbance -- a few scattered bottle caps have likely doomed the recovery of the California condor -- and miserable for the tendency of the wildlife to apply claws and fangs and venom to pets and loved ones. Fragile for the delicate balance of commodity prices and labor market conditions that make inhabitation possible, and miserable for the stress and strain of living on the knife's edge of financial viability, and doubly miserable when the distant rumbling of our global economic system brings your financial house crashing down on your head.

The only way most people can be comfortable in this kind of place is to obliterate it. Suck dry the aquifers, poison coyotes, shoot the mountain lions and the red-tail hawks, pave the chaparral, relocate factories and office buildings and depots from the distant city, blast and grade the mountainsides for drainage ditches and flood control swails, murder the night with the eyewatering glare of sodium vapor floodlamps. Then what have you got? Just another hot, boring place.

Yes, we can inhabit these places. Such is human ingenuity and power that given sufficient amounts of dynamite, concrete, oil and steel, we can probably live anywhere we can reach. We can blast and pave and bulldoze and burn any landscape to suit our purposes. The great challenge of the 19th and early 20th was to learn how to do these things on the scale required by the lethally difficult lands of the American West. A hundred years ago, life in the Mojave desert was so hardscrabble that few of even the most intrepid adventurers bothered to attempt it. Today, we build full-scale replicas of Scottish seascapes on which we play golf.

The great challenge of the centuries to come will be to abstain from exercising this power, and instead develop better enterprises in which to invest our blood and treasure.

Since I've been telling anyone who'll listen for the last couple of years that we've got to use trains for travel more often, I decided that I should take my own advice. I'm going to visit my little sister in Oklahoma, so I'm taking Amtrak there from Los Angeles. I'm taking the Texas Eagle to Fort Worth, and then the Heartland Flyer to Norman, Oklahoma.

It's going to be a long trip (about two days). It could be a lot shorter, but we've been letting our passenger rail service rot for sixty years. I'll post pictures from the trip when I get to Norman, and sooner if I can snipe some WiFi along the way. Until I do, here is a picture of the Capital Corridor train rolling into Davis.

For the first time, I just paid more than $4 a gallon for gasoline. It cost $40.34 to fill the tank on my tiny Toyota Yaris. My commute to UCLA is 37 miles each way, and I get about 38 MPG for that trip. I normally do a little better, but the Sepulveda Pass always seems to wreck my milage. At about $0.11 a mile, one trip costs me $7.77. If I drove in every day, it would cost me about $155 a month. That's almost as much as the payments on the car. If gas goes up another 84 cents, then I'd be paying more for the gasoline than the car just from driving to school.

Ouch.

Meanwhile, a Metro day pass costs $5, and a month pass is $62.00. If you commute in LA, chances are pretty good that your employer will buy your pass for you.

On my way home from UCLA today, I decided to see how fast I ride my bike from Westwood and to the terminus of the Metro Purple Line on Wilshire and Western. Particularly, I was interested to see if I could get there quicker than the 720 bus. To make it fair, I waited until there was almost no traffic for the bus to get mired in. Rush hour now lasts well into the late evening, so traffic was heavy but not jammed at 9:00 PM.

I waited for a 720 bus to pull into the station, and then took off. It was pretty much a dead heat until the Starbucks at San Vincente, and I got a couple of lucky breaks from the walk signals. I beat the bus to Western by about four minutes, completing the trip in 43 minutes without breaking a sweat. Oh, and it's mostly an uphill ride with lots of pedestrians to which one must yield.