Monday’s Friday Reads – 13 November 2019

On By In Friday Reads, Pedestrians, Podcast, Trams/Streetcars/LRT

• Underground to improve broadband speeds (IanVisits)

• The end for the Cairn-Gorm mountain railway? (RailTechnology)

• Boo! Who’s afraid of the pedestrian mall? (Curbed)

• Gradials and the unreasonable road network (Transportist)

• Sydney adds more light and heavy rail (UrbanTransport)

• Cars, parking, and motorways podcast (BBC3Arts&Ideas)

• Int’l Day of pedestrian danger & death – Halloween (PriceTags)

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7 comments

  3. I like the new podcast series The Engineers Collective from New Civil Engineer, subjects covered so far Airports, HS2, Crossrail 2, digital twins ect.

    The Economist podcast The Secret History of the Future episode S1E4:The Fault In Our Cars is worth listening to, it compares the first pedestrian killed by a car in New York 1899 to a recent fatal crash with a driverless car and mentions how the American Car Industry demonised pedestrians by inventing the term Jaywalker, jay means a stupid person, originally country bumpkin like a village idiot and lobbied for it to be an offence.

    Lloyd Alter who writes for the Treehugger website likes The War On Cars podcasts, I liked the episode Barcelona’s Superblocks. I think his article Low-Clearance Rapid Transit: Cheaper Than Subways, Faster Than Trolleys is very interesting, the idea is to pedestrianise minor roads and dig low short shallow tunnels without overhead cables under main roads to reduce delays and make trams faster.
    https://www.treehugger.com/public-transportation/low-clearance-rapid-transit-cheaper-subways-faster-trolleys.html

  5. I found interesting the PriceTags article on the high rate of pedestrian accidents at Halloween in the US, though not really for its main point. It isn’t exactly surprising that if children go out walking around the neighbourhood in the dark, in quantity far above any other day of the year, there will be many more pedestrian road accidents on such an evening. There is a risk per mile in being a pedestrian, it is higher when it is dark and it is higher when you are a child. (Another major risk factor is intoxication, but that doesn’t apply here, I hope.) The spike in deaths is a statistical inevitability.

    It is the wider comments around this that I find more interesting. I also found this article, trying to put them in context. https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/23/20927512/traffic-death-crash-statistics-nhtsa-us-2018. Comparing the figure in that article with the rate of about 10 pedestrian fatalities per million per year in Eurostat data, it looks like the rate of fatal pedestrian accidents per million population is getting on for double in the US than it is in the EU, and the trends are different too. Problems include the much greater risk to pedestrians from being hit by SUVs and riskier driving by SUV owners who feel safer when driving them. A lot of accidents occur at crossings when the pedestrian had priority.

    At a higher level, we can infer that road accident risk is something that the US has so far been less willing to address than EU countries, even though one would suggest that the value of life, and thus the value of death-reducing policies, ought to be higher in the US than the EU. Not the only area of policy where a similar observation can be made.

  6. Looking at the map, I’m astounded at the number of other (non-walking) methods of getting up The Cairn Gorm …..
    One wonders about simply letting it rust away, actually.

  7. Trivial point – it’s the Cairngorm Mountain Railway, which ascends Cairn Gorm, the mountain. No hyphen, though. The corresponding one in North Wales isn’t the Snowdonia Mountain Railway, of course.

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