Breakfast links: Nothing in life is free

by David Alpert • June 25, 2009 8:49 am

Photo by Emily Penguin.

Germantown parking district: Montgomery County Council staff are recommending creating a parking district in Germantown, to pay for regular cleanup and maintenance of the streets and encourage transit use (if, eventually, they get transit). Councilmember Mike Knapp, who represents the area, supports the concept. (Gazette)

Valet park for class?: Florida Atlantic University is instituting a valet parking service, which costs $5 per hour or $20 per day. Is this a way to "extract surplus" from the students who are late to class? Soak richer students? Ideally, they's use the money to improve transit access to the campus. (Marginal Revolution)

Not so brotherly on TV: Philadelphia allowed A&E to create a reality show, "Parking Wars," about their parking enforcement officials. But the show is giving a bad impression of the city, making officials seem ruthless and unforgiving while drivers cry and plead over tickets. "They have an incentive to be as sensational and ridiculous as they can be so people will watch," said a mayoral spokesperson. "If they did a show about what it was really like, it would be boring." (NY Times)

"Panhandling meters": Some cities have installed "panhandling meters" in popular panhandling areas. They look similar to parking meters but let people contribute to homeless services organizations instead of giving money directly to the homeless. Homeless advocates worry that it's just a way to get the homeless off the streets but not really solve the problem. (End Homelessness, dano)

Dupont row house saved!: DCRA has decided to save rather than demolish the row house at 16th and T whose owner was letting it fall down. DCRA is bidding out its own contract and will charge the owners for the cost. (Examiner, Prince Of Petworth, JTS)

You get what you pay for, but safer anyway: A rare voices of reason in the blame-Metro press coverage, Post columnist Doug Feaver reminds readers that we can't expect Metro to buy all new cars while we chronically underfund the agency, and that despite the tragedy, rail remains far, far safer than driving. (Post, Cavan) ... BeyondDC also ran some back-of-the-envelope numbers on relative safety stats.

The unusual vs. the mundane: Matt Yglesias laments the lack of press coverage of car fatalities. The Post even had touching profiles of each of the victims of Monday's crash; that's wonderful, but wouldn't it be great if they also ran profiles of the drivers, passengers, cyclists and pedestrians killed on area roads?

Federal safety grants?: Senators Rockefeller and Boxer suggested a $50 million grant to improve rail safety technology. That wouldn't bad (if it ever became reality), though the real problem isn't so much a lack of technology as a lack of money to buy the existing technology. (Streetsblog Capitol Hill)

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11 comments

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David Alpert is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Greater Greater Washington and Greater Greater Education. He worked as a Product Manager for Google for six years and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He loves the area which is, in many ways, greater than those others, and wants to see it become even greater.

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That must be the source of the number I heard the other day...that rail systems are 14 times safer than driving: The National Safety Council rates of fatalities per 100 million passenger miles.

by Froggie on Jun 25, 2009 9:51 am • link • report

comparing passenger miles can be very misleading. Take airplanes; compared with cars in passenger miles they look very safe. When you take into account most air accidents occur at takeoff or landing, and then compare that to cars, suddenly planes don't look quite so safe.

In much the same way, cars are very safe unless:

1) you are driving past midnight
2) you not on an interstate
3) you are drunk
4) you are under 20
5) you are driving over 60 MPH
6) you are not wearing a seat belt.

And of course, the fatality rate itself is a failed measurement b/c a lot of car accidents today are survivable because of better medicine.

by charlie on Jun 25, 2009 10:07 am • link • report

"Homeless advocates worry that it's just a way to get the homeless off the streets but not really solve the problem."

I've visited one of these cities, and call me heartless, but lots of aggressive homeless people on the streets IS a problem.

by Bubba on Jun 25, 2009 10:22 am • link • report

I didn't read Matt's post, but in a car crash usually at least one of the people was doing something irresponsible (drunk driving, driving too fast, tailgating, crossing the median, etc.) so there is less sympathy for the victims unless you can determine which one was totally innocent. On the other hand, riders of a Metro train are all sympathetic victims (is that grammatically correct?) from the newspaper's perspective.

That having been said, I agree that the media hype makes air travel and transit sound more dangerous than driving because the fatalities that do happen are so much more dramatic than the more numerous car fatalities.

Not to spark another debate, but it's a bit like AIDS (or West Nile Virus of Bird Flu) and heart disease. Heart disease is the unglamorous killer that claims many more victims, but it's harder to sympathize with the victims because we blame them for eating too many bratwursts or something.

by Ward 1 Guy on Jun 25, 2009 10:32 am • link • report

Charlie I'm not sure what you're getting at. Driving is safe, until it's not?

I think perhaps what you're getting at is this: if the question is what mode of travel should you use if you want to be safer, you should only compare stats of relative modes of travel. In other words, if you live in Bethesda and want to travel to downtown, you should only consider the fatality rates of Metro and the fatality rate of drivers driving roughly that same route. If the driver fatality rates are skewed by late night driving or highway driving, and you aren't considering that option, then their effect of the fatality rate shouldn't be considered.

I would imagine that the fatality rate of the average car trip avoided by riding Metro is probably lower than the overall rate. Nonetheless, I would imagine it's still multiple times higher than Metro's fatality rate.

by Reid on Jun 25, 2009 10:32 am • link • report

When you start measuring safety by passenger miles traveled against fatalities/injuries, the space shuttle is the safest mode of transportation.

by ksu499 on Jun 25, 2009 10:50 am • link • report

Charlie (and ksu499) -- while the comparison of driving to flying/space shuttling by miles travelled raises issues, the comparison to metro/trains does not raise the same issues. Using metro is almost a direct substitute for driving. Trip length is similar in both cases. Sure, you could compare it to urban driving (excluding highways) but I suspect you'd still end up in a similar result.

by ah on Jun 25, 2009 11:56 am • link • report

I digress, but on my back of the napkin calculations re: Space Shuttle.

1193 total mission days @ Approximately 17000 miles per hour / 14 fatalities = 1 death per 34 million miles traveled, which is 3 times the rate of cars. Right?

by Local on Jun 25, 2009 12:02 pm • link • report

"Homeless advocates worry that it's just a way to get the homeless off the streets but not really solve the problem."

Love the hand-waving. What's going to "really solve the problem"? Forced institutionalization and pharmacological treatment of the mentally ill?

by ibc on Jun 25, 2009 12:32 pm • link • report

@ksu499, Local: Space shuttles have orbited 19133 times--if there is an average crew of 6, that's just over 3 billion passenger-miles, so 0.46 deaths per 100 million passenger miles. Looking at this APTA table or this TPB report, the shuttle is "safer" than private cars and either equivalent to or much worse than trains and buses.

by thm on Jun 25, 2009 12:49 pm • link • report

@ THM. Ah yes, I did miles for the vehicles, not passenger miles. You are correct.

by Local on Jun 25, 2009 1:09 pm • link • report