Language - Greater Greater Washington

It's a "collision," not an "accident," in New York

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 08:49:00 EDT

The NYPD will start investigating crashes that seriously injure pedestrians and cyclists, in addition to fatal ones. Also, the department is going to start calling them "collisions" or "crashes" and avoid the term "accident" with its inherent connotation of no fault. (NYT)

Comment

What's in a name?

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 08:35:00 EDT

by Steven Yates

Congestion pricing might be a good idea, but is it the wrong term to gain support? "Decongestion pricing"? "Road fares"? (Human Transit)

Comment

MoCo planners considering congestion pricing (May 27, 2008)
Congestion pricing, pro and incoherent (Nov 22, 2005)
Conservatives for congestion pricing (Feb 8, 2007)
Golden Gate congestion pricing out, performance parking in (Aug 20, 2008)
Field report: San Francisco congestion pricing workshop (Aug 5, 2008)

And...

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 08:40:00 EDT

by David Alpert

Is Transit-Oriented Development the new black in DC? (Globe St) ... What words do we use to talk about urban planning? (Atlantic Cities) ... Metro trains are starting to run on the Silver Line, for testing. (BeyondDC)

Comment

Will the Silver Line produce sprawl like highways do? (Mar 20, 2011)
What's the status of our major transit projects? (Jun 29, 2011)
Maryland worried about new transit-hostile FTA (Feb 8, 2008)
The Corridor Cities Transitway and the future of the middle suburbs (Dec 29, 2008)
Metro isn't always the best option for transit expansion (Sep 21, 2010)

Driver hits kids on Walk to School Day

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 08:35:00 EDT

by David Alpert

A driver ran off the road and hit 2 teens on Randolph Road during Walk to School Day. Police statements and press reports use tortured language to avoid describing the driver as controlling the car. (Gazette)

Comment

Safety is no accident, says Carr (Feb 23, 2010)
The hazards of driving: Michael Phelps and you (Aug 18, 2009)
Rebuilt Wheaton High could give community a new face (Jul 12, 2011)
Bad driver or bad design? North Bethesda and CaBi (Jun 4, 2012)
Montgomery continues "pedestrian removal" in Wheaton (Mar 21, 2012)

"Virtual tunnel"? Got a better name?

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 08:24:00 EDT

by David Alpert

Metro is setting up the "virtual tunnel" for riders to transfer for free outside the system between Farragut North and West. But "virtual tunnel" is, they say, "a bit wonkish." They're asking for ideas for a better name.

Comment

WMATA readying software for Farragut "virtual tunnel" (Dec 11, 2010)
Testing the "Invisible Tunnel" (Oct 30, 2008)
Metro will look at the "invisible tunnel" "later this year" (Jun 29, 2010)
Contest: Design a better Metro map (Mar 14, 2011)
Sarles promises action, Board mixed on bag searches (Jan 27, 2011)

As you an "autoist"?

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 12:58:00 EDT

by David Alpert

Someone who rides a cycle is a cyclist. Why not call a car driver an "autoist"? Turns out, that up until the late 1970s, that term was fairly commonplace in some newspapers. (headsup, Matt')

Comment

Bike hit-and-run in Mt. Vernon Triangle

Sat, 27 Nov 2010 12:03:00 EDT

by Erik Weber

A man on a bicycle struck an elderly couple walking in an alley, injuring them both, the man critically. The Post acknowledges that Police are "seeking a bicyclist." Now if only they'd acknowledge that cars, too, don't drive themselves. (Joshua D.)

Comment

AJC unabashedly deserts city of Atlanta

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 10:13:00 EDT

by Erik Weber

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution isn't even subtle about its suburban slant anymore, moving its headquarters to the northern suburbs, and banning the word "sprawl" from its pages. (Creative Loafing Atlanta)

Comment

The era of big commute is over (Aug 5, 2008)
Transparently slanted Post article pits suburbanites against the city (Jul 6, 2008)
Be like Berlin (May 20, 2008)
Frontline examines imperiled watersheds and the Arlington solution (Apr 22, 2009)
Suburban stereotypes pollute Post, WBJ reporting (Jul 6, 2009)

This car really could hit a pedestrian

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 09:49:00 EDT

by Joshua Davis

The dreams of many a science fiction fan have been realized with the news that Google is piloting a driverless car. Google engineers claim this technology will reduce crashes, but the article noted the driver ~~had to~~ disengaged the "autopilot" when a bike ~~made a sudden turn~~ ran a red light in front of their vehicle. Soon reporters could accurately write about cars hitting pedestrians. Update: As commenters have noted, the article also says that the car "seemed likely" to have avoided hitting the cyclist.

Comment

Avoid biased language

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 15:25:00 EDT

by David Alpert

If you haven't seen Palm Beach, Florida's 1996 neutral language policy, it's worth a read. (Human Transit, BeyondDC)

Comment

Can you find a better bike sharing system name?

Mon, 24 May 2010 12:44:00 EDT

by Dan Malouff

Last week, DC and Arlington announced a massive new regional bike-sharing system to replace SmartBike and be implemented later this year. But what will it be named?

Minneapolis is going with "Nice Ride."

DDOT has a survey at which you can vote for up to three of their 17 ideas, but the "other" box at the bottom of their survey implies that nobody is too enamored with any of the suggestions so far.

Can we do better?

For the record, here are the 17 candidate names put forth by DC and Arlington: Bike2Go, BikeAround, Bikington, CAB (Capital Area Bixi), Capital Bikeshare, George, GoBike, Capital Bixi, PopCycle, ShareCycle, Spin, Velo2Go, Ucycle, WeBike, WeCycle, YouCycle, and ZoomBike.

Several of those names follow the SmartBike model of a compound word. That seems suggestive, so here are some ideas along those lines:

Pick one word from each column to form a compound:

City
Wash
Smart
Best
Metro
We
Our
Flex
Share
Skip
Hop
Zip
Web
Net

Bike
Cycle
Ride
Velo

There are 112 unique combinations using that table. Some of them duplicate DDOT ideas, like WeBike and WeCycle, while others invoke familiar brands, like MetroCycle and ZipBike. While WMATA and ZipCar might object to names that imply a connection, would anyone care if we took advantage of an old car-sharing brand and named our system FlexBike?

What about something like BikeWeb, which could open up all sorts of fun logo concepts, or something like CityCycle, which might be a little generic, but hey, alliterative. VeloFlex sounds cool, but will Americans accept such a European-sounding name?

Of course, the name doesn't have to be a compound. Maybe Hop works better on its own. Or maybe there's a good acronym out there, following the CAB model. Or we could deviate from the word Bixi itself. Replace the B with D for DC and you get Dixi, with all its political connotations, but W for Washington results in Wixi, which could catch on. Or maybe we invent a new word altogether; Bixi is a combination of bicycle and taxi, so how about we combine bicycle and Metro to form Bitro?

There are thousands of ideas out there. What do you think? Like one of the 17 DDOT suggestions? Like one of mine? Got your own? Let's hear it.

53 comments

Arlington, DC announce 1,100-bike regional bike sharing (May 21, 2010)
Capital Bikeshare, launching today, will change everything (Sep 20, 2010)
Bike sharing maps multiply (Jul 21, 2010)
Let's stimulate with a major bike sharing program (Mar 6, 2009)
Bike news (Jul 3, 2009)

Teen struck by bullet

Mon, 17 May 2010 09:31:00 EDT

by David Alpert

I've often compared crash reporting to shooting reporting, and said news stories never write, "A person was killed yesterday when he collided with a bullet moving at high speed in the opposite direction." But this report from Frederick, "Bullet strikes teen in Frederick in head," comes pretty close. (Post)

Comment

Medical Examiner "accident" finding causes confusion

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 10:24:00 EDT

by David Alpert

WTOP created some consternation among cyclists last night with its brief news item entitled, "Cyclist death officially ruled an accident."

Photo by drewsaunders.

The article says that the Medical Examiner's office "has ruled the death of bicyclist Constance Holden an accident." At first blush, it looks like the city's investigatory apparatus has again dismissed a cyclist's death, and so quickly. However, this is not the conclusion of the crash investigation, which will take more time. This is just the medical examiner's classification.

Medical examiners assign a "manner of death" to each fatality, and it falls into a small number of fixed categories. In DC, those are "natural, accident, suicide, homicide, undetermined, and pending."

In short, when the Medical Examiner says "accident" here, they don't mean "accidental" as in "unpreventable," but "accidental" as in "not deliberate." There's no way for the M.E. to determine the circumstances that led to the victim being hit with "multiple blunt impact injuries." They are basically just concluding that, for example, Ms. Holden didn't also suffer a heart attack just before the crash, or that after the crash someone didn't also shoot her while she was still alive.

This is a particularly clear example of the problems with using the word "accident" to talk about traffic crashes. All the Medical Examiner determined was that the crash was the cause of Ms. Holden's death. Yet using the term "accident" as the manner of death implies that the M.E. has determined more than that; that they've also determined nobody was at fault. That's not what they are saying, but many people could and did jump to that conclusion upon reading a fairly non-insightful news article.

The problems with this medical examiner's classification scheme go beyond just traffic incidents. Last year, I sat on a jury in a murder trial. The decedent had died from falling and hitting his head on a step. The prosecution argued another man had hit him with an unknown object first, causing him to pass out and fall; the defense argued he was drunk and fell on his own.

The DC Medical Examiner classified the death a homicide. However, the defense argued that they had done so in part because they had seen the police report which talked about this other man. If there had been nobody else there, said the defense, would they still have ruled it a homicide? How did they really know? It was difficult to separate out how much of the M.E.'s conclusion came from scientific evidence and how much came from outside information.

The Public Defender Service brought in Delaware's Chief Medical Examiner, who said he would have ruled it an accident. Putting these classifications on seems to only serve to try to prejudice juries one way or the other. The scientific expert thinks it's a homicide, so it must be a homicide, some might think, even though that scientific expert is really just coming to that conclusion because that's what the police already think.

It does a disservice to Constance Holden to say that her death was "officially ruled an accident." Her death was officially determined to have occurred as a consequence of the injuries she sustained from her encounter with a large military truck. How that truck came to be in contact with her body, and whether that was blamelessly accidental, negligence, involuntary manslaughter (a form of homicide) or something else is for the police investigators to determine, not the Medical Examiner.

18 comments

Bike death was a "right hook" cyclist broke no laws (Jul 8, 2008)
Summit security fails to protect (Apr 13, 2010)
Safety is no accident, says Carr (Feb 23, 2010)
Struck in DC this week: Don't be a jerk edition (Nov 28, 2010)
Frequent enforcement, better data needed for road safety (Feb 4, 2011)

3 ped crashes, one hour

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:41:00 EDT

by David Alpert

Three drivers hit pedestrians this weekend, in Greenbelt, near Seven Corners, and at 14th and Constitution in DC. Two of the victims died. The Fairfax and DC drivers did not stop. (Post)

All three areas are designed primarily for vehicle throughput, creating dangerous conditions for pedestrians. Also, Matt Zapotosky almost entirely avoids the word "accident" in his story.

Comment

Safety is no accident, says Carr

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:26:00 EDT

by David Alpert

Maryland Delegates Al Carr (D-Kensington) and Bill Bronrott (D-Bethesda) have introduced a bill to replace the word "accident" with "crash" in the state's laws. The House will hold a hearing on the bill this afternoon.

Accident, Maryland. Photo by oh_candy.

The bill would use the word "crash" instead of "accident" where it occurs in the laws of the State of Maryland, such as in the sections requiring police reports after certain types of crashes, requiring drivers to provide insurance information after a crash, etc.

This may seem like a triviality, but it matters. While "accident" has become a common term for these types of vehicular incidents, it also carries a connotation of being beyond the reasonable control of any person.

We have the phrase, "it was just an accident," where "just" in that case implies blamelessness. Some uses of the word "accident" imply a complete lack of agency by the parties as well, such as "chance; fortune; luck: I was there by accident." There's also the phrase "an accident of birth," over which the individual involved has no control.

Merriam-Webster defines "accident" as "an unforeseen and unplanned event or circumstance." While certainly crashes are unplanned and even unforeseen by the parties involved, they are often not unforeseeable; many so-called "accidents" stem from drunk driving, speeding, and poor road design. There are many specific locations and times of day where crashes occur frequently, and while we don't foresee the specifics, we absolutely foresee the general occurrences.

In fact, crash reporting sometimes even uses the term "accident" when there is a clear intention, and the incident is neither unplanned nor unforeseen, such as in those tragic cases where a driver has purposefully run down a cyclist or pedestrian. Those are certainly no accident.

The bill proposes the word "crash." Unlike "accident," "crash" implies nothing about the humans involved. It doesn't suggest that they had no control, but neither does it insinuate that they did. It says nothing about whether the incident was foreseen or not, or foreseeable or not. Vehicles collided; the technical term for this is a "crash." Crashes can be major or minor; they can be entirely happenstance with no blame or they can even be intentional.

"Crash" speaks to the physical event that took place, whereas "accident" speaks to the circumstances. Since exchanging of insurance information, police reports, and the other subjects with which Maryland law concerns itself take place before most facts have been established, using a neutral term like "crash" is the appropriate course of action.

Other jurisdictions have established "neutral language policies" that go beyond this bill. In addition to using neutral terms in laws, some policies ask police to use "crash" in place of "accident" in incident reports and public statements, for example. That would be a good step to take as well, though this bill is a good start. Kudos to Carr and Bronrott for sponsoring this legislation.

19 comments

Medical Examiner "accident" finding causes confusion (Apr 16, 2010)
Two cases where reporters, police don't dismiss crashes (Apr 7, 2009)
Frequent enforcement, better data needed for road safety (Feb 4, 2011)
Three Maryland delegates sign Google Transit petition (Dec 15, 2008)
3 questions with Md. delegate candidate Scott Goldberg (May 27, 2010)

Do we need a name for anti-bike-ism?

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:21:00 EDT

by David Alpert

Bicycle advocates were surprised and disappointed that Virginia legislators, particularly Republicans, defeated a seemingly innocuous measure to change Virginia's standard for drivers passing cyclists from 2 to 3 feet, to match the practice in most states.

Photo by velobry.

Based on their summary, the bill mainly didn't go down to defeat because legislators thought 2 feet was better. Rather, they perceived cyclists as a group not deserving of any added protections from the law.

Here are some arguments the Virginia Bicycling Federation reported hearing from legislators at the hearing:

"Bicyclists are often law breakers, unworthy of any added protection under the law."
"Bicyclists are inconsiderate when they delay drivers from getting to their destinations, especially in narrow lanes or roads."
"Bicyclists should police themselves before coming in asking for added legal protections."
"A 3 ft. passing rule would inconvenience and hazard motorists by requiring them to move into the adjacent or oncoming travel lanes."

Only the last item is actually about the passing distance itself. But even with a 2-foot rule, drivers still have to either get into the adjacent lane, or at least move substantially enough into that lane that they might as well move in entirely.

Many drivers think they can or should pass cyclists by squeezing through in the same lane. That's dangerous and illegal in most places. To pass safely, a driver needs enough room to move over to the adjacent lane, at least temporarily.

More worrisome is the attitude which we hear all the time from letter writers to local newspapers, talking heads, blog commenters, and even legislators, that bicyclists are lawless hoodlums not deserving of any protection from the law.

Yes, some cyclists break laws, and some cyclists ride very recklessly. Of course, many motorists break laws too, like speeding, not stopping at stop signs, not yielding to pedestrians, driving in bike lanes, assaulting each other, pedestrians, and cyclists, yelling at police officers, and more.

That doesn't excuse cyclist misbehavior, but it's also totally unfair to blame all cyclists for the dangerous actions of a few or the mildly illegal actions of many when drivers do the same thing. Most drivers generally act respectfully but do break laws in small ways like speeding, and a few drivers are really bad. Same for cyclists.

When a majority builds up and expresses incorrect and biased attitudes about a minority group, we call that out. If white people say that black people don't deserve the same rights or respect, we call that racism. If men say that women don't deserve the same rights or respect, we call that sexism. If straight people say that gay people don't deserve the same rights or respect, we call that homophobia.

This anti-cyclist attitude needs a name, too. These Virginia legislators aren't just misinformed and pigheaded, they're also cyclist-ist. Or something. I haven't seen a good name for this prejudice. Have you? Any ideas?

Update: Racism, sexism, etc. are of course far worse than cyclist hatred, and I don't mean to mean that oppressed cyclists are being mistreated as badly as ethnic groups once were and often still are. However, that doesn't make this attitude not a form of prejudice, and one worthy of being named and criticized, even if it's lower on the scale of prejudices than some.

148 comments

Letters: Cycling safety starts with cyclists (May 24, 2010)
Bus driver assaults cyclist, MPD uninterested (Mar 4, 2009)
Not stopping doesn't make every cyclist a "rogue" (Feb 9, 2009)
Enforce bicycle laws, but the right laws (Jan 16, 2009)
Chicago trains officers on cycling laws (Sep 12, 2009)

Driver kills two

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:27:00 EDT

by David Alpert

Two drivers hit each other in a minor fender bender near Adelphi, but while exchanging insurance info, another driver crashed into them both, killing them. According to one witness, her headlights were off (it was 10:45 pm). Note how the article says the two men "crashed into each other," but then the SUV "approached and hit both men." (Post)

Comment

Driver kills one of NYC's oldest

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:03:00 EDT

by David Alpert

A driver killed 104-year-old Joe Rollino in Brooklyn. The driver faces no charges, just a ticket for a "defective horn," since she was not speeding or intoxicated. The Times reporters doesn't bat much of an eyelash about that, nor their persistent writing that "a minivan" killed Mr. Rollino. (NYT, Dan)

Comment

Two-driver car replaces driverless cars?

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:11:00 EDT

by David Alpert

Two people drove a car into the Anacostia River, says the WUSA headline. It's still unclear how that happened (following a GPS, maybe?), but they're okay. After chuckling in amusement, note how the headline not only puts them in control of the car, but suggests that both of the people were "driving," in contrast to all the "car hits pedestrian" driverless headlines.

Comment

Another driverless car

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 07:41:00 EDT

by Joey Katzen

WTOP provides another example of a press report about a seemingly driverless car. "A car drove into an office building in Bethesda. ... An 82-year-old woman was driving her car into a driveway leading to the building. The car sped up, hit a pylon, went along a retaining and then went into the building in the front of the Citrine Salon." The woman is driving the car, right up until the moment when it started speeding up and hit the pylon. (AP/WTOP) By comparison, the Post admits that the woman "lost control of the car." (David A)

Comment

Bicyclist killed because he was riding in the road?

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 09:20:00 EDT

by David Alpert

A driver hit and killed a cyclist near Hollywood, St. Mary's County, in Southern Maryland. In their preliminary statement, authorities actually blame the bicyclist for "traveling in the main roadway, rather than on the shoulder." WashCycle notes that it's indeed illegal to ride in the road when there's a shoulder in St. Mary's County, but riding in the road is the safer behavior; really, the cyclist died because the driver didn't see him. The article's lede also goes through the usual linguistic contortions including the phantom driverless car and use of passive voice. (Post, Ward 1 Guy)

Comment

Is it working?

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:38:00 EDT

by David Alpert

Maybe some reporters are noticing the linguistic bias issue. This ABC7 article leads with the text, "Police are investigating whether a medical emergency caused a man to crash into a Ride On bus Tuesday afternoon." Sadly, the driver died in the crash near Damascus. (Dustin)

Comment

Rail implicated falsely by reporters� use of active voice

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:43:00 EDT

by Matt Johnson

Writers and commenters here at Greater Greater Washington frequently note the onset of the windshield perspective in reporters, columnists, and other bloggers. In news stories, drivers are frequently left out in favor of their car, which seems to have been the sole party in the accident. Recently, I've also noticed a frequent misleading use of verbs or the active voice to seemingly implicate the train in a rail-car or rail-pedestrian collision. David has written about the use of the passive voice in the media, and makes several good points.

Photo by the author.

The most egregious case of this I've seen appeared in the Chicago Tribune over the summer. In the wake of a tragic accident, their story's headline screamed: "Amtrak train rams car, killing Joliet husband and wife." Reading the article, however, one discovers that the couple made an illegal right turn in front of the northbound Texas Eagle, which was traveling about 60 mph. The Amtrak driver had no chance to stop, yet some reporter thinks he's guilty of "ramming." The Tribune article is no longer available. Here's a link to WGN Radio's article.

The Amtrak engineer was not at fault. Police report that the crossing gates and lights were working. In all likelihood, this was a tragic case of driver error. The road which the car was on is parallel to the tracks. At a signal, the sixty-four year old driver turned right onto a street crossing the tracks. She did so in violation of a sign which lights up when a train is approching prohibiting right turns. It is likely she was paying attention to the regular through-movement signal, which was green.

But the Tribune's headline was rather inflammatory. The train didn't ram the vehicle. It was just traveling along the tracks when a vehicle started to cross in front of it. Trains take time to stop. A more appropriate headline might have been "Driver turns in front of train, two killed." Consider the Sun-Times' article title, "At least one killed in train vs. car accident." Or that of WGN News, "Two people killed when Amtrak train hits car."

This is not, unfortunately, a first for the Tribune. In a search of their archives, I unearthed two other articles where a train "rammed" a vehicle which should not have been on the tracks. In one 1999 incident, a driver drove around the crossing gates to beat a commuter train, which "rammed" his car. Earlier, in 1988, a twenty year old driver, trying to beat the train in Morton Grove was "rammed" by an Amtrak train.

There is, of course, no mention in the article about the engineer. He or she will likely suffer greatly from knowing that he or she was behnind the throttle of a locomotive that killed two. The San Jose Mercury News recently delved into the topic of the trauma suffered by Caltrain engineers after collisions (h/t TOW).

Unfortunately, this is not isolated to the Chicago Tribune. Seattle recently opened their first light rail line. During construction, some vocal opponents decried the "dangerous" situation that Link would create in the city. So shortly after opening, I was disappointed to read this headline "Light-rail train hits, kills pedestrian." In this case, while all the verbs are correct, one of the nouns isn't. The struck person was not a pedestrian, but a person committing suicide-by-transit. Still the headline seems to place the blame on 'dangerous' Link.

The most common misleading use of grammar is to give the train the active voice in a headline. Despite the fact that many crashes are caused by impatient or imprudent drivers, trains often do the "striking" while autos and pedestrians are "struck". Technically this is correct, the train does often hit the person or vehicle on the track, but the use of passive voice for the auto or pedestrian alleviates the responsibility of the "object", placing it instead on the subject.

Consider these two headlines from different places. The first, from OregonLive.com, uses the active voice, "Train kills man in Woodburn as he tries to cross tracks." Here, the train does the action to the pedestrian, who according to witnesses, misjudged the speed of the train when he tried to beat it. Alternatively, the Chicago Sun-Times reports a "Man struck fatally by freight train on West Side." In the latter case, the implication of guilt is not put on either party.

Using the right verbiage in news articles is important because the way the press treats these stories affects the way the public views rail and transit projects. If communities look at trains as dangerous (and if they go around ramming cars at random, they probably are dangerous), they will be more likley to fight them. But also by taking responsibility away from the car driver, other motorists don't see the danger involved in trying to beat the train.

18 comments

Two cases where reporters, police don't dismiss crashes (Apr 7, 2009)
Excessive passive voice, linguistic detachment observed in Culpeper road fatality (Mar 23, 2009)
Pedestrian hit at Comet Square; driver "cited with a violation" (Feb 4, 2009)
Summit security fails to protect (Apr 13, 2010)
Pedestrian killed on Connecticut Avenue (Oct 2, 2008)

Why "pedestrians"?

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 08:18:00 EDT

by David Alpert

Tom Vanderbilt asks an interesting question: Why do we call someone a "pedestrian" when they're on the street, but not if they're walking down a hallway in the office or hiking in the woods? Also, does Costco intentionally underbuild parking to encourage people to make fewer trips but buy more each time? (How We Drive)

Comment

Two bicycle fatalities in Virginia

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:04:00 EDT

by David Alpert

A driver killed a cyclist in a hit-and-run in Gainesville. He was on Lee Highway's paved shoulder at the time. Another bicyclist died in a crash in Rockingham County. WHSV 3 has no problem writing "the driver hit the bicyclist." (TheWashCycle, WHSV 3)

Comment

'Accident' out at NY AAA

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:04:00 EDT

by David Alpert

In the CNN interview, Sinclair also agreed that 'accident' isn't the appropriate language. "We don't say 'accidents' any more, because it implies some measure of fate, and all these things are preventable ... The #1 cause of death for someone aged birth to 44 years is a car crash," he said. Lon?

Comment

Economy, opposition make VDOT postpone I-95/395 HOT lanes

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:27:00 EDT

by David Alpert

The Virginia DOT has decided to pause its plans to build High-Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes along I-95 and I-395 from the Pentagon to Spotsylvania County. VDOT hasn't recognized the folly of its widening plans, but is bowing—at least temporarily—to financial and opposition pressure.

Photo by Washington State DOT.

The opposition pressure comes mostly from Arlington County, which is planning a lawsuit against the Federal Highway Administration for the project. Alexandria is considering joining as well.

During the Bush Administration, FHWA gave the project a Categorical Exclusion which essentially says that the project will have no significant environmental effect at all. VDOT did the same for the I-66 widening, and that project wouldn't have created full through lanes, as the HOT lane project would.

Federal law is clear that "growth inducing effects and other effects related to induced changes in the pattern of land use, population density or growth rate," also known as induced demand, is indeed an environmental effect.

Arlington is most concerned with the project's effect on neighborhoods in and around Shirlington, where VDOT proposes changes to Shirlington Circle including more lanes and traffic lights. Residents of nearby neighborhoods worry that the project will add cut-through traffic and that construction will damage historic buildings. The Alexandria Gazette Packet writes,

The Virginia Department of Transportation says that it followed the approved rules to create a document known as an "interchange justification report" that led to federal approval the categorical exclusion. But officials in Alexandria and Arlington believe that the project did not receive an adequate review because roads near the interchanges were not studied.
"Where do you stop?" asked VDOT project manager Young Ho Chang. "The theory is that if the interchange functions better with the project then all the intersections around the interchange will also function better."

Like his previous statements, Chang seems blind to any possible downside of adding car lanes. This quote reveals the deeply entrenched traffic engineer mindset that "moving cars faster" equals an intersection "functioning better."

As the West Palm Beach, Florida Neutral Language Policy explains, that's false. Adding vehicular capacity may make the intersection better for some, but also may worsen it others. For example, widening a typical suburban intersection by adding turn lanes often creates a much more dangerous intersection for pedestrians. That's why West Palm Beach banned traffic lingo like calling an intersection widening an "upgrade."

Given that this project will inevitably spur more housing growth in Spotsylvania County for people commuting to DC, generating new traffic, the intersections may become more clogged with cars even with more lanes. Finally, even by traffic engineer standards Chang's statement makes no sense. If one intersection moves more cars at higher speed, nearby intersections may become more congested. Chang's statement belies a fundamental belief that any increase in vehicular capacity is an unmitigated good. He seems genuinely baffled as to why Arlington and Alexandria might not want all this goodness he's trying to bestow on them.

The HOT lane projects are also losing popularity and political support as more residents become aware of the onerous provisions in the Beltway contract, like the requirement that Virginia pay Fluor-Transurban if more than 24% of drivers carpool. Residents along the Beltway have also been surprised at the numbers of trees cut down and the extent of the construction impacts. Most of all, VDOT's rapidly shrinking budget and a tough credit market have shattered hopes of borrowing from the future to build the freeways today, as Maryland did with the ICC.

Homer insists his staff will continue working hard to sell the plan. We haven't heard the last of HOT lanes in Virginia.

19 comments

Widening I-66 is far from insignificant (Oct 6, 2008)
VDOT widening I-66 in Arlington, sweeping environmental impact under the rug (Oct 2, 2008)
Would I-66 widening increase accidents? VDOT doesn't know (Oct 28, 2008)
Submit your comments against I-66 widening (Nov 11, 2008)
Highway departments set on HOT lanes (May 8, 2009)