We need a sign for zipper merges (pdf). (There is a bunch proposed here, but it does not seem so obvious)

Minneapolis is banning parking on one side of most residential streets starting Thursday.

That day at 8 a.m., parking will be banned on the even-numbered side of non-snow emergency routes.

The ban will last until April 1, unless conditions allow it to be lifted earlier, the city said Tuesday.

This is an interesting experiment. (What data should be collected?) I think streets should be used for movement rather than storage of vehicles, though I recognize the traffic calming effects of parked cars.

TORONTO -- Researchers at a Toronto hospital say that every hour spent driving could lead to a 20-minute loss in life expectancy.

Using complex computer models, a team at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre determined that, much like how each cigarette smoked takes about five minutes off of a person's life, the more time spent behind the wheel, the more likely a person is to die in a car crash.

"When drivers try to speed to get to their destination faster, they actually lose more time because the savings from faster travel are offset by the increased prospect of a crash," said Dr. Donald Redelmeier, the study's lead researcher.

But the study also found that slowing down the average speed of North American drivers by just three kilometres an hour "yielded 11,000 fewer crashes each day, saved about $10 million from property damage each day, and conserved about 199 cumulative life years" across the continent.

The research was published in the latest edition of the journal Medical Decision Making.

I couldn't find the article, but I was curious, so I used a non-complex model ...
Back of the envelope, people spend 365 hours in a car each year and live 80 years. So 365*80=29,200 hours. (About an hour a day, a rough average for a lifespan, too high for children, too low for active adults).

In the US there are about 40,000 car deaths per year, and assume average life expectancy is 80 years. In 80 years there will be 3.2 million car deaths. If US population is about 320 million (which it will be by 2020), there is about a 1% chance of dying in a car crash over a lifespan. Assume the death occurs at age 40, there will be 40 years of life lost (or 350,400 hours). A 1% chance of a 40 year loss gives an expected lost of 3504 hours.

If everything is linear (which it isn't), for each hour driving you lose .12 hours (7.2 minutes), about 1/3 of the 20 minutes claimed in the article.

After hitting nearly 95 million in 2008, including a 27-year high for Metro Transit, the region's main bus system, ridership throughout the various regional transit systems is expected to sink below 90 million when the final numbers are in, according to figures released as part of Metropolitan Council Chairman Peter Bell's "State of the Region" address last week.

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For your blog since you've been keeping up with the slugs predicting roadways, here is a story of a drop of oil that solves a maze. I'm not sure what happens if the slugs get their hands on the oil, but there seems to be some spurious lesson about intelligence from these stories. What a maze-solving oil drop tells us of intelligence (New Scientist)

Wells got urban centrifugal and centripetal forces quite well.

Slime mold validates efficiency of Tokyo rail network

It is not clear to me who has precedence, UK or Japan based slime mold researchers, but interesting nonetheless.

... Jeff Jones and Andrew Adamatzky, specialists in unconventional computing at the University of the West of England in Bristol, wondered if biology could provide an alternative to conventional road planning methods. To find out, they created templates of the UK using a sheet of agar on which they marked out the nine most populous cities, excluding London, with oat flakes. Then, in the place of London, the pair introduced a colony of P. polycephalum, which feeds by spawning tendrils to reach nutrients, and recorded the colony's feeding activity (see picture).

Most of the resulting "maps" mimicked the real inter-city road network, but some offered new routes. For instance, the motorway between Manchester and Glasgow passes along the west coast of the UK, but the slime mould preferred to travel east to Newcastle and then north to Glasgow ( /arxiv.org/abs/0912.3967 ). "This shows how a single-celled creature without any nervous system - and thus intelligence in the classical sense - can provide an efficient solution to a routing problem," says Jones.

...

[A] $55 billion Hong Kong dollar ($7.1 billion) project to link Hong Kong to a national [Chinese] high-speed rail network has run into a growing protest movement analysts say stems from the lack of democracy in this wealthy former British colony of 7 million people.

Hundreds protested in a public square next to Hong Kong's legislature last week as lawmakers debated the proposed rail link to the southern Chinese city Guangzhou. Several hundred camped out in the square again on Friday.

Demonstrators object to the project because it would force many residents to relocate and could cause major traffic congestion and other environmental problems. They also question the economic benefits touted by the government and say the approval process has been clouded by conflicts of interest of some lawmakers linked to industries and companies that could profit from the project.

...

My bit below:

COMMUTING New light-rail lines, many more MnPass lanes and cars that make driving decisions for you are in the commuting forecast for the next decade, says David Levinson, a civil engineering professor at the University of Minnesota.

Congestion levels won't change much, he said. The Twin Cities area will have more residents, but the aging population will be working less, and increased telecommuting will mean that people won't go into work as often.

The Southwest and Central Corridor rail lines are scheduled to start mid-decade, and one or two Minneapolis streetcar lines could be in the mix. Levinson expects highway expansion to mainly take the form of new MnPass lanes, which are for carpools, buses, motorcycles and toll-paying solo drivers.

He sees plug-in hybrids as the dominant car, meaning drivers will be buying less gas, so a per-mile fee will be implemented to replace lost tax revenue. Cars will keep getting safer, he said, with features such as automatic emergency braking and cruise control that adapts to the speed of surrounding traffic.

JIM FOTI

From the site:

"ElectroSmog is a new festival that explores the concept 'Sustainable Immobility' in theory and practice. Sustainable Immobility is first of all a critique of the growing global crisis of mobility. Current forms of hyper-mobility of people and products in travel and transport are ecologically increasingly unsustainable. The will to slow down, however, seems thoroughly absent. The economic crisis may have temporarily slowed matters down, long term projections still point towards exponential growth of worldwide mobility and exploding energy needs. Alternatives for the current state of hyper-mobility need to be designed urgently."

This group dislikes hyper-mobility, arguing it is unsustainable. Yet, isn't life unsustainable? Doesn't astro-physics tell us the sun will immolate the earth?

If this group's radicalism is really to take root, at the extreme, we should all be trees - giving us sustainable (for everyone else) hyper-immobility.

Anyway, I look forward to local food every winter in Minnesota. Some bark or snow anyone?

"The auto fleet in the United States shrank by an estimated 2 percent in 2009, as 14 million cars were scrapped and only 10 million new cars were sold, according to a new report by the Earth Policy Institute, an environmental research organization in Washington."

More evidence that the market is now saturated, the sector is mature, and even in decline. The key indicator will be when we see a year with more roads removed (or gravelized) than built or paved.

The collapse of a bridge being built in western India is feared to have left some 40 people dead, local police say.

The lawsuits have already begun

Video available here (with really tasteless advertising)