Erik Nilsson

City Councilmember Nick Licata has a web site devoted to "critical" pedestrian crossings in Seattle: Critical Crossings. You can add your own crossing with a picture. Cool.

Labels: transportation

Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen wrote Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny to argue why the conventional wisdom on large scale human conflict is almost entirely wrong. There is no clash of civilizations. Instead, there are people who are happy to speak on behalf of these viewpoints for their own benefit, while actual people are far too complex to be captured in such narrow confines.
    Sen repeatedly makes two points: first that people have a variety of identities, and different identities are more or less important under different circumstances. Sen's second point is that opponents of the narrow-minded "clash of civilizations" perspective usually concede too much. It is not just, for example, that the Muslim and Christian worlds are not inherently at odds. Moreover, people who are ostensibly part of these two "worlds" do not see themselves as one-dimensional components of these worlds, and they should not try to see themselves in this way. Sen has a term for the simple-minded concept of identity that makes a "clash of civilizations" seem possible. He calls it the "miniaturization" of identity. But of course, the consequences of this mistaken, miniature view are serious and dangerous. That's where the "violence" part of the title comes in.
    Sen's book reminds me oddly of a very different book by a very different author that makes similar points: My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd. Loyd's and Sen's books are mostly about different things. However, particularly regarding religious identity, both Sen and Loyd make similar points about how extremists benefit by destabilizing situations and marginalizing moderates. Loyd makes his point more viscerally, and Sen more scholarly, but both draw on their own horrifying personal experiences to inform their analyses.

Labels: books

In a recent New York Times article (requires free registration), Freakonomics authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt analyze the costs of traffic. The punch line:

Driving costs in the US, per year:

• Carbon footprint: $20 billion
• Congestion: $78 billion
• "Accidents" (crashes): $220 billion

By this analysis, if we all switched to true zero emissions vehicles and somehow eliminated congestion, we would cut the cost of traffic by about a third.

And even that wouldn't really work, because if there was no congestion, people would drive more and have more crashes. That's really the point of the article: America subsidizes driving, so people drive more than they would if they had to individually bear the cost of their driving. The result is that everybody pays.

Labels: crash, transportation

The news media is reporting a new study by AAA on the costs of auto crashes and on traffic congestion. The report is available here (1MB PDF).

Short answer: we worry too much about congestion, when crashes are the more expensive problem. To the left are two graphs based on the report's data. The report also contains a number of nice graphs.

The study compares the economic costs of crashes vs. the costs of congestion. Costs include delays, lost work, and so on. See the report for a complete discussion of the methodology, which looks to me to be thorough and balanced. This study isn't performing a trivial analysis, but I think the work will support some important conclusions:

• The cost of traffic is dominated by crash costs. Except for a very few places that manage snarled but not terribly deadly traffic, lowering crash costs is a much more promising strategy than striving for lower congestion costs. This is perhaps most striking in Seattle, my home town. Congestion dominates the traffic discussion, even though congestion is not particularly bad. Conversely, Seattle's streets are among the most dangerous, pushing overall traffic costs near the top in the US. If Seattle had crash costs as low as San Francisco, our overall traffic costs would be the lowest of any major US city.
  
• The smaller the place you live, the more traffic generally costs you. Not because of congestion of course, but because of crashes. Partly because of greater travel distances, the further you get from the city, the more crashes there are. (When looking at major cities, the study includes nearby suburbs. )
  
• It's impossible to build enough roads for everybody to go at full-speed wherever they want whenever they want, but even if we could, it wouldn't have that much effect on the cost of traffic, because as vehicle miles rise, so do accidents and the costs associated with them.
• These are just economic costs, not the human costs. The human cost of waiting in traffic isn't much. The human cost of being in a car crash is often extreme. Nor are the environmental costs considered. These are real economic opportunity costs that we pay every year.
• Some places are doing much better than others. Miami and Phoenix are just categorically worse than the rest of the country for traffic. Conversely, places as diverse as New York, San Francisco, and Eugene are doing much better than everyone else. It's interesting that the places with low traffic costs are also places that are known as pedestrian- and bike-friendly places. This suggests that effective pedestrian and bike safety facilities are actually profitable: they can save more money in crashes than they cost to install and maintain.

Update: see Erica Barnett's Slog posting here on the AAA study.

Labels: crash, transportation

"Actually, before you post to the internet, get someone who passed middle school English class to proof read your witting please. Its riddle with errors and makes my eyes bleed to read it."

Actual comment from here.

Sometimes the truth is right there in front of us. Sometimes its riddle with errors, but its there.

Labels: witting sarcasm

Joseph Weizenbaum 1923 - 2008.

Joe Weizenbaum, pioneering and uncompromising computer scientist, passed away this last week. Weizenbaum wrote the computer program ELIZA, and was a relentless foe of oversimplifications of cognition and a defender of what it really means to think. Weizenbaum was a scientist and a thinker in the truest senses of the words.

I didn't really know Joe well, but we were acquaintances. One time, Joe told me the most wonderful story about his daughter. This is when Joe was at MIT and his daughter was about twelve. A colleague of his, an MIT mathematician, was over for dinner. (I forget who.)

Joe's daughter reached for last piece of bread. Joe said, "don’t take that." She asked why. Joe said, "because you don't take the last piece of bread." Joe's daughter sat silent for a minute.

"Then nobody can have any bread."

Silence around the table.

Finally, the mathematician couldn't restrain his curiosity as to how a twelve-year old would advance an induction proof. "Why?" he asked.

"Well," she said, "if you can't eat the last piece of bread, it isn't really the last piece...."

Joe's delight in this story was not just pride in his daughter, but the window it opened into one of his favorite subjects: the nature of human cognition. Joe will be missed. We'll miss the person, his utter lack of tolerance for convenient and comforting yet wrong explanations, and his unwillingness to keep his mouth politely shut in the face of bullshit.

More on Joe here and here. Terry Winograd's tribute to Joe on his winning the Norbert Wiener award is here.

Labels: people

Sherman Alexie wrote the perfect prose poem for everyone who's ever had trouble sleeping.

Labels: books, people

If you read regularly, not many of the books you read can change your life much. I read Mountains Beyond Mountains over a year ago, and it clearly is a book that can change your life. It changed mine.
    This book tells the story of Dr. Paul Farmer, a specialist in infectious disease who divides his time between Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and a rural clinic he founded in Haiti. In his spare time, Farmer revolutionized the treatment of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis. Farmer is about the hardest-working person I've ever heard of, and a great doctor: brilliant, determined, and compassionate.
    Read this book because it tells a great human story, and by the way shows what global health can really be, and how much better life can be for the world's poor, if we are willing to take even a little effort to make it so.
    This is the second book by Tracy Kidder that has had a memorable impact on me. His book The Soul of a New Machine was much read by technologists in the 80s. This book portrays the bright, driven technologists at Data General as, well, kind of soul-less. Sure, they were interesting people, but ultimately their work just wasn't very important, or even very interesting. Most of what made the book interesting is their suffering, but since their suffering was ultimately meaningless, it wasn't even redemptive. Kidder's earlier book persuaded me that I did not want to make a career in the computer equipment industry, a career path I was already on when I read Soul. Kidder's later book made me confidently enthusiastic that, if all I ever accomplish is to put moderately better tools in the hands of doctors like Paul Farmer, my career will have been worthwhile.

Labels: books

Check out my friend Andrea Okomski's blog Pedestrian InRoads. Andrea's son was run over in a crosswalk three years ago. He survived, but his life was turned upside down (along with his mother's). Andrea's boy spent four months in a coma. If you know anything about head injury, you know that's a very serious situation. I've met him, and his life seems to be like some sort of fever dream. Not what his mother hoped for. Not what he was entitled to. He's a good kid, but every day is a massive struggle.
Andrea's sense of outrage is that her son's misfortune is not an isolated incident. It happens every day.
Over forty thousand Americans die in auto-related collisions every year. Over a million are injured. As Andrea's story shows, many of those injuries are far from trivial. It's obvious isn't it? If an external threat killed 40,000 Americans and maimed 1,000,000 every year, we would spend billions to combat that threat. Maybe form a new branch of the Federal Government. But these accidents and injuries happen one at a time. We blame bad drivers, bad weather, or just bad luck. Driving can never be entirely safe, but "accident" isn't the right word for this level of carnage. As I walk, ride, and drive in America's cities, it's clear to me the basic problem is that many drivers don't take driving seriously.
Not that I'm exactly a model driver. I'm impatient, more than anything else. But I try hard to have good driving skills, which to me includes signaling properly and yielding to pedestrians. For the last six or seven years, I've been more often a pedestrian than a driver, and that has definitely made me more respectful of pedestrians, and more aware that too many drivers just don't understand pedestrian's rights, or don't care. That has to change.

Labels: crash, transportation

The Trouble With Physics tries to be about physics, but it's more about the politics of physics. Of course, since physics is the original Big Science, there is very little about physics that isn't political. Smolin's thesis is that string theory stopped being a proper theory a good while ago, and is now something more like a political party. Or a cult.
    Maybe people who haven't had much exposure to science might find this booking shocking. Science, as it happens, is fiercely competitive. Most of the scientists I know are kind, delightful people. But science doesn't give much credit for being nice, it gives credit for being right. And not everyone is going to be nice all of the time. When millions of dollars in research funding is at stake, there will inevitably be people who will do things that should not be done. Smolin argues that realpolitik has come to dominate physics research, particularly in America.

Labels: books

...or maybe not.

I sure hope Floyd told his mom the truth. The testosterone test isn't perfect. Still, only a fool would believe there is no doping in cycling, and it's natural to assume that the people doping do so with plans to win.

Labels: bike, people

Floyd Landis blew it yesterday. He lost his chance to win the Tour de France. What did he do next? He admitted the obvious, to himself, to his team, and to the world.

But he didn't give up.

He went out today to show the world that one bad day may have ended his chances of winning the tour, but he was still going to give his team his best, the absolute best he could do.

The result? The best single day performance in modern Tour history. Landis beat the field, decisively. He was stronger. He had better strategy. He dug deeper. He won the stage, and is once again the favorite to win the Tour.

What an example of achievement for any endeavor.

Labels: bike, people

I created a new blog on P4 Medicine. P4 Medicine is a term coined by Leroy Hood to describe the future of Medicine, which will be less about repairing damage, and more about preventing problems before they become serious.

Not a big deal really, but there seem to be some hinks in getting Apple to spell WPA.

Happy Martin Luther King Day.

The cover of the Seattle Times today featured an article "Bigger black enrollment still only a dream for UW." My friend Terryl Ross has probably studied black enrollment at the UW more than any single person. He tells me that low black enrollment isn't the end of it. The bigger problem is black attrition: a high percentage of black students don't stay. As far as I know, nobody gathers good stats on how many of these students transfer out to other institutions, and how many just leave higher education altogether. The former is a loss for the UW community. The latter is an economic disaster for the individual and a loss for our community as a whole.
    Why do Black students leave the UW? The Times article gives some reasons. Black students don't feel welcome at the UW. They often don't feel safe. Most of all, they feel lonely. Seattle's black population is small, but the UW's shortage of black people, relative even to the community it serves, is depressing.