Search Results for ""Windshield Perspective""

Via Shane Phillips at Planetizen: A new study published in the Transportation Research Record confirms that windshield perspective is all-too real. Observing the world from behind the wheel, it turns out, has a powerful influence on our judgments about places and even people.

Over the weekend, I went to visit family in the high desert of Nevada and had to spend quite a bit of time behind the wheel -- there's simply no other way to get around. As a matter of fact, the main road through the town I was staying in is so dangerous that I decided I had to travel to the restaurant across the street from my hotel in the car -- with an eight-year-old in tow, the six lanes of speeding traffic were just too unpredictable to hazard on foot.

Over the past couple of months, we've been following a story in Savannah about a crackdown on jaywalking -- a crackdown prompted by the death of a tourist who was hit by a car on Oglethorpe Avenue in the city's historic district. Streetsblog Network member Sustainable Savannah has done a great job of articulating why the jaywalking ticket blitz was an inappropriate and ineffective response to the problem of unsafe streets.

Today's featured post from the Streetsblog Network comes from member blog Greater Greater Washington. David Alpert has identified an all-too-common strain of a problem familiar to our readers, Entitled Driver Syndrome. A particularly dangerous variant of this common affliction, writes Alpert, is Entitled Driving Journalist Syndrome, or EDJS:

"We are, paradoxically, dependent on public transit and plagued by the congestion posed by millions of cars, choking exhaust, hundreds of annual traffic crash deaths, and the nation’s slowest bus service."

California Highway Patrol supports Pedestrian Safety Month with yet another tone deaf Public Safety Announcement putting the onus for safety on the most vulnerable people using roads.

You get a flurry of local news coverage ... but not a lot of participation. No wonder pols all have the "windshield perspective."

Smoking, once a celebrated totem of American culture, is increasingly an ostracized habit of the marginal few. Getting there, though, took deliberate vision, coordinated efforts, and persistent policy trial and error over decades — and those efforts reveal a partial roadmap for breaking our country’s similarly dangerous addiction to cars.

In reality, plenty of people benefit from such projects. But the media often highlight the loudest, least-informed voices.

The National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration has posted a short "safety fact sheet" summarizing the research on stop-as-yield laws. They reduce crashes.