Category Archives: Travels & Tribulations

The Last Available Parking Spot

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last_spotI got yet another parking ticket in Hoboken. I parked in front of the house and thought I’d hear the street cleaner drive by in time to move. Unfortunately, the ticket writer pumped out the violation quicker than I could leap down 2 flights of stairs and run across the street. It didn’t even matter if I moved the car. For $45 they can drive the Zamboni around my Brick.

Pic from the latest Simpsons, where Lisa is overwhelmed by the disasters our future has in store for us. I’ve always felt that we could never run out of parking; someone is always leaving a spot, right?

Parking In Hoboken

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streetcleaner

I got another parking ticket from the city of Hoboken this week. It’s a bi-monthly occurance for me, as I forget the street cleaning rules every so often and wind up covering a dirty patch of asphalt on an otherwise sparkling road.

Street parking is a huge issue in Hoboken, NJ, as it is in many cities around the world. When people live in homes that are stacked atop each other there just isn’t enough square feet of street to accommodate their steel and rubber vehicles. Garages spots here go for almost $300… if you can find them. Waiting lists are years long and if you get into the notorious Robotic Parking garage you may never get your car back or it may be signifigantly damaged.

From the NY Times:

The motive is unclear. The weapon is a mystery. But what is certain is that what is being called the country’s first fully automated parking garage has already claimed two victims, most recently on Oct. 16, when the $12 million garage sent a Jeep Wrangler plummeting four stories to its demise… In February 2004, a Cadillac DeVille fell and crashed in the same garage here at 916 Garden Street.

Some people in the city take liberties with the no parking zones near intersections, but this makes the crosswalks incredibly dangerous, as you have to walk into the road and can barely see oncoming traffic. Pushing your kids across the street in a stroller becomes next to impossible when a hulking SUV blocks your vision. The Hoboken Parking Authority was recently called out on NPRs “This American Life” for inconsistent parking enforcement. Host Ira Glass interviews “Kathy”, a vigilante parking enforcer who confronts a city employee who parks in a crosswalk. I wonder if it was the employee who wrote my ticket.

Driving Distracted

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As often happens when I’m driving with the kids, one of them started getting carsick. When someone in the back seat is gagging and spraying all over my luxurious vinyl interior it’s pretty tough to concentrate on driving. I pulled over to the side of the road.

Claire was fine, but it got me thinking about something I’d read in the book “Traffic” and on the author Tom Vanderbilt’s blog, How We Drive. He writes about the dangers of driving while talking on the cell phone and I had a hard time understanding the difference between talking on the phone and talking to a passenger. Dialing the phone could also be compared to fiddling with the radio or GPS. Why do cell phones pose a distinct hazard that those other activities don’t?

An article in the Washington Post cites research:

A 1997 study in the New England Journal of Medicine and a
report by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in 2005 found
drivers who use cell phones while driving were four times more likely
to be in a crash.

Hands-free devices may also cause a hazard, Froetscher added. A
study by researchers at the University of Utah found no difference in
driver concentration between using hand-held or hands-free devices. In
fact, talking to a passenger while driving is much safer than talking
on a cell phone, the Utah researchers noted.

I assume the reason is a matter of context. The passenger riding shotgun is experiencing traffic along with you. This means they see and hear what you hear, and adjust their conversation accordingly. They may even notice and point out things you haven’t. If it’s your mom, she may even slam hard on the passenger brake, signaling her dissatisfaction with your hoonage.

The National Safety Council backs this up:

“When you’re on a call, even if both hands are on the wheel, your head is in the call, and not on your driving,”
Froetscher said. “Unlike the passenger sitting next to you, the person on the other end of the call is oblivious to
your driving conditions. The passenger provides another pair of eyes on the road.”

My puking kids don’t have that ability, however. I’ll have to continue to resort to pulling over and grabbing a towel and spare pants from the trunk.

The Light Was Yellow, Sir

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A few months ago I got a speeding ticket from a robot camera and was ambivalent. On one hand, I knew I was speeding and was glad not to get stopped and have a notch taken off my license. On the other hand, it sucks to get ticketed by a camera.

Red light cameras are probably more common than automatic speed traps though. theNewspaper.com has a great collection of articles examining how longer yellow light cycle times reduce accidents and violations.

For example, in Virginia in 1999 traffic engineers determined and set a safe yellow light time for an intersection on Rt. 50 at 5.5 seconds. A year later a contract for red light cameras was signed with Lockheed Martin and suddenly the county reduced the cycle time to 4 seconds. In the year it took to install the cameras there was a dramatic increase in crashes. When the cameras were eventually installed they generated steady revenue and Lockheed Martin was able to compare accident rates after installation against the artificially inflated rates of the previous year.

When Virginia increased the cycle time back to 5.5 seconds, however, average monthly violations dropped from 250 to 20. The intersections were safer, but Fairfax County wouldn’t collect nearly as much revenue.

Recently Norcross, Georgia canceled a contract with the red light company LaserCraft because revenue from tickets couldn’t support the cost of the cameras used to issue the tickets. The Georgia General Assembly had issued a bill requiring intersections with cameras to increase their yellow light times by one second. Two cameras in Norcross went from issuing fifteen tickets a day to three. Instead of generating $260k in annual citations, the city would be sinking $145k into costs associated with running the cameras.

The financial incentives for municipalities to game the system must be tremendous. At what point does the increase in safety override the benefit to the bottom line? For yellow light cameras, it’s an imperceptible fraction of a second.

No Bomb for Obama

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nj-turnpikeWe braved the crowded Metro, the packed Mall and the DC beltway for the Inauguration of Barack Obama, only to wind up parking the car for 3 hours in a traffic jam on the Jersey Turnpike.

A guy from Massachucetts was driving to DC when his family called authorities to say he had a bomb and was going to blow up the Mall. The threat escalated to the FBI and Secret Service and both sides of the Turnpike were closed from the Delaware Bridge to Exit 4, over 30 miles. Turns out it was a false alarm, and they’re now questioning the mental health of the person who called it in.

We thought we’d beat the traffic by leaving right after the inaugural address, and travel was brisk until NJ. We were getting bits and pieces of traffic reports on the radio, but had no idea how long it would last. Slowly one hour turned to two, then to three as we idled motionless. Disney’s Robin Hood played for the kids in the back seat while we watched people get out of their cars to piss in the woods. Finally cars and trucks started moving again and a few miles later we passed the flashing lights and security vehicles around a little sub-compact sitting alone on the south-bound lane, jamming up the system with its hoax.

Christmas Tree Delivery on December 24th

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pic_xmas_2008.jpg

The Christmas tradition we follow is to get and install the tree on Christmas eve. This means you get a poor pick of trees, but they’re usually marked down and really cheap. This year it also meant picking and strapping down a tree in the freezing rain. After feeding the tree a little whisky it warmed up nice in our home.

Here’s more snowy bricks.

Busted by Big Brother

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I got a holiday card from the District of Columbia this week. It was an automated ticket for a moving violation, running 58 MPH in a 45 MPH zone. Looks like I was speeding through the 3rd st. tunnel under the US Capitol on our trip back from Thanksgiving at my parents.

pic_moving_violation_calculation.jpg

There were 2 photos in the card, with info on the back showing how to interpret the image. They show that the pics were taken 0.2 seconds and that I’d traveled approximately 16 feet. I did the math and got this:

17 feet in 0.2 seconds = 85 feet in 1 second = 306,000 feet in 1 hour

306,000 feet / 5280 feet per mile = 57.95 MPH

Route 395 runs through DC and has a complex set of tunnels as it travels under the national mall. It’s a set of curves and hills that begs to be sped through and I remember giving the throttle a little push on that traffic-less Saturday morning. I didn’t see the flash of DC’s speed camera catching me exiting the tunnel at 13 MPH over the limit. I now know that when I see those horizontal marks on the pavement I need to slow the hell down. And I need to tint that back window ’cause I gots some junk in my trunk.

(01/28/09: The 3rd st. tunnel will now be known as the Purple Tunnel of Doom in solidarity for all the 2009 inauguration purple ticket holders who got corralled inside and missed the event. Epic fail.)

pic_moving_map3.jpgI’ve heard of red-light cameras used to catch people running lights but never heard of speed cameras. The red-light cameras usually shoot from the front and can get an identifiable shot of the driver. Since the shot of my car was from behind I’m being billed as the owner of the car, not the violator, so the ticket isn’t going on my record and I’m not getting any points off my license. It’s almost like a parking ticket, although I wonder if my insurance company will get any record.

There has been some dispute about how red-light cameras are implemented. Some jurisdictions have been accused of shortening the yellow light cycle to raise revenue. Ironically, Dallas’ red-light cameras were so effective that people stopped running reds, and now they don’t get enough revenue to keep the cameras maintained.

I’m not going to dispute the ticket. I know I was cooking through that tunnel. But there are plenty of stories of drivers getting pissed of at cameras and taking vengeance on the poor little buggers. A guy in the UK melted one with a welding torch. The French are shooting, painting and hammering theirs. Another dude in the UK blew a camera up, only to have the explosion trigger the shutter and catch him in the act. And Maryland residents are accusing DC of discriminating against them because they get 64% of the tickets issued from automated cameras.

There’s a couple of videos online of people trying to trick the cameras.  The guys at Mythbusters try a lane change to no avail. Top Gear was only able to beat it by going 177MPH in a TVR Tuscan S.

00022ce8-68e2-1399-8a420c01ac1bf814-1.jpgThe best story is of these 4 hoons getting their mugs shot on a speed camera in the UK. They had just stolen the car and got their pic taken as they sped off on their joy-ride. They assumed since it wasn’t their car they couldn’t be connected to the license plate number. The car was found torched and the cops found one of the 16 year olds. It mustn’t have taken long for them to find the others after this shot was published in the local paper.

My Car Made Her Puke

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My daughter Claire has been retching as we approached our car lately. She says it’s the “smell” but I think it’s psychosomatic; she remembers times she had motion sickness and when she sees the car it triggers an upset stomach. Well, today she went and puked in the parking lot of a rest stop. More details and a technicolor photo after the jump…
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My Car Induces Vomiting

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barf buddyMy daughter Claire has started retching every time we approach the Brick now. She complains about having to get in because it’s an “old car”. I think she’s gotten motion sickness so many times that she now associates the car with vomiting and has a psychosomatic reaction. Or maybe we didn’t clean up the puke well enough from her last incident. At least we have vinyl seats.

I tried to fix the situation by getting a “new car scent” deodorant disc to clear the air but I don’t think it helps. It would take a carpet replacement to get this car to come close to smelling like new; instead the thing now smells like a bar of soap. Claire keeps telling me I should buy the red Cobra Mustang she saw in Auto Trader. Sure thing.