Archinect - News

Car accidents have become commonplace in America

2019-08-13T19:30:00-04:00

Since January 2000, more Americans have died in car crashes than did in both World Wars, and the overwhelming majority of the wrecks were caused by speeding, drunk or distracted drivers, according to government data.

As the rise of deaths and injuries from automobile crashes continues unabated, the public's fascination and obsession with driving cannot be swayed. The Washington Post highlights data that points to a major cause for nearly all crashes: human error.

"In automotive circles, it's common to hear that 94-percent of car crashes are caused by human error, a fact provided by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and often used as a preamble when people discuss the coming era of driverless vehicles."

Cities across the U.S. have adopted initiatives to promote the use of public transportation and to regulate traffic speeds. However, despite these approaches, the number of deadly car crashes continues to grow.

According to Maureen Vogel of the National Safety Council, "Unfortunately, our public opinion research has repeatedly shown that people still believe it will happen to someone else, but not to them."

Is it time to embrace the “slow city”?

2019-08-13T09:42:00-04:00

Imposing tighter limits on leadfoots is a key part of the Vision Zero campaign for reducing traffic deaths and injuries, because of the dramatic safety benefits associated with reducing vehicle velocity. Does this add up to evidence that fast-paced Americans are ready to embrace the virtues of city life in the slow lane?

How fast is too fast? Cities like New York, Portland, Boston, and Washington, D.C. are initiating ways to regulate traffic speeds and install better signage to aid in pedestrian and bicycle safety. With the high number of reported traffic-related deaths and injuries only rising, cities are starting to realize that lowering urban speed limits doesn’t only benefit non-drivers.

In a recent CityLab article, writer Andrew Small provides detailed information communicating the benefits that reducing speed limits can have for non-drivers, drivers, and the built environment, alike. One detail Small points out is how "perhaps urbanists shouldn't demand slow lanes or slow neighborhoods: They should ask for a slow city."

With the rise of fast-paced micro-mobility on our streets and sidewalks, and the promise of zippy autonomous vehicles transporting products and people supposedly in our the future, it can be hard to imagine how a slow city might be a possibly come to be. However, Small points...

Driverless cars hit the streets of Milton Keynes

2016-10-11T20:49:00-04:00

Driverless cars will trundle around the UK in their first public trials today. The demonstration of the autonomous electric vehicles is going to take place on the pavements of Milton Keynes. These tests will be the culmination of an 18-month research project which involved virtually mapping the town and updating regulations for driverless vehicles.

For the latest on advances in self-driving cars:

Would self-driving cars be useful to people living outside urban cores?

2016-06-07T18:47:00-04:00

So a lot of us own or lease cars...But when the talk turns to autonomous cars – and it always does – I sigh. Our overcrowded highways really could use a break from human stupidity, and that human factor is behind nearly all of the fatalities and injuries and property damage we see strewn across our roads every day. Get rid of the human behaviour to save the human body! This is where autonomous cars make sense; but not all the world is a crowded, urban highway.

Is Waze to blame for heavy traffic on L.A. residential side streets?

2015-11-24T15:00:00-05:00

Waze sometimes sends drivers through little-used side streets such as Cody Road [in Sherman Oaks, Calif]...Some people try to beat Waze at its own game by sending misinformation about traffic jams and accidents so it will steer commuters elsewhere. Others log in and leave their devices in their cars, hoping Waze will interpret that as a traffic standstill and suggest alternate routes.

More about Waze on Archinect:

Throwback Throughway: when GPS fails, these gorgeous "mental maps" help you navigate

Waze takes on the ride-sharing market with new carpooling app

Arnold Schwarzenegger voices Waze app

Waze and its new uneasy bedfellows

The "algorithmic dreams" of driverless cars, and how they might affect real-world urban design

2015-11-12T15:43:00-05:00

The sensory limitations of these vehicles must be accounted for, Nourbakhsh explained, especially in an urban world filled with complex architectural forms, reflective surfaces, unpredictable weather and temporary construction sites. This means that cities may have to be redesigned, or may simply mutate over time, to accommodate a car’s peculiar way of experiencing the built environment...

"...The flip side of this example is that, in these brief moments of misinterpretation, a different version of the urban world exists...If we can learn from human misperception, perhaps we can also learn something from the delusions and hallucinations of sensing machines. But what?"

As self-driving cars gradually integrate themselves into urban society, Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG spotlights emerging lidar (light + radar) scanning technologies that the cars use to navigate. He weighs the possible advantages and risks that these technologies — which still have their vulnerabilities — can pose on the built environment.

More recent news about driverless cars on Archinect:

Tokyo's 2020 Olympics won't have Zaha, but it's looking like there will be "Robot Taxi"

Dawn of the self-driving car: testing out Tesla's autopilot function

Milton Keynes invests in driverless cars over public transit infrastructure

Can a loss of driver autonomy save lives?

Is America actually shifting away from its car obsession? Not entirely.

2015-10-23T18:45:00-04:00

The plateauing and decline in U.S. vehicle miles traveled per capita that occurred between [2005-2014] was described by some hopeful commentators as a dramatic shift that was indicative of the preferences of a new workforce...Marginal changes in the way a new generation behaves...cannot overcome the realities of a country where more than three-fourths of jobs are located more than three miles from downtowns and where only one-fourth of homes are in places that their residents refer to as urban.

More about car transit on Archinect:

Welcome to Evanston, Illinois: the carless suburbia

Dawn of the self-driving car: testing out Tesla's autopilot function

From California to Texas, car culture is losing its monopoly

Can a loss of driver autonomy save lives?

Designers imagine a world of self-driving, mobile offices

The surprisingly ideological debate over roundabouts

2015-10-19T12:48:00-04:00

The same is happening in other UK cities, which have decided that signal junctions are better for traffic flow and safer for cyclists. [...] After a century of resistance, US cities are finally learning to love the roundabout – the Bronx just got its first – believing them to be safer and better for traffic flow. [...] “Traffic lights are so fascist and dictatorial, telling you when to stop and go,” says Beresford. “Roundabouts are quintessentially English and democratic in their etiquette.”

Driving in the US is coming to a standstill, and that's a good thing

2015-01-07T13:49:00-05:00

The Federal Highway Administration has very quietly acknowledged that the driving boom is over. [...] the agency’s more recent forecast finally recognizes that the protracted post-World War II era has given way to a different paradigm. The new vision of the future suggests that driving per capita will essentially remain flat in the future. The benchmark is important because excessively high estimates of future driving volume get used to justify wasteful spending on new and wider highways.

More roads won't ease traffic, but charging drivers more at peak hours will

2014-06-17T15:40:00-04:00

You can’t build your way out of congestion. It’s the roads themselves that cause traffic. The concept is called induced demand, which is economist-speak for when increasing the supply of something (like roads) makes people want that thing even more. [...] What [economists] Turner and Duranton (and many others who’d like to see more rational transportation policy) actually advocate is known as congestion pricing. This means raising the price of driving on a road when demand is high.

The Case for Tearing Down Park-and-Ride Lots

2014-06-12T13:02:00-04:00

The wisdom of surrounding transit stations with "seas" of park-and-ride lots may be turning. In theory, park-and-ride seems like a great transportation compromise, converting full-trip drivers into part-trip riders. In practice, the opposite often occurs, with former non-drivers now commuting part of the way by car. That unexpected practical shift can increase vehicle miles traveled in a metro area, subverting the sustainability goal of transit.

In Los Angeles, walking illegally is more than twice as expensive as parking illegally

2013-12-27T14:00:00-05:00

The city of Los Angeles is cracking down on pedestrians who sneak across streets when the traffic signal says “don’t walk.” But when you put a price on bad behavior, like being in a public street illegally, you see clearly what a city values. The cheapest parking ticket in Los Angeles (pdf) is $58, and the one most commonly issued for parking in a prohibited zone is $73. Jaywalking—the term of art for a pedestrian crossing against the light—will cost you $197.