With the increasing popularity of red light cameras, it’s not usually worth the risk of a steep ticket.  By installing cameras that discourage drivers from running yellow lights, cities are contradicting their eco-friendly commitments.  To be fair, running a blatantly red light is reckless, dangerous to yourself and others, and should remain illegal.  But if you enter the intersection while the light is still yellow, I think you’ll be perfectly safe and it’s the green thing to do.

Since fuel efficiency is measured in miles per gallon, and cars still use fuel when idling at a stop light, stopping is by definition the least efficient use of resources.  Zero miles traveled divided by any amount of gas is still 0.  Plus stopping kills any inertia energy you’d built up, and accelerating again after the stop is definitely not the optimum operation for your engine.  Cruising at a constant speed maximizes efficiency and running yellow lights can prolong your time spent at that speed.

Slamming on the brakes to stop for yellow results in increased rear-end-collisions and creates unnecessary wear and tear on the vehicle.  Cars at idle burn fuel and create emissions without any benefit — after all they’re not going anywhere.

A yellow light typically lasts 5 seconds.  Then you’ll typically have an “all-red” time of 2-3 seconds, when no one is allowed to go, which is intended to allow the intersection to safely clear.  And then you’ll have another 2-3 seconds before cross traffic drivers react to their new green light and reach the middle of the intersection.  So in total, you have about 10 seconds from when the light turns yellow to when another car could possibly hit you.

In 10 seconds, a car traveling 40 mph will go a distance of 586 feet — almost the length of two football fields!  I think you can make it safely through the intersection.  Maybe even the next one.

So there you have it, running yellow lights is the safe and green thing to do.  If you get a ticket, just tell the officer about this inconvenient truth.

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We stopped at a few places along the way, including this scenic vista at about 9200 ft.

And then again at the top:

Very cool drive, definitely recommended.

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Sure, nobody parks perfect 100% of the time.  But I’m amazed anyone would park like this on a busy Sunday and think, “I’m good.”  I was in the stall to his right, wanting deeply to somehow leave a huge scrape on his passenger side without damaging my ride as I eased out with an inch of clearance.

Your compact pickup with canopy says, “I’m hardworking, but practical.”  Your Vallejo license plate holder suggests a blue-collar upbringing and perhaps a built-in respect for others.  But your actions say, “I’m lazy and don’t give a shit about anyone else.”  You’re an enigma, sir.

I guess it was a victimless crime so it’s really not a big deal.  But seriously what a toolbox.

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Other common ones are “Red light violation: minimum fine $438″ or “Blocking the intersection: minimum fine $297.”

I was curious:

• If that’s the minimum fine, what is the maximum?
• What determines any fine amount above the minimum?  Sir, the court finds you guilty of premeditated handicap parking…
• Who decides the amount of the fine?
• Do these signs really work as deterrents?

And here’s what I found:

The minimum fine is generally assessed for first time offenders.  Habitual handicap parking violators, for example, can see increasing fines or even be sentenced community service.   The fine is substantially greater if you’re caught with a fake disability permit.  I guess it’s risk and reward… you’re less likely to get cited, but if the officer checks your disability credentials and they come back negative, it’ll cost you.

I’ve also heard the rumor that if the parking lot is otherwise full, it is OK to park in one of the handicap spots.  I could find nothing to confirm that, so don’t do it.  As soon as one of the other spots opens up, the cop will never know.

The fine assessed is determined by the ticketing officer, and is also dependent on the “severity” of the offense.  For example someone caught blocking an intersection during gridlock traffic would likely be given the minimum fine.   It was probably an honest mistake, he thought he had enough room.  But the driver that blocks an intersection during gridlock traffic and then for some reason abandons his car there would be given a steeper fine.

I couldn’t find any data on the deterrent effect of such minimum fine signs.  I imagine they are fairly effective though.  If someone was trying to save a few seconds by parking illegally in the handicap spot, they would probably think twice about it after learning about the risk of a $250 fine.  Personally I’ve gone through some Livermore intersections as the yellow turned to red, looked up to see that $438 fine sign glaring me in the face, and slammed on the brakes at the next intersection.  Slamming on the brakes is probably the less safe of my two choices, but less likely to result in a fine… kind of messed up.

Also I imagine the deterrent effect of the minimum fine signs varies with income.  To a millionaire, $250 stings a little but really is meaningless.  To a minimum wage earner, it could be a week’s pay.

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Time

Let’s say the average driver encounters 6 “yield-able” stop signs each day, and that each unnecessary stop costs drivers 5 seconds.  Each day, that’s an extra 30 seconds of life we’ll never get back.  It’s not a lot, but multiplied times 200 million drivers and say a 60 year lifetime of driving, as a society we’ll give up nearly 2.2 trillion days stopping at empty intersections by 2070.

I believe there is a better use for those 2.2 trillion days than wastefully obeying stop signs.  I believe we could use them to find a cure for cancer, fight global poverty, and make earth a better place to live.  Or play more Dr. Mario.

Energy

Kinetic energy is a function of the square of a car’s speed.  So reducing a car’s speed from 20 mph to zero costs exponentially more kinetic energy than from 20 mph to 10 mph.  In fact, in this example, it requires 4x the force.  Similarly, the force required to re-accelerate after a complete stop is exponentially more than a driver would use had he safely coasted through.

Let’s return to our average driver and the 6 “yield-able” stop signs.  Based on the physics of coasting through, drivers use roughly 1/4 the amount of fuel they would use compared to making a complete stop.  And while these stops make up a relatively small portion of driving time and fuel economy, it adds up to millions of barrels of wasted gas across society and over time.

If the 6 stops/day add up to an eighth of a mile, it results in 45 miles of unnecessary stopping/starting per driver per year.  I’ll make some fuel-economy estimates and say a full-stop strategy costs each driver about 4 gallons more than a coast-through strategy, resulting in 48 billion gallons of gas.  Extra fuel burned also means more pollution.

Just as stopping at stop signs is costing us more time than we ever imagined, it is costing us dearly in terms of our limited oil resources and clean air.  Chevron and Exxon are happy, as is OPEC.    But everyone else?

Money

Those 48 billion gallons certainly have a huge economic cost, not to mention the cost of increased wear-and-tear on our brakes, and cost of police officers dutifully ticketing California stops.

Your Responsibility

It is amazing the gains we can achieve on the road without sacrificing safety.

The next time you get pulled over by an unenlightened cop for not being a responsible driver and obeying the stop sign, just say this:

“I’m sorry Officer.  You see, I’m a pragmatist and an environmentalist, and coming to a complete stop would have been a terrible waste of resources; much like what you’re doing now, having pulled me over for a victimless crime.  Now who’s being irresponsible?”

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It’s a common theme in music:

• Life is a Highway
• Open Road Song
• On the Road Again
• Free and Easy (Down the Road I Go)
• Highway 20 Ride
  
• Take Me Home, Country Roads
• Everyday is a Winding Road
• I am the Highway
  
• The Long and Winding Road
• Down the Road
• Highway to Hell
• What About Now
• Runaway
• Anywhere But Here
• Want To

Photo credit: Bryn snapped this one on I-5 in central CA last October.

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It was a rainy Friday evening on my way home from work.  I stopped to get gas at the gas station about a 100 yards from my condo complex.  That’s how close to home and the weekend I was.

I need to make a left hand turn out of the gas station parking lot.  There are 2 right-bound lanes and the closest one is full and stopped back from stoplight.  There is no one in the second lane.  A driver in a Lincoln LS has left the gas station driveway open, and waves me to make my left turn.

Following his advice, I get T-boned in my driver-side door by a Pontiac Aztek coming up second lane.  Very scary.

And then…

It’s crazy all the things that have time to run through your head in the split second before an accident.  Holy shit that guy’s coming fast.  Dude that guy in the LS told me to go.  He’s going to hit me.  Honk.  This might really hurt.  If I die, Bryn’s going to kill me.  Honk.

Crash!

The airbags go off and I’m still laying on the horn when I realize I’m ok.  My driver’s seat area is noticeably smaller but I don’t even have a scratch on me.  I’m shaken up but the car makes it the final few hundred feet to my complex.

My door wouldn’t open so I crawled over the console to the passenger side to get out and inspect the damage.  It was at that point I became very thankful to have been driving such a solidly built and safe car.  It was pretty much a direct hit!

The best part was it was this cashmere colored Explorer.  It was a company car so I call over to the office that’s just 2 miles down the road to see if anyone is still there.  Ten minutes later my friends Jen and Heather pull up, in two identical cashmere-colored Mountaineers.  “Here’s your new car, Nick.”  The kids in the Aztek and the guy in the LS must have been like, “Who is this guy?”

Ford’s insurance ended up totaling the car (sticker price $42k), and I was cited with a $200 “failure to yield” ticket.  Ouch!

Bye-bye, first company car.  I hardly even got to know you!

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In fact, drivers continued to crash at the same rate as before, whether or not they were on their cell phones.  We gave up freedom in the name of safety, except we didn’t get any safer!

If A=B, and B=C, we expect A=C.  But now we have to go back and consider that maybe A didn’t really equal B after all; that driving while talking on the phone does not really increase your chances of getting in an accident.

It’s the argument tobacco execs have been making for years, that correlation does not prove causation.  Sure, smoking is correlated with lung cancer, but does that mean smoking causes lung cancer?   Sure, talking on your phone is correlated with increased accidents, but does that mean cell phone driving caused those accidents?  Since the accident rate did not decrease after the ban went into effect, something else must have been causing those accidents, right?  (The tobacco execs face a much harder battle.)

I have a theory.  Well two theories.  The first is that a certain percentage of people are just bad drivers.  They’ll wreck at the same rate whether they’re on their phones or not.

The second is about risk tolerance.   Everyone has a different risk tolerance, but it is largely unconscious.  It has to do with what you’re inherently comfortable with.  One driver might cruise by doing 80 mph, talking on his cellphone, eating a cheeseburger, radio blaring, sticking his head out the window, carrying a dog on his lap.  He’s comfortable and confident or else he wouldn’t be doing it.  Another might drive 55 mph, hands at “10 and 2″ in complete silence and concentration.  Both drivers have the same goal: get to their destination safely.  Both are driving to the limit of their risk tolerance.

They’re called “accidents” for a reason.  Nobody crashes on purpose.  Think of risk tolerance as a bucket that needs to be filled.  Now that cell phones have been taken out of that bucket, drivers are filling it with something else.  I don’t know what that “something else” is but it must be pretty significant to keep crashing at the same rate.

This concept was discussed in Superfreakonomics, where the authors argued that there is an equilibrium accident rate, and that changes to driving laws (side of the road, speed limit, cell phones) and car safety features (seat belts, child’s seats) might have an initial positive impact in reducing that rate, but over time, drivers will return to their “natural” risk tolerance and get back to the equilibrium.  (They also use available data to explain that “drunk walking” is actually riskier than “drunk driving.”)

I’ve gotten in a couple car accidents, neither of which I was on my phone.  I do miss having Sync though.

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Last week I went up skiing, which was awesome, but got myself caught in the middle of Sacramento’s evening rush hour on the way home.  Aside from Sacramento, I’ve been the victim of other people’s traffic in Portland, Santa Rosa, and LA.  Other people’s traffic is far more frustrating than your own traffic for a couple reasons.

1. You don’t know the typical traffic patterns, so you have no idea where it is likely to break up, or if it is “normally” this bad.
2. You don’t want to go where these people are going.  You’re just passing through.  In fact, if they’d just let you pass, you’d be out of their way.

Traffic you encounter on your daily commute is frustrating, but tolerable, because it is expected and predictable.  Other people’s traffic is traffic you have no business being in, unexpected and unpredictable.  You are an innocent bystander graciously using these other people’s roads when all of a sudden they swarm you.

It’s the tax levied by the good people of Sacramento: if you’re going to go skiing on a Thursday when the rest of us are working, you’re going to pay for it on the way home.

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Your license plate holder might say:

• Where you bought your car.  I like these people.  They have more important things to do than spend money on a new license plate holder and spend time changing it out.
• Where you went to school.  I fall into this category.  There’s not a lot of Huskies down here so I’ve got to represent.  The alumni association wishes I drove a nicer car.
• What you’d rather be doing.  I’d rather be skiing/playing tennis/driving a Titleist. Clever.

But the other day I saw one of these “I’d rather” license plate holders that actually made me feel really bad for the driver:

“I’d rather be sleeping.”

At first I thought it was kind of funny, mostly because it gave me something to read while I was stuck at a red light.  But the more I thought about, the more I realized how depressing it was.

Of all the things in the world this woman would rather have been doing (that could fit on a license plate frame), sleeping was her first choice.  This is what she has chosen to advertise to her fellow drivers, that her optimal state of being is one of unconsciousness.  I mean I enjoy sleeping as much as the next guy and definitely like a good night’s rest, but if that’s the activity you look forward to the most – enough to put it on your car – I’d venture to guess you’re not a happy person.

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