transportation – The Journalist's Resource

How they did it: Streetsblog exposes underground sales of illicit temporary license plates in New York City

Clark Merrefield — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 13:39:39 +0000

“In some respects, there was nothing unusual about the killing of Walter Gonzalez.

Eighty-six pedestrians had already died in car crashes in New York City last year by October 23, when a driver slammed a pick-up truck into Gonzalez in Brooklyn. It was not out of the ordinary that the driver was speeding, nor that his license had been revoked months prior.

But there was one thing that stood out about the crash: the paper license plate hanging from the back of the truck.”

-The lede to “Ghost Tags: Inside New York City’s Black Market for Temporary License Plates,” by Jesse Coburn

In April 2023, online news outlet Streetsblog NYC published the first story in a four-part investigation exposing a vast black market for temporary license plate tags, the massive scale of which was not publicly known.

Temporary tags are legal when someone buys a car. In New Jersey, for example, a dealer issues the buyer weatherized paper tags to display until metal plates come in the mail.

But it is illegal for dealers to issue temporary tags absent a car sale. It is also remarkably easy for dealers to sell those tags on the black market. And when dealers were caught, the penalties were small — before the series from Streetsblog investigative reporter Jesse Coburn.

More than 100 dealers in Georgia and New Jersey who authorities found violating regulations “have printed more than 275,000 temp tags since 2019,” Coburn writes, while tags from New Jersey dealers “are among the most common on the streets of New York City, as are tags from Georgia and Texas.”

Temporary tags proliferated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when state motor vehicle departments across the country were shut down. People buying cars privately had difficulty getting their vehicles registered. Some private buyers turned to used car dealers for temporary tags.

“Some New York City blocks suddenly seemed to be full of cars with out-of-state temps,” Coburn writes. “They started popping up in crimes across the city, like a shooting in Brooklyn, a robbery in Manhattan and a hit-and-run in the Bronx in which a driver plowed into a family of six on the sidewalk.”

Further, “Drivers were using them to mask their identities while evading tolls and traffic cameras, or while committing more serious crimes, authorities said,” Coburn writes.

At the time the Streetsblog investigation was published, auto dealers fraudulently selling authentic tags could fetch $100 to $200 apiece, while the maximum violation for a first-time offense in New Jersey was $500, Coburn found. One dealer in New Jersey issued tens of thousands of tags in 2021, and “could have made millions of dollars,” if all those were sold on the black market, Coburn writes.

Coburn’s seven-month investigation was built upon nearly 50 public records requests he filed, particularly from motor vehicle authorities in New Jersey and Georgia, for information on dealers illegally issuing temporary tags. Those tags, Coburn found, were being issued by dealers who appeared by and large not to be engaged in any legitimate business.

“The data really tells the story because it’s like, here’s this dealership that has no online presence, none whatever, no listing on Google Maps — none of the trappings of a successful car dealership — issuing tens of thousands of temp tags every year,” Coburn says.

Since the Streetsblog series, New Jersey has imposed tougher restrictions on temporary tags, including potential prison time and fines up to $10,000 for violators. A lawmaker in Georgia has also introduced legislation aimed at curtailing the market for fraudulent temporary tags there.

“New Jersey and Georgia have also shut down dozens of dealers for temp tag fraud since the series came out and proposed $150,000 in fines,” Coburn says. “Seven of the dealers that I sort of flagged to these states as possible temp tag violators are now under criminal investigation.”

Keep reading for four tips from Coburn based on his investigation, including how it came about, how he got people buying and selling temporary tags to talk to him, and the types of sources he thinks are most compelling.

1. Stay alert — is there something weird in your neighborhood?

Being an investigative reporter isn’t necessarily about having deep government sources or getting your hands on an incendiary tip, Coburn says. Sometimes, a strong investigation can come from staying alert to changes in the places you frequent.

“During the pandemic, in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, I started seeing tons of these paper license plates on cars from out of state — Texas, New Jersey, Georgia, Virginia, Maryland,” Coburn says. “And, you know, I’m sort of wondering what this is about.”

Coburn says he saw some local news coverage of illicit temporary tags in New York City, but those stories were driven mostly by police reports and press conferences.

“It just seemed inconceivable to me that so many people had just bought cars in Texas or Georgia,” he adds.

So, he began filing public records requests for data on temporary tags issued by auto dealers in New Jersey.

“What I saw was that there were these dealerships that were issuing massive numbers of tags — 10, 20,000 tags in a single year,” Coburn says. “Which should mean that that dealership is selling that many cars.”

He started digging into one dealer, F&J Auto Mall in Bridgeton, New Jersey, and learned it “issued 36,000 temporary license plates in 2021 — more than any other dealership in the state, including the used-car juggernauts Carvana and CarMax combined,” Coburn writes in Part 1 of the series.

Coburn recalls that when he looked up the publicly available address for F&J, Google Maps images showed a “warehouse in the middle of nowhere, with no big sign out front. A giant parking lot that was totally empty. That was the moment I was like, ‘There’s something really crazy going on here.’”

2. To ‘find your Virgil,’ try old-fashioned cold calling.

Cold calling may not feel like the most natural thing in the world, but if you don’t otherwise have good sources for your story, a few dozen unsolicited calls can work.

That’s what Coburn did when he realized he needed reputable auto dealers to walk him through what the data indicated about F&J. He searched for dealerships in northern New Jersey, close enough to his home base to potentially visit in person.

Initially, the response from auto dealers was “chilly” and “people were very skittish,” Coburn says. But before long, he struck journalistic gold.

“It took me about a dozen dealerships,” he says. “But, eventually, I got this guy on the phone named Abdul Cummings.”

As an émigré from Palestine running a legitimate used auto dealership, Cummings was troubled by the illegal activity happening in his industry, Coburn says. Cummings immediately began describing to Coburn how the paper tag fraud worked. Coburn recalls that Cummings was “very candid, and smart” with “a lot of integrity.”

“Find your Virgil,” Coburn advises, referring to the ancient Roman poet, a fictional version of whom shepherds Dante through hell in the Divine Comedy. “Someone who can kind of guide you through.”

Coburn found many other key sources through cold calls, such as Jose Cordero, who told Coburn he made $18,200 selling temporary tags before New Jersey authorities caught him.

3. Use court calendars to find sources involved in active cases.

Coburn identified temporary tag buyers through cold calls, but also by looking at WebCriminal, the online criminal court portal for New York.

“It’s extremely Web 1.0 — it’s very hard to use,” Coburn says. “But there is a wealth of information if you kind of know how to find it. And so eventually, I figured out how to search the court calendars for every day, and to search by violation.”

The violation for possessing illegal temporary tags is called “criminal possession of a forged instrument.” Coburn would search for people being arraigned on that charge and potentially related charges, such as driving with a suspended license.

“I would just sit in court and wait for their hearing to be called,” he says. “You know, I just had this list of names. And then after they were arraigned, I approached them and tried to talk to them — and was once again amazed at how candid people were.”

That’s how Coburn got the story of Adrian Mocha, who had his license suspended. In the span of one year, Mocha went through “eight or nine” temporary tags, according to Part 3 of the investigation. Coburn simply approached Mocha and interviewed him following one of Mocha’s court dates.

4. Seek sources outside the spotlight for interesting anecdotes.

Politicians and other high-profile officials are often used to interacting with members of the news media. They may be guarded and self-aware in what they publicly convey. But people who have less or no experience talking with reporters provided some of the more interesting details in Coburn’s story — such as Ali Ahmed, manager at Zack Auto Sales, which is registered in New Jersey, according to Coburn’s reporting.

Coburn visited Zack Auto Sales and asked Ahmed about the 999 temporary tags the dealership issued in 2022, despite having no presence online. Ahmed said, “If you’re going to go deep, and I find it, and you go to ask about my company in Trenton and New Jersey, you’re going to get trouble with it, believe me,” Coburn writes in Part 2 of the series. Ahmed said they “retail and wholesale [cars] online, like a broker,” according to Coburn’s reporting.

“Streetsblog did not find evidence that Zack Auto Sales illegally sells temporary license plates,” Coburn writes. “But one car wholesaler and one car broker based in New Jersey told Streetsblog that wholesalers and brokers have no reason to issue large numbers of temp tags.”

Coburn also recalls the compelling story of how Kareem Ulloa-Alvarado discovered he had been unknowingly delivering temporary tags for a dealership for a few weeks in December 2022 and January 2023, after finding the gig on Craigslist.

In Part 4 of the series, Coburn reports that Ulloa-Alvarado didn’t realize he was doing anything illegal until he was attacked at knifepoint during a delivery in the Bronx. When he went to police, a detective told Ulloa-Alvarado that he could be arrested for delivering fake tags if he filed a report about the assault. “Kareem was shocked,” Coburn writes.

“They were very interesting, original people,” he says. “I like stories where I’m not just speaking to media-trained government officials.”

Read the stories

Part 1: The Dealers

Part 2: The Landlords

Part 3: The Buyers

‘Duped’: A Harlem 20-Something Blows the Whistle on an Illegal Temporary License Plate Business

The post How they did it: Streetsblog exposes underground sales of illicit temporary license plates in New York City appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Crosswalks and pedestrian safety: What you need to know from recent research

Clark Merrefield — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 16:57:33 +0000

Each year, thousands of people die trying to cross roads in the U.S., making pedestrian safety a perpetual policy issue in cities and towns of all sizes. That’s why local news outlets pay close attention when government officials discuss crosswalk design and construction.

In recent months, news organizations have covered crosswalk construction or changes to existing crosswalks, including new, decorative pavers in Slidell, Louisiana, proposed infrastructure changes aimed at improving pedestrian safety in Phoenix, and decorative, themed crosswalks, such as rainbow crosswalks painted in towns across the country for Pride month.

Such stories call attention to the dangers of pedestrians and vehicles sharing roadways — and the rising rate of pedestrian deaths nationwide.

The Governors Highway Safety Association estimates at least 7,508 pedestrians were killed as a result of crashes on U.S. roadways in 2022. (Oklahoma did not submit data used for the analysis.)

The share of pedestrian deaths as a percentage of all traffic fatalities has risen 4.6 percentage points in recent years, from 13.0% in 2010 to 17.6% in 2021, according to the association’s latest preliminary pedestrian safety report, published in June 2023.

On top of those fatalities, there are more than 47,000 hospitalizations resulting from pedestrian crash injuries each year, according to a September 2020 analysis published in BMC Public Health.

Hotspots for pedestrian deaths — road corridors roughly a half-mile long with relatively high rates of deadly pedestrian-vehicle crashes — are more likely to be near commercial zones, have speed limits over 30 mph and have traffic volumes greater than 25,000 vehicles per day, according to January 2021 research published in The Journal of Transport and Land Use.

There is extensive research on measures that can improve pedestrian crossings. Recent studies have found that crosswalks are most effective when they are well lit at night and there is nearby signage alerting drivers they are coming up on a crosswalk.

Research also finds that Black and Hispanic pedestrians are at higher risk of being killed by a vehicle, compared with those who are white or Asian or Pacific Islander. And, current traffic light timings are typically set according to the average walking speed of a person without physical disabilities under age 65 — creating potentially dangerous situations for older pedestrians and people with disabilities.

Keep reading for more — including insight into the future of pedestrian safety as autonomous vehicles become increasingly common on U.S. roads.

Why pedestrian crashes happen and demographic risk trends

Recent research has identified several characteristics of intersections where vehicle-pedestrian crashes are more likely. A peer-reviewed analysis published in August 2022 used pedestrian crossing data from July 2017 to June 2018 at 1,606 intersections with traffic signals in Utah to predict crash counts at those crossings over a decadelong period.

The authors predict more pedestrian crashes at intersections with heavy foot and vehicle traffic. Other factors that worsened pedestrian safety included long crossing distances, intersections where right-on-red turns were allowed, commercial or vacant land nearby and communities where higher percentages of pedestrians have a physical disability or are racial or ethnic minorities, among other factors.

Uncontrolled crosswalks, those without a traffic signal or stop sign, generally “correspond to higher pedestrian crash rates, often due to inadequate pedestrian crossing accommodations,” according to a 2018 guidance document for local transportation agencies produced by the Federal Highway Administration.

Other recent, comprehensive research indicates Black and Hispanic pedestrians are more likely than white pedestrians and Asian or Pacific Islander pedestrians to be killed by a vehicle.

The authors of a September 2020 paper published in BMC Public Health find that from 2009 to 2016, there were 376,417 hospitalizations related to pedestrian-vehicle crashes, amounting to $1.13 billion in estimated hospital costs yearly. Overall, the authors report more than 47,000 people are injured in pedestrian crashes each year in the U.S.

The mortality rate was highest for Black pedestrians, at 2.78 per 100,000 people nationally. The rate for Hispanic pedestrians was 2.07, followed by white pedestrians at 1.67 and Asian or Pacific Islander pedestrians at 1.44. The hospital admission rate per 100,000 people was 15.62 for Black pedestrians, 13.00 for white pedestrians, 11.82 for Hispanic pedestrians and 8.27 for Asian or Pacific Islander pedestrians.

Hospital stays were longer and medical costs were higher for Black and Hispanic pedestrians compared with white pedestrians.

“Our results also align with previous research that has established links between race and inequities in safety and accessibility of transportation, including walking, and neighborhood social inequities, traffic volumes, road design, and road traffic injuries,” the authors write.

Recent research also suggests historically Black neighborhoods may lack crosswalks. The author of an April 2022 peer-reviewed paper uses satellite mapping to identify which San Francisco neighborhoods have crosswalks and which don’t.

There are about 6,400 intersections in San Francisco, and 58% of them have painted crosswalks, the author finds. Neighborhoods in the northern half of the city were more likely to have crosswalks than neighborhoods in the southern half.

The author closely examines 1,000 intersections in four neighborhoods with varying demographic characteristics. Just over half of intersections had crosswalks in Bayview, a historically Black neighborhood, compared with over two-thirds of intersections with crosswalks in Pacific Heights, a majority-white neighborhood.

A future consideration for pedestrian safety is whether a human or an autonomous system is operating an oncoming vehicle. By 2035, some 17% of new cars sold may have advanced autonomous driving systems, according to a conservative estimate from a January 2023 report from McKinsey & Company.

There is at least one recent paper that looks at real-world autonomous driving data and intersection interactions. The authors of peer-reviewed research published in February 2023 use 1,500 hours of sensor data from autonomous cars in Canada, the U.S. and Singapore to assess how self-driving vehicles approach people walking or riding bikes.

They report that autonomous vehicles making right turns are riskiest for pedestrians, while left turns are riskiest for bicyclists.

“The task of keeping active road users safe, while tricky in some situations, can be improved by more cautious [autonomous vehicle] behavior, a better ability to interpret active road user intentions, and a better understanding of the specific risky scenarios,” the authors write.

Safety measures for older pedestrians

Federal guidelines recommend that transportation agencies calculate how much time to give pedestrians to cross intersections that have traffic lights using an average walking speed of 3.5 feet per second. If pedestrians who walk slower or use wheelchairs routinely cross particular intersections, the Federal Highway Administration recommends transportation agencies use a walking speed of less than 3.5 feet per second.

Observational research indicates it’s unlikely older pedestrians can cross a street at a speed of 3.5 feet per second. A 2017 study published in Innovation in Aging found that among a sample of 1,191 people over age 60 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, nearly 96% walked slower than 3.5 feet per second.

An October 2019 paper in Accident Analysis and Prevention examines pedestrian crashes in Los Angeles from 2015 to 2017, specifically 2,471 crashes with pedestrians over age 65 and 11,373 crashes with pedestrians under age 65. The author identifies several infrastructure improvements that can improve safety for older pedestrians.

These include raised medians — islands in the center of a road that separate traffic, giving pedestrians a defined, safe place to stop while crossing wider roads. Three-way intersections are also safer for older pedestrians because they feature “less complex configuration and traffic flow” compared with four-way intersections. Tree-lined streets also help, as they may protect pedestrians while “providing pedestrians and drivers with a clear definition of roadways and sidewalks,” the author writes.

However, crosswalks make intersections safer for pedestrians under age 65, not those over age 65, a finding which “seems to reflect the fact that elderly pedestrians are discouraged from crossing roads and avoid jaywalking at the intersections with missing crosswalks,” the author writes. Likewise, decorative crosswalks — for example, those painted for Pride month — seem to benefit younger pedestrians more than older pedestrians, according to the paper.

Research on crosswalk design

Transportation agencies may rely on a variety of high- and low-tech tools to improve pedestrian safety at crosswalks, including lighting, video cameras, signs and flags.

A June 2020 nationwide review of research published in the 2000s and 2010s and conducted by researchers at the Louisiana Transportation Research Center finds the most common lighting treatments are overhead lights, in-road flashing lights and lights on bollards, which are short metal or concrete posts sometimes used to separate oncoming traffic or to define sidewalks.

Several factors, such as speeding and poor lighting, contribute to pedestrian crashes, the literature review finds. The authors find few studies on how adding lighting affects vehicle crashes, and none on how new lights affected pedestrian crash numbers.

Studies that examine driver and pedestrian behavior show crosswalk lighting makes drivers more likely to yield to pedestrians — and pedestrians more aware of their surroundings.

Other studies based on models aimed at predicting the probability of crashes at crosswalks “reveal that providing adequate lighting at midblock and intersection crosswalks is associated with lower probability of pedestrian fatalities and severe injuries,” the authors write.

Existing law enforcement cameras at intersections may make crosswalks safer for pedestrians. The authors of a March 2022 paper in the Journal of Safety Research studied four crosswalks without traffic lights in Nanjing, China. They learned that when cameras were present, fewer drivers drove aggressively — for example, speeding up toward an intersection and nearly hitting crossing pedestrians.

There are lower-cost options for transportation agencies that want make crosswalks safer where they live. An August 2019 paper in the journal Sustainability examines if crossing flags at intersections affect whether drivers yield to pedestrians.

The authors write that crossing flags are “brightly colored, typically plastic, reusable flags” pedestrians carry across the roadway then leave in a bucket on the other side. In examining 160 crossings in Las Vegas, those with flags were less likely to have drivers go through a crosswalk when a pedestrian was already in the roadway, and more likely to yield to a pedestrian waiting on the sidewalk.

Gateways are another low-cost option for improving pedestrian safety. These are inexpensive, reflective signs several feet tall meant to alert drivers approaching a crosswalk.

The authors of a June 2020 paper in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis studied gateways in Three Rivers, Michigan, concluding that “this type of set up would be ideal for a ‘Main Street’ setting where there is a downtown area with a high pedestrian and vehicle traffic count with several crosswalks. The gateway intervention could be deployed at the first intersection of each way of travel, therefore creating a corridor of safe crosswalks for that stretch of roadway.”

The news media and pedestrian safety

An experimental study published in December 2019 in the journal Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives examines whether news coverage of traffic crashes affects how readers assign blame for those crashes — was it the driver’s fault, the pedestrian’s, or due to something else?

“The field of media studies has consistently demonstrated that news coverage meaningfully shapes public perceptions,” the authors write. For their experiment, the authors recruited a nationally representative sample of 999 people and divided them into three groups, each assigned to read different versions of a fictional, local news article about a vehicle-pedestrian crash.

The first version of the article insinuated the pedestrian was at fault. It used the term “accident” and phrasing such as “a pedestrian struck by a car,” and noted the pedestrian was “wearing dark clothing” when “he was struck.”

The second version was driver-focused. It used the term “crash,” reported the “driver striking a pedestrian,” and omitted what the pedestrian was wearing “when the driver struck him with his car.”

For the third article, the authors use a “thematic” framing. The article grounds the particular crash within the theme of vehicle-pedestrian crashes. There is more detail on where the crash happened, with the pedestrian “attempting to cross Main Street between a bus stop and the Walgreens.” It adds context: “This is the eighth death of a pedestrian in the city this year, an increase of 20% from last year at this time” and notes there have been three recent pedestrian deaths on that stretch of Main Street.

The authors write that “shifting from a pedestrian-focused to a driver-focused text increased perceived blame for the driver. In turn, shifting to a thematically-framed text slightly reduced blame on the driver and increased blame on ‘other’ factors.”

They recommend journalists focus on the crash location and situation and avoid using language that may, inadvertently, assign blame to either the driver or pedestrian. They also encourage journalists to note whether a particular crash was a one-off or part of a trend.

Electric vehicles: 5 recent studies to inform your coverage

Clark Merrefield — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 16:25:35 +0000

With extreme drought in the Western U.S. causing water levels in the Colorado River to fall to historic lows and the Northeast also experiencing an extraordinarily dry summer, it’s a good time to explore recent research about electric vehicles — long touted as a key way to turn back the clock on climate change.

Carbon emissions increase the likelihood of extreme weather events, such as drought and wildfires. Electric vehicles “have large potential to reduce land-based transport [greenhouse gas] emissions,” according to a 2022 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientific analysis organization headquartered in Geneva and endorsed by the United Nations.

The first electric cars date to the 1830s, though they weren’t ready for everyday use until the 1870s. By the early 1900s, electric vehicles made up one-third of all vehicles in America, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The rise of Henry Ford’s gas-fueled Model T in the early 1910s spelled an end to the electric car for decades. The 1970s oil crisis renewed interest in electric vehicles. In 1996 General Motors released the EV1, a mass-produced all-electric car. In 2000 Toyota announced the U.S. launch of its Prius, the first mass produced hybrid vehicle, running on both gas and electric power. Tesla began delivering its first electric car, a sports car called the Roadster, in 2009, followed by the Model S luxury sedan in 2012.

Electric vehicles make up a small fraction of the roughly 261 million light-duty vehicles, including motorcycles, on U.S. roads. The Environmental Protection Agency defines light-duty vehicles as those weighing less than 8,500 pounds. Most passenger cars, SUVs, motorcycles and pickup trucks are considered light duty. Passenger cars and light-duty trucks account for 68% of U.S. road vehicle emissions and the transportation sector as a whole is the biggest greenhouse gas polluter, according to the latest federal government data.

There were about 2 million registered hybrid and fully electric vehicles in the U.S. in 2021, according to a 2022 report from the International Energy Agency, an independent intergovernmental organization based in Paris. “Some of the main drivers underpinning growth in the United States in 2021 were the increased production of Tesla models and the availability of new generation electric models by incumbent automakers,” according to the report. Combined sales of fully and partially electric vehicles doubled from 295,000 in 2020 to 631,000 last year — representing 5% of new vehicle sales, according to the agency.

Globally, hybrid and fully electric vehicles make up less than 1% of the 1.3 billion light-duty vehicles on the road today, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which collects and publishes energy statistics and analysis. The administration projects that by 2050, there will be 672 million plug-in vehicles around the world, making up about one-third of the global vehicle fleet.

One barrier to widespread electric vehicle adoption is fleet turnover, which simply means new vehicles replacing old ones. New gas-powered cars can last years, even decades, before they are replaced by lower- or no-emissions vehicles. As the authors of one of the papers included below write, “even if [electric vehicle] market share jumped dramatically, it would take decades to replace the existing vehicle fleet, during which time vehicle [greenhouse gas] emissions would continue, worsening climate change.”

To reduce electric vehicle costs and speed production, the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law on Aug. 16, provides tax credits to battery makers, potentially bringing down battery production costs by about one-third. Some states are also attempting to accelerate fleet turnover through policy action. California, for example, by 2035 will ban sales of new cars that run solely on gasoline.

The five studies featured here explore innovative ways to spur electric vehicle purchases, such as a revamped cash-for-clunkers program, which originally made national headlines in the U.S. during the Great Recession. Other topics include overviews of current charging infrastructure needs, considerations related to social and economic inequality, and the prospect of reusing car batteries to store solar power.

Inequality and the Future of Electric Mobility in 36 U.S. Cities: An Innovative Methodology and Comparative Assessment
Patricia Romero-Lankao, Alana Wilson and Daniel Zimny-Schmitt. Energy Research & Social Science, September 2022.

The study: The authors explore social and economic inequalities in 36 U.S. cities, then discuss how those inequities can inform the rollout of transportation technologies, such as electric vehicles, so the broadest number of people can take advantage of them. They specifically explore how inequities play out for “wealthy, urban disadvantaged, urban renters, middle-class homeowners, and rural/exurban” groups.

The findings: The authors focus on 20 large metropolitan areas — each with a population of more than 1.5 million people — and 16 medium metropolitan areas — each with 500,000 to 1.5 million people — in California, Colorado, Illinois, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas and the District of Columbia. They conclude that in order for electric vehicle rollouts to be successful, government policies will need to be tailored to the specific needs of each group. “For instance, rural/exurban populations might require electric carpooling,” the authors write. City dwellers, however, especially renters and households with lower incomes, would benefit more from electrified transit options rather than individually owned electric vehicles.

In the authors’ words: “Offering a variety of electrified options would provide benefits to the largest percentage of people and have more potential to sustainably decrease greenhouse gas emissions, reduce tailpipe emissions, and improve the health of people and ecosystems.”

Accelerating Vehicle Fleet Turnover to Achieve Sustainable Mobility Goals
Sergey Naumov, David Keith and John Sterman. Journal of Operations Management, March 2022.

The study: The authors examine potential designs for cash-for-clunkers programs that would help turn over more of the nation’s vehicle fleet to low- or no-emissions vehicles. The most notable cash-for-clunkers program in the U.S., called the Car Allowance Rebate System, ran during the summer of 2009 with $3 billion in congressional allocations. People with eligible gas-guzzling cars received a credit to purchase newer, more fuel efficient vehicles. Engines in the old cars were disabled and the cars scrapped. The authors use a model of light duty vehicle turnover in the U.S., developed as part of prior research from two of the authors, and simulate cash-for-clunkers policies that would achieve significant vehicle turnover by 2050.

The findings: Despite thousands of dollars in existing tax credits at the federal level and in some states for people buying zero-emissions vehicles, “alternative fuel vehicles have only achieved low single-digit market share in the United States to date,” the authors write. Their model assumes that patterns of car turnover will remain largely the same in the coming decades — with the average light vehicle having a useful life of 17 to 30 years — though they acknowledge that technological advances, like self-driving cars, could change those patterns. They explore several different program designs, including those in which people can get a cash credit for the purchase of an electric vehicle or traditional combustion engine vehicle; an electric or hybrid; or electric only. The authors find the design that would work best at turning over the existing vehicle fleet and reducing emissions is one that makes all gas-powered vehicles eligible, regardless of their age or fuel efficiency, and the credit reserved for those who replace their old car with a fully electric one. Government vehicle fleets being made fully electric would further spur the no-emissions vehicle market, they add.

In the authors’ words: “[Cash-for-clunkers] programs will also primarily benefit more affluent individuals who buy the majority of new cars, while low-income individuals tend to purchase used vehicles or forgo car ownership altogether, instead relying on public transportation. However, by accelerating fleet turnover, [cash-for-clunkers] policies speed reductions in harmful tailpipe emissions. The adverse health impacts of these emissions are disproportionately borne by the poor and especially by people of color.”

The State of Play in Electric Vehicle Charging Services — A Review of Infrastructure Provision, Players, and Policies
Sarah LaMonaca and Lisa Ryan. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, February 2022.

The study: The authors explore current charging options for electric vehicle owners and policies that could spur the development of more charging infrastructure. They also discuss whether charging infrastructure is “a public good or private asset,” considering that “both the public and private sectors have been involved in the provision of charging stations and it is timely to consider the roles of the different actors in this market.”

The findings: Charging services have different cost structures, which make it hard for consumers to compare whether it’s cheaper to charge at home or at a public charging station. Some charging services charge by the minute, the hour, by energy used, or even offer subscriptions. The authors suggest that legislation could standardize how charging pricing is presented and “could help to improve the customer experience when searching out charging services.” To promote electric vehicle usage, federal and state governments could subsidize charging infrastructure, which is still expensive to build and maintain. Better data is needed on how and when people use public chargers, which federal or state governments could compel private providers to make public.

In the authors’ words: “Because the likely social benefits are not limited to those who can pay, decisions about this infrastructure are an important public policy concern and should not be just a matter for private firms and investors; it is therefore rarely fully privately-funded or owned.”

Quantifying the Emissions Impact of Repurposed Electric Vehicle Battery Packs in Residential Settings
Alizer Khowaja, Matthew Dean and Kara Kockelman. Journal of Energy Storage, November 2021.

The study: The authors use detailed electrical grid generation data and electricity demand data from homes with solar power in Austin, Texas, to explore the potential emissions benefits of adding the storage power of old electric vehicle batteries to energy efficient homes. Based on previous environmental research, the authors note that drawbacks crop up throughout the life of an electric vehicle battery, including “the depletion of water tables during mining, high [greenhouse gas] emissions during battery manufacturing, e-waste due to a small percentage of batteries being recycled after operation, and contamination or exposure of toxic chemicals after disposal.”

The findings: Used electric vehicle batteries can hold from 60% to 80% of their original capacity, “which under favorable conditions could provide up to 10 years of second-life stationary [battery storage systems] at an economic savings of up to 60% compared to new storage systems,” the authors write. Assuming processes are in place to distribute and install old electric vehicle batteries to store solar power for homes, the authors find that such setups could reduce carbon emissions by one ton each year for each equipped house. By comparison, the average car emits roughly 4.6 tons of carbon per year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

In the authors’ words: “While the [greenhouse gas] savings for each household may appear negligible, the power of scale and rising social cost of CO2 may allow communities to considerably reduce their carbon footprint and transition both the power and transportation sector away from traditional fuel sources.”

There’s No Place like Home: Residential Parking, Electrical Access, and Implications for the Future of Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure
Yanbo Ge, Christina Simeone, Andrew Duvall, and Eric Wood. National Renewable Energy Laboratory Technical Report, October 2021.

The report: The authors examine the types of homes that currently have charging access, noting that “there is uncertainty about how effectively home charging can scale as the primary charging location for electric vehicle owners.” They conducted an online survey from May 13 to May 31, 2020, asking 5,250 adults across the U.S. about their access to parking and electrical outlets. The authors use the survey results to project what the future of charging infrastructure might look like.

The findings: The authors find that one quarter of those surveyed have driveways or garages with electrical access, with another quarter reporting they could have such access installed. In one future scenario, the authors project that if every car on the road were electric, about one quarter of vehicles would lack at-home charging. They note that for electric vehicle ownership to extend beyond “high-income, single-family homes that have access to off-street parking,” city planners will need to consider how to provide charging infrastructure for people living in multi-family housing, such as apartment buildings, where overnight, off-street parking may not be easily available.

In the authors’ words: “In situations where residential off-street charging access is unattainable, a portfolio of solutions may be possible, including providing access to public charging in residential neighborhoods (on street), at workplaces, at commonly visited public locations, and (when necessary) at centralized locations via high power fast charging infrastructure (similar to existing gas stations).”

The post Electric vehicles: 5 recent studies to inform your coverage appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Seat belt use in America: A primer and research roundup

Clark Merrefield — Tue, 03 May 2022 16:06:48 +0000

This piece was updated on May 18, 2022, to reflect new crash death estimates from the federal government covering all of 2021.

Upcoming long weekends like Memorial Day and Independence Day will mean more Americans behind the wheel, so it’s a good time for journalists to remind audiences that a simple action — buckling a seat belt — can prevent tragedy.

Nearly 43,000 people were killed in motor vehicle crashes in 2021, according to new statistical modeling estimates from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

That means last year was the deadliest on U.S. roads since 2005.

It also marks a continuation of high fatality rates — a measure of crash deaths relative to miles driven — since the pandemic began, which stand at levels unseen in over a decade.

Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in February called rising crash fatalities during the COVID-19 pandemic a “national crisis.”

NHTSA research published in October 2021 links those deaths with speeding, drunk driving and less seat belt use among people in crashes.

Coming soon: driving season

People were ejected from their vehicles at higher rates through most of 2020 and 2021 compared with 2019, though ejection rates in 2021 were lower than in 2020.

An ejection typically indicates a severe crash and that the person ejected was not wearing their seat belt, according to the NHTSA research from last fall.

Seat belts saved 14,955 lives in 2017, the most recent year those estimates are available from NHTSA.

An additional 2,549 lives could have been saved in 2017 if everyone wore a seat belt, according to NHTSA.

Since 1975, seat belts have saved 374,276 lives and would have prevented another 386,719 deaths if they had been universally used.

It’s too soon to tell how seat belt use and ejection rates will fare this year. While high gas prices could keep some Americans from driving this summer, government projections suggest otherwise.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasts $3.84 per gallon during summer driving season.

That would put gas prices nearly 80 cents higher on average than last summer.

Still, the EIA forecasts more gasoline consumption this summer than last summer — meaning more driving.

The agency points to low unemployment and “decreasing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on travel” as factors for the rosy summer travel outlook.

Stagnating seat belt use rates

Despite rising crash fatalities, seat belt use rates nationally among drivers and passengers remain historically high at over 90% each year from 2019 to 2021 — though the 2021 rate of 90.4% is slightly down from the 2019 rate of 90.7%.

But seat belt use has stagnated.

According to NHTSA, “gains have plateaued in recent years, and traffic safety researchers seek to understand why approximately 10% of the U.S. population does not consistently wear a seat belt while driving, and a much larger portion admit to not consistently wearing belts when riding in rear seats or other situations.”

Parsing the seat belt use data reveals potential areas for improvement.

For example, seat belt use rates vary by state, suggesting there is work to do in certain parts of the country.

The most recent data for seat belt use by state comes from 2019 — because of the pandemic, NHTSA gave states a pass on conducting seat belt use surveys in 2020. Those surveys usually happen in June, the month after the federal government and state governments launch their Click It or Ticket marketing campaigns.

Click It or Ticket advertisements run on TV, radio, digital and social media, roadside billboards and other media. The annual campaign to encourage seat belt use began in 2003 and targets 18-to-34 year old men.

The 2021 national budget was $8 million.

New Hampshire is the only state that does not require adult drivers and front seat passengers to wear seat belts. With a rate of 71% in 2019, New Hampshire is last in the nation for seat belt use, according to the 2019 NHTSA data.

Other states below 80% include South Dakota, Wyoming and Nebraska.

At a rate of 97%, Hawaii tops the nation in seat belt use. Other states over 95% include California, Georgia and Oregon, as well as the District of Columbia.

The federal government provides millions of dollars in grants to states that enact laws promoting road safety, including if states meet certain thresholds for seat belt use.

Those thresholds vary by state based on past seat belt use rates.

California, for example, had a target of 97.5% seat belt use in 2019. Wyoming had a target rate of 81.2%.

Vehicle type matters when it comes to seat belt use. Some 91% of passenger car occupants use a seat belt along with nearly 93% of van and SUV occupants.

But in pickup trucks, the rate is lower — about 86%. The rate is the same for medium and heavy-duty commercial truck drivers, according to 2016 survey data, the most recent available from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

Nationally, urban and rural areas see roughly equal levels of seat belt use, but speeds tend to be higher in rural areas, increasing the risk of a severe crash.

Enforcement laws also make a difference. Those laws fall into two categories: primary and secondary.

Primary laws allow police to pull over a driver solely for not wearing a seat belt.

Secondary laws require police to pull over a driver for another reason before enforcing a seat belt law.

There are 34 states, plus the District of Columbia, with primary seat belt laws.

In 2019, the seat belt use rate was 92% in primary enforcement states, compared with 86% in secondary enforcement states.

First offenses for seat belt law violations can result in monetary fines of less than $25 in most states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

How to increase seat belt use: What the research says

Academic and government researchers have explored potential solutions to encourage people to buckle up.

One paper, “Does Driver Seat Belt use Increase Usage among Front Seat Passengers? An Exploratory Analysis,” published in May 2021 in the Journal of Safety Research, points to a nuanced angle the federal government and states could bring to their marketing campaigns.

The paper parses seat belt use data from 2017 to 2019 in Wisconsin to explore how driver seat belt use affects whether passengers buckle up.

Wisconsin’s overall seat belt use rate was just over 90% in 2019, on par with the national rate.

When a driver uses a seat belt, women in the passenger seat are more likely than men to also wear their seat belt, finds author Tracy Buchman, an assistant professor of occupational and environmental safety at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

But male passengers were more likely to buckle up when the driver wearing their seat belt was a woman.

When a female driver was wearing their seat belt, male passengers buckled up 96% of the time in 2019, Buchman finds. When a male was driving and buckled, male passengers wore a seat belt 94% of the time.

The data was collected as part of the National Occupant Protection Use Survey, which NHTSA oversees and uses for its national and state figures.

All drivers were over age 16, but the paper does not break down the results by age. Buchman explains that the goal was simply to explore how driver seat belt use behavior affected passengers.

“It’s always been known males don’t wear their seat belts as often as females, so ad buys target males — and that’s valid and important,” she says. “But I think if females know they can make a difference with seat belt compliance, maybe we start targeting females with ad buys and try to get that last 5% or 10% to be even more compliant.”

Federal marketing campaigns, such as Click it or Ticket, typically try to get people who don’t wear a seat belt to buckle up. Buchman adds it’s worthwhile to consider a “multi-pronged” approach targeting drivers carrying seat-belt reluctant passengers.

“Tell your passengers to put their seat belt on,” she says, “they’ll listen to you.”

The truck driver shortage and the trucking industry workforce: 5 studies to consider

Clark Merrefield — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 15:55:58 +0000

Industry groups for years have warned of a workforce shortage in trucking, particularly for long-haul truckers who pick up and deliver across state lines. In the year before the COVID-19 pandemic, the industry was short nearly 61,000 drivers, according to the American Trucking Associations, the nation’s largest group representing the industry. The association estimates a shortage of 160,000 drivers by 2028.

The association is the biggest lobbying group in trucking, spending more than $2 million in five of the past six years lobbying federal legislators. Along with over 100 other supply chain trade groups, the association maintained in an April letter to members of Congress that the pandemic has “exacerbated the truck driver shortage, and the temporary closures of state [motor vehicle departments] and truck driver training schools dried up the already fragile pipeline of new drivers entering the trucking industry.”

Aside from an initial rush to hoard household items, the pandemic slowed demand in the U.S. for durable goods (like furniture) and certain nondurable goods (like gasoline) during the first half of 2020. But the reopening of the country has reinvigorated consumers’ appetite for spending.

By weight and value, trucks carry more freight across the country than every other mode combined, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. There were about 1.8 million heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers in the U.S. in May 2020, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (May 2021 employment estimates won’t be published until spring 2022.)

Heavy trucks and tractor-trailers are vehicles weighing over 26,000 pounds. Those drivers take home a median annual wage of $47,000, compared with about $42,000 across all occupations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That works out to about $22 per hour.

But hourly wage data for truck drivers can be misleading because drivers are often paid by the mile — $200 for a 500-mile haul that takes 8 hours comes to $25 an hour. But if the trucker loses two hours to traffic, the hourly rate for the same haul is $20.

The idea behind a trucker shortage is that there are not enough people to fill the jobs available. The American Trucking Associations blames the shortage on the relatively high average age of truckers — 46 years old — as well as that about 7% of truckers are women, despite women making up half of the national workforce. The association has been a prominent voice in pushing federal regulators to lower the minimum age for long-haul truckers from 21 to 18, to attract younger people into the industry.

Safety advocate groups, like Road Safe America and the Truck Safety Coalition, counter that teenage commercial drivers are more likely to be involved in fatal crashes. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the agency that regulates trucking nationally, has proposed a pilot program to test whether long-haul truckers under age 21 are less safe.

Industry groups representing drivers, such as the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, the second-biggest lobbying group in trucking, call out retention as the major labor problem in trucking. For them, it’s not that people aren’t interested in driving long-haul for a living, and it’s not that there is a dearth of credentialed drivers. The issue is pay and working conditions. News outlets have documented wages failing to keep up with inflation and long hours away from home as factors affecting employee retention.

Days on the road can take their toll on drivers’ well-being. During a random survey of 316 male truckers at a rest stop near Greensboro, North Carolina, published in 2012 in Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 28% reported being lonely, 27% felt depressed and 21% experienced chronic sleep problems.

Here, we explore five recent studies on the trucking workforce, both in the U.S. and abroad, to inform journalists’ coverage of this labor story. This research breaks down the major workforce issues in trucking, as well as comparisons between trucking in the U.S. and other countries.

A quick note: At The Journalist’s Resource, we usually cover peer-reviewed academic research. There are many peer-reviewed transportation journals — Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Transportation Science and Research in Transportation Economics, to name just a few.

Numerous universities also invest in high-quality transportation research, although it’s not always submitted for formal peer review. They include the University of California, Berkeley, through its Institute of Transportation Studies; the Texas A&M Transportation Institute; and San Jose State University, through its Mineta Transportation Institute, which does use a peer-review process for its research.

The U.S. Department of Transportation also funds research, searchable via the Repository & Open Science Access Portal, known as ROSA P. The Transportation Research Board — part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine — is another source for high-quality research on a range of transportation topics.

—

What Do Professional Drivers Think About Their Profession? An Examination of Factors Contributing to the Driver Shortage
Chao Ji-Hyland and Declan Allen. International Journal of Logistics Research and Applications, September 2020.

This examination of driver conditions in Europe reveals similarities with conditions drivers experience in the U.S. The authors analyze data from a survey of 111 drivers of heavy trucks in Ireland conducted in late 2018 and early 2019, as well as in-depth interviews with five drivers. Mirroring the issue of the aging trucker workforce in the U.S., most of the drivers surveyed for this research were in their mid-40s to mid-50s.

“This highlights the profession’s relative inability to attract a young labor force,” the authors write. In response to an open-ended question about major questions facing the industry, drivers mentioned “low pay, extensive regulations, pressure to fulfill on-time deliveries and long hours away from home.”

The authors also find the longer drivers are in the profession, the more satisfied they are with their jobs and the more committed they are to keep driving. But no matter their experience level, all drivers surveyed recounted feeling lonely being on the road for long periods of time.

“Because of long hours away from home, social and psychological factors have a significant influence on drivers’ job satisfaction,” the authors write. “All participants referred to the loneliness that they can experience.”

Critical Issues in Trucking Workforce Development
Thomas O’Brien, Tyler Reeb, Deanna Matsumoto and Diana Sanchez. Mineta Transportation Institute, April 2020.

The authors of this white paper conducted a literature review of recent research from academic, peer-reviewed journals, as well as government and industry group sources.

They also interviewed government and private sector industry leaders to better understand workforce development issues in trucking nationally and in California specifically. While vehicle automation could eventually displace thousands of professional drivers, experts interviewed didn’t think that was imminent. In fact, they think demand for drivers will remain high, possibly for decades to come.

“Messaging to prospective drivers needs to reflect this reality to counteract the current inaccurate reporting in the media centered around the demise of the truck driving profession,” the authors write.

They note they conducted their research before the pandemic, so it doesn’t capture COVID-related workforce challenges. Here are other key findings:

New truck drivers tend to be in their 30s and previously worked in other fields.
Churn may be a leading cause of driver shortages. Many drivers don’t necessarily leave the industry — they simply switch companies.
There can be significant barriers to entering the field, including that drivers often foot the bill for their training and licensing.
By 2026, there will be a projected 108,400 additional heavy and tractor-trailer drivers nationally, a 6% increase compared with 2016 employment levels.

“Recent research on stressors in the trucking industry point to promoting engagement or essential skills (formerly referred to as ‘soft skills’) to improve relations between dispatcher and driver, and supervisor and driver,” the authors write. “These recommendations may result in better truck driver performance and retention rates by increasing drivers’ loyalty to the company, rather than loyalty mainly to the profession.”

Is the U.S. Labor Market for Truck Drivers Broken?
Stephen Burks and Kristen Monaco. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, March 2019.

This government research further supports the idea that U.S. drivers are committed to staying in the industry, though not necessarily at any particular company. The authors examine national occupational statistics to understand which jobs drivers leave before getting into trucking, and which industries they pursue after leaving trucking. Even when drivers leave the profession, they often move to jobs where they interact with drivers.

“As a whole, the market for truck drivers appears to work as well as any other blue-collar labor market, and while it tends to be ‘tight,’ it imposes no constraints on entry into (or exit from) the occupation,” the authors write.

A tight labor market is characterized by high employment levels and high demand for workers. In heavy and tractor-trailer trucking, the labor market has been tight since 2003, the authors find. This situation tends to push overall wages higher, compared with other jobs requiring similar education levels.

But, as other studies and news reports have found, many truckers still think their pay is too low. The authors note that working conditions spotlighted by industry groups and the news media are concentrated in a specific segment: for-hire, long-distance trucking.

“Surprisingly, the occupational attachment of truck drivers is actually a bit higher than that of some other blue-collar occupations,” the authors write. “This finding suggests that the market for truck drivers works about as well as that for other blue-collar occupations, and that, broadly speaking, we should expect that if wages rise when the labor market for truck drivers is too tight, the potential for any long-term shortages will be ameliorated.”

In other words, the authors expect the trucking labor market to act like any other market: If companies have a hard time hiring truckers, upping pay should attract enough drivers to meet freight demand.

The Endemic Issue of Truck Driver Shortage: A Comparative Study between India and the United States
Neha Mittal, Prashanth Udayakumar, G. Raghuram and Neha Bajaj. Research in Transportation Economics, November 2018.

The authors identify common traits of truck driver shortages in the U.S. and India, “two distinct nations” dealing with more freight than truckers.

Driver age is a major issue in both countries. In the U.S., this is driven by baby boomers leaving the trucking labor market and some drivers turning to other job opportunities, such as those offered by ride-sharing companies, according to the authors.

In India, younger workers are reticent to enter trucking because the industry there is unorganized. Truck drivers often are not covered by minimum wage laws, for example. The profession also generally carries less social status than it once did.

“While truck drivers in the early years following India’s independence were respected for their disciplined driving behavior, today’s drivers have lower socio-economic status in the society,” the authors write.

In the U.S., driver interactions with supervisors affect turnover.

“Drivers complain that their supervisors do not even know their name — they object saying: ‘they’re not a truck and a trailer, they’re a person,’” the authors write. “Another common complaint is that their manager does not value their ideas and suggestions.”

One suggestion the authors offer to attract drivers: Better marketing from companies.

“Trucking and logistics companies should invest in creating programs and advertisements that can help the society understand the need and importance of truck drivers and how they are the ‘heroes’ in our day-to-day lives,” the authors write.

Trucker Shortage as Government Failure
Jeremy Kidd and Joseph Padgett. Loyola University Chicago Journal of Regulatory Compliance, March 2016.

Trucking is federally-regulated in the U.S., for safety reasons. Drivers must be adequately trained so they know how to operate their large vehicles while sharing the road with passenger cars. There are rules on how many hours truckers can drive in a given period, when they have to take breaks, and more.

The authors of this paper argue the precision of hours-of-service and other regulations can make it difficult for drivers to drive at the best times. They note that a driver due for rest who is unloading at 11 a.m. on a Friday may have to wait until Monday morning rush hour to get back on the road.

Because drivers are typically paid by the mile, the faster a driver completes their run, the more they end up making per hour. Peak traffic congestion can cost them.

“Society need not abandon the notion of regulation entirely … However, the example of the trucking industry should encourage caution; regulations should be seen as only a corrective measure, applied when a specific flaw can be identified and a well-defined solution can be crafted,” the authors conclude.

The post The truck driver shortage and the trucking industry workforce: 5 studies to consider appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Want fewer cars on the roads? Don’t offer parking, research suggests

Clark Merrefield — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 21:18:14 +0000

Forthcoming research in Urban Studies draws a direct line between dedicated parking spots and the number of cars owned among affordable housing residents in a major American city.

San Francisco residents who joined affordable housing lotteries from July 2015 to June 2018 and secured units with a free parking spot were more likely to have cars, the research finds.

Specifically, lottery-winning residents in buildings that guaranteed one parking spot per unit had double the rate of car ownership of residents in buildings without parking. A building’s parking supply also more strongly predicts car ownership than transit access, according to the research.

“That was surprising,” says Adam Millard-Ball, associate professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles and one of the paper’s authors. “You might think it doesn’t matter how much parking is in a building because people could park on the street or rent a space down the block. It isn’t something I was expecting — that parking in a building has such a large effect on whether people choose to drive.”

Define affordable

The definition of housing affordability greatly depends on the affordability of a city itself. San Francisco is among the most expensive places to live and has one of the most expensive real estate markets, with median home prices north of $1 million, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Rental prices have fallen over the past year but an average rental in San Francisco still runs about $3,000 each month, according to apartment listing website RENTCafé. Parking isn’t cheap either, with dedicated spots routinely going for hundreds of dollars per month there. That high cost of living means affordable housing is different in San Francisco compared with most other parts of the country.

Eligible households apply to enter city-run lotteries to buy or rent below-market-rate units, with preference given to current or former San Francisco residents. Income ceilings for affordable housing lotteries there are roughly $120,000 for a two-person household — double the median U.S. household income — according to the forthcoming paper. The two-person income cap for an affordable housing rental in Raleigh, North Carolina, by contrast, is about $60,000. Below-market-rate sale and rental prices in San Francisco vary based on type of unit, but it costs $750,000 just to build a two-bedroom affordable housing unit there, according to The New York Times.

Totally random

Parking is part of what transportation planners call the “built environment.” It is what it sounds like: the built environment refers to human-made physical structures that influence how people move and live. Past research has strongly suggested parking supply and car ownership are related.

But as the authors of the new paper point out, it’s been a challenge for researchers to draw concrete, causal conclusions — because of something called self-selection. In this context, self-selection means people may select their transportation modes based on personal preference. Do people live in highly walkable neighborhoods because they like walking, or for other reasons? Do people live in car-centric communities with limited transit access because they prefer driving, or for other reasons?

Put another way, people are not randomly assigned to their homes. As the authors note, “randomized experiments are the gold standard to identify causal effects.” The difficulty in parsing the relationship between where people live and their transportation choices has precluded other researchers from being able to say that changes in parking supply cause changes in car ownership.

People aren’t usually randomly assigned to their homes.

San Francisco housing lottery winners, however, are by and large randomly selected. The city is one of several in the country experiencing a well-documented and long-standing affordable housing crisis.

Developers building new apartments there must set aside a percentage of units for people to rent or buy at below market rates, and lotteries often attract many more applicants than there are available units.

Private developers typically have to set aside 12% to 20% of on-site units as below-market-rate, or provide or pay a fee toward off-site affordable units, according to the new paper, “What Do Residential Lotteries Show Us About Transportation Choices?“

“Because of the very low odds of winning, eligible households generally apply indiscriminately to many different housing lotteries,” write Millard-Ball and his co-authors, Jeremy West, Nazanin Rezaei and Garima Desai. Millard-Ball further explains that because of the high cost of housing in San Francisco, if someone wins a below-market-rate unit, they’re likely going to move in no matter where it is in the city and whether or not the building has certain amenities, like parking.

Because transportation and other preferences are not part of the equation, the researchers directly link parking supply and car ownership. They analyze results from their survey of transportation choices and employment among 2,700 San Francisco households that won below-market-rate units across 59 lotteries from 2015 to 2018.

Residents given the chance for a free or reduced price parking spot, usually about $100, were likely to take advantage. And while some research suggests people who own vehicles are more likely to have jobs, the authors of the current study find no relationship between car ownership and full-time employment. They note they conducted their survey in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic led to historically high national unemployment rates.

“It is some of the first evidence that there’s no obvious employment downside to not having parking in a building,” Millard-Ball says. While San Francisco is a uniquely expensive place to live, Millard-Ball adds that “there’s something all cities can learn from this: we can’t just write off the effects of the built environment.”

Zone out?

Starting in 2010, San Francisco began phasing out a zoning requirement that units in new buildings each have at least one parking spot. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors completely eliminated parking minimums in 2018. If new construction does include parking spots, residents now often have to pay market rates — hundreds of dollars per month for tenants, tens of thousands of dollars in one-time payments for buyers.

But many cities still require that new apartment buildings have at least one parking spot per unit.

“There is a long history of zoning and parking requirements making it harder to build affordable housing,” Millard-Ball says. “They’re designed with a specific type of household in mind — one that is middle- and high-income, and owns cars and is more likely than not to be white.”

The built environment influences how people move and live.

Parking minimums are one element of zoning law that can make it difficult for a city to encourage new affordable housing — because the cost of building parking ups the final bill for housing developments, says Millard-Ball. By one estimate, dedicated parking spots in San Francisco can increase residential per-unit costs by $50,000. The authors of the current paper record a range of parking costs for below-market-rate buyers in their sample, with spaces offered from $33,000 to $138,000.

“Removing parking requirements is pretty much free, and provides savings in construction costs and can make housing cheaper,” Millard-Ball says. “So beginning to abolish zoning requirements for a minimum number of parking spaces to be built — that’s something that can be done at any time.”

Induced / reduced demand

The new paper adds to a lineage of research on what transportation researchers call induced demand — that’s the “if you build it, they will come” line of thinking.

Induced demand happens, for example, when a state decides to add lanes to relieve congestion on a busy highway. Research shows adding lanes or building new roads doesn’t reduce traffic — it makes people drive more. During peak travel times, usually mornings and evenings, traffic swells to meet road capacity in cities. That’s the “law of peak-hour expressway congestion,” a phrase economist Anthony Downs coined in 1962.

Economists Gilles Duranton and Miles Turner confirmed Downs’ law in a 2011 American Economic Review paper by analyzing U.S. highway travel data from 1983, 1993 and 2003, concluding that “increased provision of interstate highways and major urban roads is unlikely to relieve congestion of these roads.”

San Francisco is home to one of the more well-known examples of the inverse of induced demand — reduced demand. The idea is that removing elements of the built environment — such as inner city highways — doesn’t necessarily lead to traffic chaos, it just reduces demand for those transportation modes.

In the 1980s, some San Francisco residents began pushing political leaders to demolish the elevated Embarcadero Freeway, which cut off the eastern waterfront from the city core. Other residents feared that if the freeway were removed, their lives would become marred by snarling traffic and they would lose easy access to other parts of the city.

Then, nature stepped in. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake damaged the freeway, which was taken out of service. Traffic nightmares never materialized. Instead, nearby surface streets absorbed traffic and transit ridership in the area increased 75% during the 1990s, according to research from 2009 in the Journal of Urbanism. The city began demolishing the Embarcadero Freeway in 1991.

“In particular, the Embarcadero teardown opened up access to San Francisco Bay, while a street-car line along the waterfront’s palm-tree lined boulevard brought locals and tourists to restaurants and cultural activities in the formerly isolated, dingy area left in the shadow of the unfinished, double-decked expressway,” wrote the late urban historian Raymond Mohl in the Journal of Planning History in 2011.

The Embarcadero: wide and walkable.

The demise of the Embarcadero Freeway also presaged San Francisco’s housing crisis. When the wide and walkable Embarcadero boulevard opened in the freeway’s place in 2000, nearby properties suddenly gained waterfront access. Average values within a one-mile radius increased by tens of thousands of dollars over the five years after the boulevard opened, according to the Journal of Urbanism research.

The forthcoming research in Urban Studies was paid for with a grant from the University of California Institute of Transportation Studies, with funding from California’s Road Repair and Accountability Act of 2017.

Working from home: What the research says about setting boundaries, staying productive and reshaping cities

Clark Merrefield — Mon, 08 Jun 2020 16:46:49 +0000

Over the past 12 weeks, the coronavirus pandemic has forced millions of employees in America to begin working from home. Before the pandemic, 2.5% of U.S. employees teleworked full-time, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Now, almost everyone who can telework is doing so.

Some economists expect the share of people teleworking full-time to remain high even after the pandemic ends. We collected a variety of research to address big questions employers, employees and cities face as America’s office workers consider the future of working from home.

Research indicates there is no one-size-fits all approach when it comes to telework arrangements. Everyone now teleworking faces challenges, from caring for children to adjusting to virtual collaboration with coworkers. Some people will be more productive working from home, some people less so.

One constant in the academic literature is that the type of work matters when it comes to whether telework arrangements are successful. People with complex jobs that can be performed independently generally fare better than those with less complex jobs that require extensive interaction with colleagues.

It’s important to remember most jobs cannot be done at home, and tens of millions of workers have temporarily or permanently lost their jobs — though the economy regained 2.5 million jobs in May. An estimated 37% of U.S. jobs are conducive to telework, according to an analysis from University of Chicago economists Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman.

Google and Facebook are two major employers that have told employees to plan on teleworking through 2020. Twitter has told employees if they can telework and want to keep teleworking, they can “do so forever.”

Work-from-home arrangements will likely expand beyond the tech world — and beyond the pandemic. Executives at about 1,750 firms from a variety of industries across the country expect 10% of full-time employees to telework every workday after the pandemic ends, according to the May monthly panel survey by economists at the Atlanta Fed, Stanford University and the University of Chicago. The executives expect 30% of their workforce to telework at least one day a week after the pandemic, triple the 10% rate before.

Keep reading to find out what the research says about employee productivity and setting boundaries while working at home, how mass teleworking could transform cities — and more.

My work and home life have completely melded. How can I set boundaries?

It’s one of the bigger questions for workers thrust into full-time telework — especially those simultaneously caring for children. Academic research can provide guidance for striking a balance.

For the paper “Strategies for Successful Telework: How Effective Employees Manage Work/Home Boundaries,” from June 2016 in Strategic HR Review, Kelly Basile and T. Alexandra Beauregard conducted 40 in-depth interviews with people teleworking full or part-time at an organization that did not have a culture of long work hours. Basile is an assistant professor of management at Emmanuel College. Beauregard is a reader in organizational psychology at Birbeck, University of London.

“When work and home activities take place in the same physical space, physical, temporal and psychological boundaries between work and home can become blurred,” Basile and Beauregard write.

The workers they interviewed use physical, time-based, behavioral and communicative strategies to set boundaries. For example, after their workday was done, full-time teleworkers with dedicated office space at home had an easier time devoting their full attention to non-work responsibilities, compared with those without a home office.

Teleworkers accountable to other responsibilities, like walking a dog or caring for children after school, had stronger work-home boundaries than those only accountable to themselves. Certain routine behaviors, like shutting down a computer at the end of the day, or turning off the ringer on a work phone, also helped establish boundaries. Those with children or spouses at home during telework time were most successful when they communicated clearly and consistently that they needed their workday to be free of household noise and interruptions.

“In organizations where after-hours communications, early meetings and weekend working are the norm, employees preferring segmentation will have difficulty establishing and maintaining boundaries between work and personal time,” Basile and Beauregard write. It’s another theme throughout the academic literature: Whether telework works for individual employees depends on company culture.

For “Toward Understanding Remote Workers’ Management of Work-Family Boundaries: The Complexity of Workplace Embeddedness,” from December 2015 in Group and Organization Management, Kimberly Eddleston and Jay Mulki conducted 52 interviews with sales and service employees from across the U.S. who worked from home full-time. Eddleston is a professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at Northeastern University and Mulki is an associate professor of marketing there.

Many of the interviewees worked at organizations where it was common to work more than 40 hours a week, sometimes outside of regular hours. Even though interviews were in-depth, the authors caution that because their sample is small, their findings cannot be generalized to the broader population.

Still, the findings indicate a telework divide between men and women. About 62% of the interviewees were women. Some women experienced benefits — spending time with their families while also being able to step away for urgent deadlines. But more than half of women working remotely — compared with just a tenth of men — reported their spouse didn’t respect boundaries between work and family. “You know, I get distracted by my private life,” one woman told the researchers. “It kind of interferes with my professional life.”

With an acuity applicable to today’s era of widespread coronavirus telework, Eddleston and Mulki write that “organizations should educate remote workers on the need to establish boundaries between work and family, and train these workers to resist temptations to perform work activities during family time.”

How does telework affect worker productivity?

Tens of millions of Americans are unemployed because of the new coronavirus, and data from the Bureau of Labor statistics show labor productivity is down considerably. The BLS defines labor productivity as “a measure of economic performance that compares the amount of goods and services produced (output) with the number of hours worked to produce those goods and services.”

For those who still have jobs and are teleworking, productivity can depend on personal motivation, type of work and home environment. Research indicates people who work from home can, overall, be as productive as office-dwellers.

In one widely cited November 2014 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, researchers found call center workers at a large Chinese travel agency randomly assigned to work from home four days a week for nine months increased performance 13% compared with those who stayed in the office. Attrition also halved among teleworkers. The authors note that “the job of a call center employee is particularly suitable for telecommuting. It requires neither teamwork nor in-person face time.” The company required teleworkers in the office one day a week for training on new products and services.

In “Are Telecommuters Remotely Good Citizens?” from May 2014 in Personnel Psychology, Ravi Gajendran, David Harrison and Kelly Delaney‐Klinger surveyed 323 employees from various industries, including technology, banking, health care and manufacturing. Gajendran is an associate professor of management at Florida International University. Harrison is a professor of management at the University of Texas, Austin. Delaney-Klinger is an associate professor of management at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

About 37% of the sample had a telework arrangement, with 80% of teleworkers working from home. The researchers found an association between teleworking and higher job performance ratings from supervisors. They suggest higher performance among teleworkers has to do with their finding that teleworkers believe they have more autonomy than regular commuters.

“Further, perceived autonomy is likely to be influenced by telecommuting intensity — the more extensive telecommuting is, the higher the discretion employees perceive over where and when they work,” write Gajendran, Harrison and Delaney-Klinger.

Work-from-anywhere arrangements could be even better for productivity than working from home, depending on the type of work. That’s according to “Work-From-Anywhere: The Productivity Effects of Geographic Flexibility,” a Harvard Business School working paper by Prithwiraj Choudhury, Cirrus Foroughi and Barbara Larson, released in December 2019. Work-from-home arrangements assume employees live close enough to go to the office a few days a week, or as needed, according to the authors. Work-from-anywhere arrangements let employees work remotely and physically far from their organization’s offices.

The authors exploit a natural experiment at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, where in 2012 management and union representatives launched a work-from-anywhere policy. The rollout was staggered, so employees transitioned at different times from being in-office, to work-from-home, to work-from-anywhere. The authors find that patent examiners working from anywhere were 4.4% more productive than examiners working from home. All examiners had at least two years on the job.

“[Work-from-anywhere] examiners relocate to lower cost-of-living locations and we report a correlation between relocating to a below-median cost-of-living location and productivity,” Choudhury, Foroughi and Larson write. They note two limitations: Their study focuses on a single organization, and patent examiners, by and large, don’t depend on coworker interaction to do their jobs.

Flexible work arrangements could also allow some older workers to work longer, if they want to. That’s according to a January 2020 paper in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. The authors surveyed 2,772 clients of The Vanguard Group, an investment company. Participants were at least 55 years old with at least $10,000 in their Vanguard accounts. The sample skews wealthier, healthier and more educated than the national population.

“The willingness to work is stronger when jobs offer a flexible choice of hours worked,” the authors find. “Individuals are willing to take substantial earnings reductions to gain an hour of flexibility.”

Won’t I miss out on office relationships and opportunities for collaboration?

A constant throughout the literature is that whether telework arrangements are successful or not depends on the type of work. One study, published February 2018 in the Journal of Business and Psychology, surveyed 273 telecommuters and supervisors from a company with a voluntary telework program. The authors found teleworkers with complex jobs had better job performance than telecommuters with less complex jobs, “and their performance increased with higher levels of telecommuting.”

Then there are individual personalities. An outgoing person, for example, might miss office camaraderie, while an introvert might relish the demise of water cooler chatter. In “Getting Away From Them All: Managing Exhaustion from Social Interaction with Telework,” from February 2017 in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, Jaime Windeler, Katherine Chudoba and Rui Sundrup find that part-time telework allowed exhausted workers the chance to recover.

Windeler is an associate professor of business analytics at the University of Cincinatti. Chudoba is an associate professor of management information systems at Utah State University. Sundrup is an assistant professor of computer information systems at the University of Louisville.

Based on survey results from 258 workers from a variety of industries and regions in the U.S., the authors found workers were less exhausted when they had quality in-person interactions with coworkers. Quality is a subjective measure that “reflects an individual’s appraisal of the adequacy of support or satisfaction with interpersonal interactions,” the authors write.

But exhaustion increased as interactions became more frequent. Telework acted as a salve for office exhaustion. Participants represented the demographic characteristics of people with jobs conducive to telework and uniformly worked at small, medium and large companies. Taking a break from the office may be a good way to recharge, but collaboration remains fundamental to the human experience.

“The tendency for people to work together — to establish and run businesses, to conduct research projects, and to create and share music — is a foundation of human culture,” write then-Stanford University doctoral researcher Priyanka Carr and Stanford associate psychology professor Gregory Walton in a July 2014 paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. “For individuals, working with others affords enormous social and personal benefits.”

Will my career growth suffer if I’m not able to go to the office?

Some research suggests workers who want flexibility, like a telework option, may face stigma in the workplace. But the current widespread telework situation is unprecedented. If everyone at a company is teleworking, then, by definition, regular commuters can’t level stigma toward teleworkers.

If work life ends up looking similar to pre-COVID times, with some number of workers still regularly going to an office and others going in sometimes or not at all, promotions may hinge on what’s normal for each employee’s work unit. That’s according to “Is There a Price Telecommuters Pay?” from February 2020 in the Journal of Vocational Behavior by Timothy Golden and Kimberly Eddleston. Golden is a professor of enterprise management and organization at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Eddleston is the Northeastern University professor mentioned earlier.

The authors analyzed survey results and salary and promotion growth data from a sample of 405 employees of a technology services firm. Roughly equal numbers were women and men.

People who teleworked extensively received more promotions when teleworking was part of their work unit’s culture and when they did extra work outside regular hours. Extensive teleworkers who did extra work and had the opportunity for face-to-face interactions with their supervisors also saw higher salary growth.

“Indeed, while work context factors examined in our study tended to decrease career penalties for telecommuters including those who telecommuted extensively, the greatest career benefits were attained by those who only occasionally telecommuted,” Golden and Eddleston write.

What will happen to cities if office workers don’t come back?

It’s another big question that may come down to whether coronavirus telework arrangements persist — and, if they do, how city leaders fill the void from lost office rent and ancillary business revenue, like workers buying lunch at cafes.

Research shows telework may affect whether people live in cities or suburbs. More telework could mean more urban sprawl, with people moving away from city cores and reducing density. In a simulated mid-sized city where every worker teleworks at least one day a week, transportation costs decrease 20% and geographic area expands by about 26% — according to “Telework: Urban Form, Energy Consumption and Greenhouse Gas Implications,” by William Larson and Weihua Zhao in Economic Inquiry from April 2017.

Larson is a senior economist at the Federal Housing Finance Agency and Zhao is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Louisville. Their simulated city is based on characteristics of the Charlotte, Indianapolis, Kansas City and San Antonio metropolitan areas, including average geographic area, average number of occupied units and median household income.

Greenhouse gas emissions fall slightly and housing units become slightly larger in Larson and Zhao’s telework simulation. Another potential side effect: “While telework increases the welfare of those who telework, it also makes those who do not telework better off through reduced congestion,” they write.

The authors of “Working from Home and the Willingness to Accept a Longer Commute,” from July 2018 in The Annals of Regional Science, also hint at a link between teleworking and urban sprawl. Based on surveys of nearly 7,500 Dutch workers spanning 2002 to 2014, they find people working from home at least one day per month were willing to accept 5% longer commute times, on average. Researchers report similar findings from the Netherlands in a September 2007 paper in the Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, with telecommuters more likely than regular commuters to live on the edge of or outside cities.

On the other hand, if fewer workers drive every day into city centers, that could free up space for more bicycling and public transportation, according to E&E News, an energy and environmental news outlet.

Check out our other coronavirus-related resources, including tips on covering biomedical research preprints and a roundup of research that looks at how infectious disease outbreaks affect people’s mental health. Also, don’t miss our feature on rural broadband in the time of coronavirus.

The post Working from home: What the research says about setting boundaries, staying productive and reshaping cities appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

How public transportation predicts social media connections in New York City

Clark Merrefield — Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:43:28 +0000

There’s a phenomenon economists call “agglomeration economies,” where a collection of companies become more efficient by being close to one another. The idea holds for people, too. When people cluster in dense places like cities, they share insights and resources. Strong social connections make for good economics.

A recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research adds a twist to the economics of proximity: mass transit connections may be tied to social media connections, which can also spur economic success. In New York City, travel time and cost more strongly predict social media connectedness between zip codes than geographical distance, the paper finds.

How transit connections relate to social connections

“Social connections are hugely important from an economic perspective, since they allow for the exchange of ideas and information, and therefore contribute to innovation and social progress,” explained one of the paper’s co-authors, Theresa Kuchler, assistant professor of finance at New York University, via email.

The New York City region is matchless in America for the breadth of its public transportation system, which provides some 2.6 billion trips per year on subways, buses, commuter rails, through bridges and tunnels, and across “the most modern aerial tramway in the world.”

The authors start their analysis with anonymous Facebook data from March 2018 from users who had turned on location tracking. They drill down to zip codes and combine information on Facebook friendships with geographic data from the Census Bureau and city transit maps.

The results “suggest that public transportation infrastructure plays a more important role in the formation of social networks in urban settings than simple geographic distance does,” the authors write.

The longer it takes to travel between locations, the fewer social friendships there are among people in those neighborhoods. The authors find that each 10% increase in public transit time is associated with 14.2% lower social connectedness between zip codes. Meanwhile, a 10% increase in geographic distance is associated with only 8.7% lower social connectedness.

“We were surprised by just how much transit time mattered for social connectedness relative to other factors,” Kuchler explains. “We expected there to be some effect, but were really surprised by how large that effect ended up being.”

New York City has a large transit system, but that doesn’t mean places that are geographically close are easy to move between. Take the East Village in Manhattan and Greenpoint in north Brooklyn. Those neighborhoods are separated by about 1.5 miles across the East River, as the crow flies. But because there are no direct transit connections — there’s no straight-shot tunnel under the river — travel time from the East Village to Greenpoint is among the longest compared with similarly distant trips, according to the paper.

Just hail a cab?

New York City yellow taxis are iconic as the Statue of Liberty, the Yankees and thin-crust pizza, but getting between neighborhoods without efficient transit connections isn’t always as easy as hopping in a cab — especially when cost is factored in. A subway trip that can take a rider dozens of miles underground is $2.75. The base rate for a taxi ride is $2.50, but the final cost depends on distance and traffic. The average yellow cab ride is around $13, according to one study from 2016.

The more a cab ride costs between neighborhoods, the less social connectedness those neighborhoods have. Each 10% increase in cab cost was associated with a 10.6% decline in social connectedness, the authors of the working paper find. (They didn’t analyze transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft.)

Transit links ‘shrink’ geographic distance

Little Neck and Oakland Gardens are next-door neighborhoods in the borough of Queens with very different transit connections to midtown Manhattan — and very different patterns of social connectedness. Little Neck has two stops on the Long Island Railroad, which goes into midtown, while Oakland Gardens has no stops.

Likewise, Oakland Gardens isn’t very socially connected to any zip codes in Manhattan. But for Little Neck, zip codes in midtown and nearby Manhattan neighborhoods are as socially connected as some closer zip codes in Queens. Transit links, it appears, can “shrink” geographic distances, according to the authors.

“Obviously this does not by itself prove that it is the transit access causing the connections, but it is a case study that is highly consistent with everything else we find in the paper,” Kuchler explains.

‘A diverse set of friends’

Neighborhoods where people have a higher percentage of Facebook friends more than 5 miles from them have some of the highest incomes and education levels out of the 182 New York City zip codes studied.

Kuchler cautions that this is not a causal relationship but nonetheless is “highly consistent with a large prior literature suggesting that exposure to diverse ideas and information is central for your economic outcomes.”

The authors also look at socioeconomic factors beyond cab costs that can affect social connectedness. Areas of the city with similar education levels and racial makeups are more likely to be socially connected. And distance has less of an effect on social connectedness across neighborhoods that are both wealthy or both poorer. But travel time retains the strongest overall association with social connectedness, the authors find.

“What our work shows is that public transit infrastructure is central to allowing people to connect with a diverse set of friends within the city, and to therefore benefit from the exchange of ideas and information,” according to Kuchler.

The post How public transportation predicts social media connections in New York City appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Cruising into a driverless future: Research on autonomous vehicles

Chloe Reichel — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 19:14:17 +0000

Eerie as it may seem to drive alongside a car with no one behind the wheel, autonomous vehicles are poised to hit the roads in the next few years. A lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, Google’s self-driving car project, settled in February 2018 illustrates the fierce battle to develop driverless car technology. Many cars already employ semi-autonomous technology, such as parking assistance and lane monitoring.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) suggests that automated vehicles could promote safety on the road. According to the NHTSA’s Federal Automated Vehicles Policy, 94 percent of car accidents are linked to human choice or error. Automated vehicles, the NHTSA writes, could reduce the frequency of crashes by eliminating some human error on the roads. The policy indicates positive features of automated vehicles beyond safety, including potential environmental benefits and increased mobility for those otherwise unable to drive.

The cutting-edge technology, however, presents ethical questions and other concerns. Some research included in this roundup indicates that the environmental effects of widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles might not be positive. Safety benefits are not so clear-cut either. This roundup brings together this scholarship along with other related research, including findings on public opinion and policy implications.

Potential benefits

“Estimating Potential Increases in Travel with Autonomous Vehicles for the Non-Driving, Elderly and People with Travel-Restrictive Medical Conditions”
Harper, Corey D.; Hendrickson, Chris T.; Mangones, Sonia; Samaras, Constantine. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 2016. DOI: 10.1016/j.trc.2016.09.003.

Abstract: “Automated vehicles represent a technology that promises to increase mobility for many groups, including the senior population (those over age 65) but also for non-drivers and people with medical conditions. This paper estimates bounds on the potential increases in travel in a fully automated vehicle environment due to an increase in mobility from the non-driving and senior populations and people with travel-restrictive medical conditions.”

“Sustainability Implications of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles for the Food Supply Chain”
Heard, Brent R.; Taiebat, Morteza; Xu, Ming; Miller, Shelie A. Resources, Conservation & Recycling, 2018. DOI: 10.1016/j.resconrec.2017.09.021.

Abstract: “Connected and autonomous vehicles are anticipated to transform food distribution systems. The food distribution industry is a likely early-adopter of this technology, with resulting changes affecting the environmental and economic profiles of the food supply chain. Considerations for a truly sustainable adoption of this technology are discussed.”

“Autonomous Vehicles: The Next Jump in Accessibilities?”
Meyer, Jonas; Becker, Henrik; Bösch, Patrick M.; Axhausen, Kay W. Research in Transportation Economics, 2017. DOI: 10.1016/j.retrec.2017.03.005.

Abstract: “Autonomous vehicles are expected to offer a higher comfort of traveling at lower prices and at the same time to increase road capacity – a pattern recalling the rise of the private car and later of motorway construction. Using the Swiss national transport model, this research simulates the impact of autonomous vehicles on accessibility of the Swiss municipalities. The results show that autonomous vehicles could cause another quantum leap in accessibility. Moreover, the spatial distribution of the accessibility impacts implies that autonomous vehicles favor urban sprawl and may render public transport superfluous except for dense urban areas.”

“Automated Vehicles, On-Demand Mobility, and Environmental Impacts”
Greenblatt, Jeffery B.; Shaheen, Susan. Current Sustainable/Renewable Energy Reports, 2015. DOI: 10.1007/s40518-015-0038-5.

Abstract: “We review the history, current developments, projected future trends and environmental impacts of automated vehicles (AVs) and on-demand mobility, and explore potential synergies. Many automobile manufacturers and Google plan to release AVs between 2017 and 2020, with potential benefits including increased safety, more efficient road use, increased driver productivity and energy savings. Estimates of AV energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions range from an ~80 percent or greater decrease to a threefold increase; however, we argue that net decreases are likely. On-demand mobility services exist in many cities around the world, with advances in mobile technology increasing their popularity. On-demand mobility can provide numerous transportation, land use, and environmental and social benefits, and users tend to decrease both vehicle ownership and annual vehicle distances traveled. Combining on-demand mobility and AVs may amplify adoption of both, and further lower energy use and GHG emissions through the use of small, efficient shared AVs.”

“Help or Hindrance? The Travel, Energy and Carbon Impacts of Highly Automated Vehicles”
Wadud, Zia; MacKenzie, Don; Leiby, Paul. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2016. DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2015.12.001.

Abstract: “Experts predict that new automobiles will be capable of driving themselves under limited conditions within 5–10 years, and under most conditions within 10–20 years. Automation may affect road vehicle energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in a host of ways, positive and negative, by causing changes in travel demand, vehicle design, vehicle operating profiles, and choices of fuels. In this paper, we identify specific mechanisms through which automation may affect travel and energy demand and resulting GHG emissions and bring them together using a coherent energy decomposition framework. We review the literature for estimates of the energy impacts of each mechanism and, where the literature is lacking, develop our own estimates using engineering and economic analysis. We consider how widely applicable each mechanism is, and quantify the potential impact of each mechanism on a common basis: the percentage change it is expected to cause in total GHG emissions from light-duty or heavy-duty vehicles in the U.S. Our primary focus is travel related energy consumption and emissions, since potential lifecycle impacts are generally smaller in magnitude. We explore the net effects of automation on emissions through several illustrative scenarios, finding that automation might plausibly reduce road transport GHG emissions and energy use by nearly half — or nearly double them — depending on which effects come to dominate. We also find that many potential energy-reduction benefits may be realized through partial automation, while the major energy/emission downside risks appear more likely at full automation. We close by presenting some implications for policymakers and identifying priority areas for further research.”

Ethical questions

“The Ethics of Accident-Algorithms for Self-Driving Cars: An Applied Trolley Problem?”
Nyholm S.; Smids J. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/s10677-016-9745-2.

Abstract: “Self-driving cars hold out the promise of being safer than manually driven cars. Yet they cannot be 100 percent safe. Collisions are sometimes unavoidable. So self-driving cars need to be programmed for how they should respond to scenarios where collisions are highly likely or unavoidable. The accident-scenarios self-driving cars might face have recently been likened to the key examples and dilemmas associated with the trolley problem. In this article, we critically examine this tempting analogy. We identify three important ways in which the ethics of accident-algorithms for self-driving cars and the philosophy of the trolley problem differ from each other. These concern: (i) the basic decision-making situation faced by those who decide how self-driving cars should be programmed to deal with accidents; (ii) moral and legal responsibility; and (iii) decision-making in the face of risks and uncertainty. In discussing these three areas of disanalogy, we isolate and identify a number of basic issues and complexities that arise within the ethics of the programming of self-driving cars.”

“The Social Dilemma of Autonomous Vehicles”
Bonnefon J.F.; Shariff A.; Rahwan I. Science, 2016. DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf2654.

Abstract: “Autonomous vehicles (AVs) should reduce traffic accidents, but they will sometimes have to choose between two evils, such as running over pedestrians or sacrificing themselves and their passenger to save the pedestrians. Defining the algorithms that will help AVs make these moral decisions is a formidable challenge. We found that participants in six Amazon Mechanical Turk studies approved of utilitarian AVs (that is, AVs that sacrifice their passengers for the greater good) and would like others to buy them, but they would themselves prefer to ride in AVs that protect their passengers at all costs. The study participants disapprove of enforcing utilitarian regulations for AVs and would be less willing to buy such an AV. Accordingly, regulating for utilitarian algorithms may paradoxically increase casualties by postponing the adoption of a safer technology.”

Safety

“Driving to Safety: How Many Miles of Driving Would it Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability?”
Kalra, Nidhi; Paddock, Susan M. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2016. DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2016.09.010.

Abstract: “How safe are autonomous vehicles? The answer is critical for determining how autonomous vehicles may shape motor vehicle safety and public health, and for developing sound policies to govern their deployment. One proposed way to assess safety is to test drive autonomous vehicles in real traffic, observe their performance, and make statistical comparisons to human driver performance. This approach is logical, but it is practical? In this paper, we calculate the number of miles of driving that would be needed to provide clear statistical evidence of autonomous vehicle safety. Given that current traffic fatalities and injuries are rare events compared to vehicle miles traveled, we show that fully autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of fatalities and injuries. … These findings demonstrate that developers of this technology and third-party testers cannot simply drive their way to safety. Instead, they will need to develop innovative methods of demonstrating safety and reliability. And yet, the possibility remains that it will not be possible to establish with certainty the safety of autonomous vehicles. Uncertainty will remain. Therefore, it is imperative that autonomous vehicle regulations are adaptive — designed from the outset to evolve with the technology so that society can better harness the benefits and manage the risks of these rapidly evolving and potentially transformative technologies.”

“Is Partially Automated Driving a Bad Idea? Observations from an On-Road Study”
Banks, Victoria A.; Eriksson, Alexander; O’Donoghue, Jim; Stanton, Neville A. Applied Ergonomics, 2018. DOI: 10.1016/j.apergo.2017.11.010.

Abstract: “The automation of longitudinal and lateral control has enabled drivers to become ‘hands and feet free’ but they are required to remain in an active monitoring state with a requirement to resume manual control if required. This represents the single largest allocation of system function problem with vehicle automation as the literature suggests that humans are notoriously inefficient at completing prolonged monitoring tasks. To further explore whether partially automated driving solutions can appropriately support the driver in completing their new monitoring role, video observations were collected as part of an on-road study using a Tesla Model S being operated in Autopilot mode. A thematic analysis of video data suggests that drivers are not being properly supported in adhering to their new monitoring responsibilities and instead demonstrate behavior indicative of complacency and over-trust. These attributes may encourage drivers to take more risks whilst out on the road.”

“Autonomous Vehicles’ Disengagements: Trends, Triggers, and Regulatory Limitations”
Favarò, Francesca; Eurich, Sky; Nader, Nazanin. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 2018. DOI: 10.1016/j.aap.2017.11.001.

Abstract: “Autonomous Vehicle (AV) technology is quickly becoming a reality on U.S. roads. Testing on public roads is currently undergoing, with many AV makers located and testing in Silicon Valley, California. The California Department of Motor Vehicles (CA DMV) currently mandates that any vehicle tested on California public roads be retrofitted to account for a back-up human driver, and that data related to disengagements of the AV technology be publicly available. Disengagements data is analyzed in this work, given the safety-critical role of AV disengagements, which require the control of the vehicle to be handed back to the human driver in a safe and timely manner. This study provides a comprehensive overview of the fragmented data obtained from AV manufacturers testing on California public roads from 2014 to 2017. Trends of disengagement reporting, associated frequencies, average mileage driven before failure, and an analysis of triggers and contributory factors are here presented. The analysis of the disengagements data also highlights several shortcomings of the current regulations. The results presented thus constitute an important starting point for improvements on the current drafts of the testing and deployment regulations for autonomous vehicles on public roads.”

“Examining Accident Reports Involving Autonomous Vehicles in California”
Favarò, F.M.; et al. PLoS ONE, 2017. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0184952.

Abstract: “Autonomous Vehicle technology is quickly expanding its market and has found in Silicon Valley, California, a strong foothold for preliminary testing on public roads. In an effort to promote safety and transparency to consumers, the California Department of Motor Vehicles has mandated that reports of accidents involving autonomous vehicles be drafted and made available to the public. The present work shows an in-depth analysis of the accident reports filed by different manufacturers that are testing autonomous vehicles in California (testing data from September 2014 to March 2017). The data provides important information on autonomous vehicles accidents’ dynamics, related to the most frequent types of collisions and impacts, accident frequencies, and other contributing factors. The study also explores important implications related to future testing and validation of semi-autonomous vehicles, tracing the investigation back to current literature as well as to the current regulatory panorama.”

Public opinion

“Assessing Public Opinions of and Interest in New Vehicle Technologies: An Austin Perspective”
Bansal, Prateek; Kockelman, Kara M.; Singh, Amit. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 2016. DOI: 10.1016/j.trc.2016.01.019.

Abstract: “Technological advances are bringing connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) to the ever-evolving transportation system. Anticipating public acceptance and adoption of these technologies is important. A recent internet-based survey polled 347 Austinites to understand their opinions on smart-car technologies and strategies. Results indicate that respondents perceive fewer crashes to be the primary benefit of autonomous vehicles (AVs), with equipment failure being their top concern. Their average willingness to pay (WTP) for adding full (Level 4) automation ($7,253) appears to be much higher than that for adding partial (Level 3) automation ($3,300) to their current vehicles.”

“Public Opinion on Automated Driving: Results of an International Questionnaire Among 5,000 Respondents”
Kyriakidis, M.; Happee, R.; de Winter, J.C.F. Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, 2015. DOI: 10.1016/j.trf.2015.04.014.

Abstract: “This study investigated user acceptance, concerns, and willingness to buy partially, highly, and fully automated vehicles. By means of a 63-question Internet-based survey, we collected 5,000 responses from 109 countries (40 countries with at least 25 respondents). We determined cross-national differences, and assessed correlations with personal variables, such as age, gender, and personality traits as measured with a short version of the Big Five Inventory. Results showed that respondents, on average, found manual driving the most enjoyable mode of driving. Responses were diverse: 22 percent of the respondents did not want to pay more than $0 for a fully automated driving system, whereas 5 percent indicated they would be willing to pay more than $30,000, and 33 percent indicated that fully automated driving would be highly enjoyable. 69 percent of respondents estimated that fully automated driving will reach a 50 percent market share between now and 2050. Respondents were found to be most concerned about software hacking/misuse, and were also concerned about legal issues and safety. Respondents scoring higher on neuroticism were slightly less comfortable about data transmitting, whereas respondents scoring higher on agreeableness were slightly more comfortable with this. Respondents from more developed countries (in terms of lower accident statistics, higher education, and higher income) were less comfortable with their vehicle transmitting data, with cross-national correlations between ρ = −0.80 and ρ = −0.90. The present results indicate the major areas of promise and concern among the international public, and could be useful for vehicle developers and other stakeholders.”

“Autonomous Vehicles and Alternatives to Driving: Trust, Preferences, and Effects of Age”
Abraham, Hillary; et al. Paper presented at Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, 2017.

Abstract: “New vehicle technologies and transportation alternatives offer the potential of expanded mobility solutions for users of all generations. While many industries are focused on creating these options, only limited research has explored their use, adoption, and appeal as they apply to older generations. An online survey was fielded in order to gather information on satisfaction with current in-vehicle technology, inclination to use differing levels of automation, transportation alternatives to driving your own car, and methods of learning to use in-vehicle technology across users of all ages. The survey found that respondents reported generally being satisfied with technology in their vehicles, but are not learning to use the systems with their preferred methods of learning. A majority of respondents indicated a willingness to consider transportation alternatives, but far fewer had taken advantage of the alternatives in the past year. Older adult respondents, in particular, are not taking advantage of new mobility solutions at the levels that they might. Finally, while many older adults generally expressed a willingness to use some level of automation, they expressed less interest in full autonomy than younger drivers.”

Long-term implications

“Preparing a Nation for Autonomous Vehicles: Opportunities, Barriers and Policy Recommendations”
Fagnant, Daniel J.; Kockelman, Kara. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2015. DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2015.04.003.

Abstract: “Autonomous vehicles (AVs) represent a potentially disruptive yet beneficial change to our transportation system. This new technology has the potential to impact vehicle safety, congestion, and travel behavior. All told, major social AV impacts in the form of crash savings, travel time reduction, fuel efficiency and parking benefits are estimated to approach $2,000 to per year per AV, and may eventually approach nearly $4,000 when comprehensive crash costs are accounted for. Yet barriers to implementation and mass-market penetration remain. Initial costs will likely be unaffordable. Licensing and testing standards in the U.S. are being developed at the state level, rather than nationally, which may lead to inconsistencies across states. Liability details remain undefined, security concerns linger, and without new privacy standards, a default lack of privacy for personal travel may become the norm. The impacts and interactions with other components of the transportation system, as well as implementation details, remain uncertain. To address these concerns, the federal government should expand research in these areas and create a nationally recognized licensing framework for AVs, determining appropriate standards for liability, security, and data privacy.”

“Policy and Society Related Implications of Automated Driving: A Review of Literature and Directions for Future Research”
Milakis, Dimitris; van Arem, Bart; van Wee, Bert. Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2017. DOI: 10.1080/15472450.2017.1291351.

Abstract: “In this paper, the potential effects of automated driving that are relevant to policy and society are explored, findings discussed in literature about those effects are reviewed and areas for future research are identified. The structure of our review is based on the ripple effect concept, which represents the implications of automated vehicles at three different stages: first-order (traffic, travel cost, and travel choices), second-order (vehicle ownership and sharing, location choices and land use, and transport infrastructure), and third-order (energy consumption, air pollution, safety, social equity, economy, and public health). Our review shows that first-order impacts on road capacity, fuel efficiency, emissions and accidents risk are expected to be beneficial. The magnitude of these benefits will likely increase with the level of automation and cooperation and with the penetration rate of these systems. The synergistic effects between vehicle automation, sharing and electrification can multiply these benefits. However, studies confirm that automated vehicles can induce additional travel demand because of more and longer vehicle trips. Potential land use changes have not been included in these estimations about excessive travel demand. Other third-order benefits on safety, economy, public health and social equity still remain unclear. Therefore, the balance between the short-term benefits and long-term impacts of vehicle automation remains an open question.”

“Assessing the Long-term Effects of Autonomous Vehicles: A Speculative Approach”
Gruel, Wolfgang; Stanford, Joseph M. Transportation Research Procedia, 2016. DOI: 10.1016/j.trpro.2016.05.003.

Abstract: “In recent years, self-driving cars have generated significant attention and discussion. While it is recognized that a number of technical and legal issues need to be solved, widespread adoption of self-driving vehicles is increasingly considered to be inevitable. However, the long-term effects of this technology are rarely considered and seldom examined in the literature. Among these potential impacts are a number of direct and indirect, positive and negative outcomes, and the net effect in terms of societal benefit or harm is far from clear. In this paper, we identify the several of these outcomes, and we explore conditions in the broader transportation system under which self-driving vehicles may be either harmful or beneficial. We investigate how autonomous operation could affect the attractiveness of traveling by car, how this in turn could affect mode choice, and how changes in mode choice would affect the broader transportation system. The paper considers three speculative scenarios, defined primarily by different behavioral responses to the availability of autonomous driving. The scenarios build on an established system dynamics model that represents the major forces involved in transportation systems. A wide range of outcomes are considered, and potential policy interventions are discussed.”

If you’re interested in reading more research on transportation, we have written about distracted driving, road congestion, the effects of changing gas prices and the impact of laws that prohibit texting while driving.

The post Cruising into a driverless future: Research on autonomous vehicles appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Amtrak safety, rail transit and Positive Train Control: Research roundup

John Wihbey — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 19:43:59 +0000

In December 2017, an Amtrak train derailed after traveling too fast on a curve in Washington, killing or injuring dozens of people. In May 2015, a train derailed under similar circumstances in Philadelphia, killing eight and sending 185 others to area hospitals.

Investigators are still trying to figure out what happened in Washington. But the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) learned that the engineer on the Philadelphia train was distracted by another train and, according to a report the agency released in 2016, the “most likely reason the engineer failed to slow for the curve was … because of his loss of situational awareness.”

The December crash has raised new questions about whether Positive Train Control (PTC) — technology designed to slow trains nearing dangerous conditions — would have prevented these disasters and whether the federal government erred by extending the deadline for railroads to install it.

As the U.S. Government Accountability Office noted in a December 2013 report, PTC was supposed to be implemented by the end of 2015, precisely to prevent accidents caused by human factors. This system and its accompanying 2015 deadline were mandated under the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008, which was passed in response to several fatal rail accidents between 2002 and 2008. PTC was described as a “groundbreaking” wireless communications system comprised of “integrated technologies capable of preventing collisions, over-speed derailments and unintended train movements.”

The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), charged with overseeing PTC’s development and roll out, had not implemented it on the stretch of rail going through Philadelphia prior to the crash there, as Matthew Yglesias of Vox first noted. News reports indicate that while the technology has been installed on tracks in Washington, it is not yet operational.

In September 2015, the federal government released a report saying nearly 70 percent of railroads were not going to implement PTC until after the Dec. 31, 2015 deadline — an estimated one to five years afterward. Congress extended the deadline to Dec. 31, 2018, although railroads may qualify for more time if they meet certain criteria.

Below is a selection of research and reports relating to Amtrak, rail transit and Positive Train Control that can help inform reporting on these issues:

_______

“Technical and Safety Evaluation of the Southern California Regional Rail Authority Positive Train Control Deployment Project: Challenges and Lessons Learned”
Placencia, Greg; Franklin, John; Moore, James E. Report sponsored by the Federal Transit Administration, Report No. 0112, July 2017.

Abstract: “Positive Train Control (PTC), often referred to as Communication Based Train Control (CBTC), has been on the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) ‘Most Wanted List of Transportation Safety Improvements’ for several decades as a safety-enabling system. The Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008 mandated its implementation after the September 12, 2008, Chatsworth, California, collision between trains from the Southern California Regional Rail Authority (SCRRA or Metrolink) and Union Pacific. SCRRA has undergone substantial challenges to integrate PTC into its operations. This report investigates the multilevel challenges—technological, human, organizational, and systematic—that SCRRA faced implementing the new technology as well as many of the lessons the railroad industry can learn from these challenges. Technology alone cannot ensure safety, but a properly-implemented PTC system can develop and promote high reliability practices that enable safe operations throughout an organization. The report examines interactions among the numerous Systems of Systems for their impact on successful PTC implementation.”

“Amtrak Five Year Service Line Plans: Fiscal Years 2017-2021”
National Railroad Passenger Corporation, 2017.

Summary: This 140-page report offers a broad overview of Amtrak operations, including ridership, ticket revenue, financial forecasts and Amtrak’s five-year capital plan. The report briefly mentions Positive Train Control. According to the report: “After six straight years of annual ridership exceeding 30 million passengers, Amtrak’s business is the strongest it has ever been in its 46-year history. Each day more than 20,000 employees nationwide commit to providing superior customer service. In FY2016 we achieved record revenues of $3.2 billion, proving people are recognizing Amtrak is simply the smarter way to travel.”

“A New Alignment: Strengthening America’s Commitment to Passenger Rail”
Robert Puentes; Adie Tomer; Joseph Kan. Metropolitan Policy Program, Brookings Institution, March 2013.

Excerpt: “Amtrak experienced a significant increase in national ridership after 1997. Using Amtrak’s fiscal period of October to September, Amtrak’s total boardings and alightings jumped 55.1 percent from 1997 to 2012. To put this increase in perspective, it outstrips population growth (17.1 percent) more than threefold over the same period and exceeds the growth in real gross domestic product (37.2 percent). With Amtrak setting ridership records for nine of the past ten years, including the new all-time high in 2012, there is a great chance Amtrak’s passenger growth will continue to far outpace growth in population and GDP. In addition, Amtrak’s passenger growth also exceeds all other domestic transportation modes. The most appropriate modal comparison is domestic aviation, since Amtrak and major airlines compete along certain corridors. In this case, Amtrak more than doubled the growth in domestic aviation passengers (20.0 percent) over the same 16-year period. Similarly, Amtrak also far exceeded the growth in driving (measured by vehicle miles traveled per year; 16.5 percent) and transit trips (26.4 percent). All three modes do carry larger aggregate quantities of people, but these growth trends serve as evidence of changing attitudes toward train travel.

In addition to route length, having a direct connection between major metropolitan areas is another driver of higher Amtrak ridership. Across the past 15 years, a consistent group of 10 corridors, all less than 400 miles long, generate around 70 percent of total system ridership. Each of these routes involves many of the country’s 100 largest metropolitan areas and benefit from the higher job and population densities present in those metropolitan cores. The Northeast Corridor is particularly notable in this respect, connected by the metropolitan anchors of Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington. These four metropolitan areas house over 35 million people, generate $2.3 trillion in annual output, and share historic and modern relationships. Similarly, all four metro areas suffer from high traffic volumes between them as well as the country’s most congested airspace (New York-Philadelphia), making the rails an attractive alternative to some of the country’s most delayed airports. Indeed, Amtrak boasts 75 percent of the share of the passenger rail/aviation market between New York and Washington.”

“State of the Northeast Corridor Region Transportation System”
Northeast Corridor Infrastructure and Operations Advisory Commission, Summary Report, February 2014.

Excerpt: “Available capacity on the highway, rail, and aviation networks is limited such that all three modes experience serious congestion levels with negative consequences for productivity and quality of life. Aging infrastructure, especially on the highway and rail networks, threatens to reduce the capacity we enjoy today. Existing plans and identified funding sources fail to fully address the capital needs for bringing our transportation system into a state of good repair or building new infrastructure to support growth in the economy. Despite these challenges, advances in technology and new types of intermodal and interjurisdictional coordination offer opportunities for modernizing our transportation system.”

“Rail Safety: Improved Human Capital Planning Could Address Emerging Safety Oversight Challenges”
U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-14-85, December 2013.

Excerpt: “[The Federal Railroad Administration] (FRA) has developed a risk-based approach to direct its inspection efforts, but the agency has been slow to implement broader risk reduction planning. FRA has two tools to help direct its inspection efforts — the National Inspection Plan (NIP) and the Staffing Allocation Model (SAM). The NIP process uses past accident and other data to target FRA’s inspection activities, and the SAM estimates the best allocation of the different types of inspectors across FRA regions in order to minimize damage and casualties from rail accidents. However, all eight FRA regional administrators expressed concerns about FRA’s staffing process that relies primarily on the SAM to predict appropriate regional inspector needs, and that does not allow the flexibility needed to accommodate the regions’ changing resource needs. In addition, the Railroad Safety Improvement Act of 2008 mandated safety risk reduction plans primarily for large freight and passenger railroads. FRA has not yet issued the final rule directing railroads to develop the plans, which was mandated to be issued by October 2012. According to FRA, the rulemaking was delayed due to concerns by railroads over their potential liability. Although FRA anticipates completing approval of railroad’s plans by 2016, the agency has not developed an interim plan with specific timeframes to ensure that there are no further delays in issuing regulations and that timely evaluation and approval of the railroads’ risk reduction plans occurs.”

“Rail Safety: Preliminary Observations on Federal Rail Safety Oversight and Positive Train Control Implementation”
Susan A. Fleming. U.S. Government Accountability Office, Testimony before the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, U.S. Senate, June 2013.

Excerpt: “According to FRA officials, in the next 5 years, about 32 percent of FRA inspectors will be eligible to retire. Although FRA officials said that they anticipate being able to replace inspectors, it can take 1 to 2 years to find, hire, train, and certify a new inspector. Finally, FRA faces other ongoing and emerging safety challenges like addressing adverse weather conditions and their impact on railroad operations and equipment, educating the public on the potential hazards of rail-highway crossings, accommodating changes in rail safety risks including new freight flows that affect the need for inspections, and hiring and training a specialized inspector workforce to provide adequate safety oversight for emerging technologies including positive train control (PTC), a communications-based system designed to prevent train accidents caused by human factors…. FRA is a small agency relative to the railroad industry, making the railroads themselves the primary guarantors of railroad safety. Based on our work to date, FRA has about 470 inspectors in its headquarters and regional offices, in addition to about 170 state inspectors. In contrast, the U.S. railroad system consists of about 760 railroads with about 230,000 employees and 200,000 miles of track in operation.”

“Individual Freight Effects, Capacity Utilization and Amtrak Service Quality”
Betty Krier; Chia-Mei Liu; Brian McNamara; Jerrod Sharpe. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Vol. 64, June 2014, 163-175. doi: 10.1016/j.tra.2014.03.009

Excerpt: “We hypothesized the existence of a link between individual freight effects and Amtrak’s service quality in the post-deregulation rail industry. We tested the hypothesis with train delay models for long- and short-distance routes. Based on monthly panel data on 1117 directional Amtrak station-pairs for FY 2002 to 2007, we found that individual freight railroads had important effects on Amtrak delays. We also identified other significant delay causes. Among these, the capacity utilization rate, maintenance-related slow orders, and turn points are particularly important because of their potential to be improved upon through stakeholder actions. These findings also have policy implications. Despite the statute giving Amtrak trains priority on freight infrastructure, delays still differ significantly depending on the host railroad. It could be beneficial to look for solutions that further address the potential conflict of interest between freight railroads and Amtrak. For example, there is probably room to increase the effectiveness of the structures for incentive payments by Amtrak to the freights to reduce Amtrak’s train delays.”

“Railroad Safety: Amtrak Is Not Adequately Addressing Rising Drug and Alcohol Use by Employees in Safety-Sensitive Positions”
Office of the Inspector General, Amtrak. Report No. OIG-E-2012-023, September 2012.

Excerpt: “Amtrak’s HOS employees are testing positive for drugs and alcohol more frequently than their peers in the railroad industry. Our analysis of Amtrak’s random drug and alcohol test results shows that these employees have been testing positive for drugs and alcohol at a rate that has been generally trending upward since 2006, and this rate has exceeded the industry average for the past 5 years. The majority of Amtrak’s positive tests since 2006 were for drugs, primarily cocaine and marijuana. In 2011, Amtrak had 17 positive tests for drugs or alcohol, which resulted in a combined positive test rate that was about 51 percent above the industry average, its worst rate since 2007. The 2011 rate was driven by a relatively large number of positive tests by signals and mechanical employees that were both over four times the rate of their peers in the industry. Based on the random test data, we calculated, with 95 percent confidence, that if all 4,454 HOS employees had been tested in 2011, between 21 and 65 of these employees would have tested positive for drug use, with a best estimate of 43 employees. We also calculated that between 4 and 32 of Amtrak’s HOS employees would have tested positive for alcohol use, with a best estimate of 18 employees.

Amtrak is not exercising due diligence to control the use of drugs and alcohol by these employees. Until we presented Amtrak’s key senior management with our preliminary results, they were unaware of the extent of drug and alcohol use by these employees. Further, senior management is not actively engaged in the program, nor have they demonstrated that controlling drugs and alcohol is a clear priority at Amtrak, thereby making it difficult to manage the risk that drug and alcohol use poses to its employees, passengers and the public. Amtrak also did not adequately address, for several years, FRA’s concerns about Amtrak’s program to physically observe HOS employees for signs and symptoms of drug and alcohol use. Consequently, FRA has stated that it may elevate enforcement actions against Amtrak up to and including fining Amtrak in the future if the number of observations is not improved. This may become more challenging because the number of HOS employees requiring observation may increase by 2,260 in 2013 due to potential changes in the regulation.”

The post Amtrak safety, rail transit and Positive Train Control: Research roundup appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Climate change costing billions in extra road repairs

David Trilling — Fri, 13 Oct 2017 16:21:07 +0000

When engineers build roads, they use weather models to decide what kind of pavement can withstand the local climate. Currently, many American engineers use temperature data from 1964 to 1995 to select materials. But the climate is changing.

A recent paper in Nature Climate Change asserts that newer temperature figures are needed to save billions of dollars in unnecessary repairs. Using data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Shane Underwood of Arizona State University and his colleagues show that road engineers have selected materials inappropriate for current temperatures 35 percent of the time over the past two decades.

“At present, engineers assume a stationary climate when selecting pavement materials, meaning that they may be embedding an inherent negative performance bias in pavements for decades to come,” Underwood and his colleagues write. Some of their findings:

Failing to adapt to warmer temperatures is adding 3 to 9 percent to the cost of building and maintaining a road over 30 years.
The authors use two models of predicted warmer temperatures, which suggest between $13.6 and $35.8 billion in extra or earlier-than-normal repairs will be required for roads being built under the current models. In the lower-temperature warming model, this translates to an annual extra cost of between $0.8 billion and $1.3 billion; in the higher-temperature warming model, it is an annual extra cost of between $0.8 billion and $2.1 billion.
A road built to last 20 years will require repairs after 14 to 17 years under these models.
In some cases, government transportation agencies are paying too much for materials to withstand cold temperatures that do not currently (and perhaps no longer) exist.
Because municipal governments in the United States work on tighter road-maintenance budgets than state and federal transportation departments, the extra financial strain will largely impact cities and towns.

For more research, visit our climate change and infrastructure pages.

The post Climate change costing billions in extra road repairs appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Body camera footage suggests police treat black drivers with less respect

Denise-Marie Ordway — Wed, 07 Jun 2017 17:40:49 +0000

A larger percentage of black drivers than white drivers are stopped by police, according to a 2013 report from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. A higher percentage of black drivers are searched. And black drivers are much less likely than white drivers to believe police had a legitimate reason for pulling them over.

Researchers have studied interactions between police and motorists to try to understand such disparities as well as the reasons black people are far less confident in local police than white people are. Meanwhile, the nation continues to grapple with the high-profile deaths of several black drivers shot by police in recent years. In September 2016, a black driver was fatally shot in Tulsa, Oklahoma after an officer found his vehicle parked in a street. The officer was prosecuted, and a jury acquitted her in May 2017. Also in 2016, a black driver in Minnesota was shot seven times during a traffic stop and his girlfriend broadcast the aftermath on Facebook Live. The officer involved in that shooting has been charged with second-degree manslaughter.

A new study uses body camera footage to examine differences in how police communicate with black and white drivers during traffic stops.

An academic study worth reading: “Language from Police Body Camera Footage Shows Racial Disparities in Officer Respect,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), June 2017.

Study summary: A group of Stanford University researchers sought to determine whether there are differences in the way police officers speak to black people and white people during routine traffic stops. The team, comprised of scholars from the university’s linguistics, psychology and computer science departments, analyzed transcripts from 183 hours of body camera footage taken by police officers in Oakland, California in April 2014. (Oakland is a racially diverse city, where about 40 percent of residents are white and more than 30 percent are black.) The authors examined the language and phrases used by officers during 981 traffic stops, 682 of which involved black drivers and 299 of which involved white drivers.

Key findings:

Police officers spoke less respectfully to black people than to white people during traffic stops. Officers were more likely to use informal titles with black drivers and formal titles with white drivers.
White drivers were 57 percent more likely to hear a police officer use phrases that were considered the most respectful — apologies, for example, and expressions of gratitude such as “thank you.”
Black drivers were 61 percent more likely to hear officers use language considered to be the least respectful, including commands for drivers to keep their hands on their steering wheels.
Disparities remained even after the researchers controlled for the race of the police officer, the severity of the offense for which a driver was stopped and the location of the traffic stop.
Officers tended to use more formal language when interacting with older drivers and women.
Officers tended to use less respectful language with all drivers while performing searches.

Other resources:

The National Conference of State Legislatures tracks legislation on body cameras and provides a searchable database of state laws on body cameras. As of April 2017, five states — California, Florida, South Carolina, Nevada and Connecticut — require at least some law enforcement officers to wear body cameras.
The vast majority of law enforcement agencies in the United States plan to use body cameras or are already experimenting with them, according to a 2015 joint report from the Major County Sheriffs of America, the Major Cities Chiefs Association and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The American Civil Liberties Union has spoken out against proposals to limit the public’s access to officers’ body camera footage.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of civil and human rights organizations, created a scorecard to evaluate the body camera policies in place at 50 major police departments nationwide.
The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics gathers data on traffic stops and surveys U.S. residents every several years about their experiences with police.

Related research:

A 2016 study published in Criminal Justice and Behavior, “’Contagious Accountability’: A Global Multi-site Randomized Controlled Trial on the Effect of Police Body-Worn Cameras on Citizens’ Complaints Against the Police,” suggests body cameras help reduce citizen complaints against police.
A 2015 study in the Journal of Experimental Criminology, “The Impact of On-officer Video Cameras on Police-Citizen Contacts: Findings from a Controlled Experiment in Mesa, AZ,” found that officers who did not wear body cameras conducted more “stop-and-frisks” and made more arrests than officers who wore cameras.
A 2014 report from the U.S. Department of Justice, “Police Officer Body-Worn Cameras: Assessing the Evidence,” offers a review of research on the costs and benefits of body cameras.

The post Body camera footage suggests police treat black drivers with less respect appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Fuel-efficient cars may actually be safer than gas guzzlers

David Trilling — Wed, 03 May 2017 15:59:06 +0000

When the United States started demanding that cars swig less fuel, critics argued that the efficiency standards, because they lower the cars’ weight, would make them more vulnerable in an accident. But a new paper challenges that theory, arguing that efficiency standards are likely saving lives.

What matters is not only the average weight of the car, as researchers have argued in the past. Instead, Antonio Bento of the University of Southern California and his colleagues write for the National Bureau of Economic Research, researchers should study how the weight is distributed across a carmaker’s fleet after those cars are redesigned to meet the new standards.

The debate has taken on urgency since Donald Trump’s inauguration. The president has pledged to review fuel-efficiency standards – known as Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) – and has hinted he will ease them. Meanwhile, car accidents remain the leading cause of death for American teenagers.

Bento and his colleagues examine data on cars sold in the U.S. between 1954 and 2005, determining that fuel-efficiency regulations lower the average vehicle weight and increase the way weight is dispersed across all the vehicles in a carmaker’s lineup. (In this dispersion, some cars become lighter relative to the average and some, such as SUVs, heavier.) For every 40 to 50 pounds of weight a car loses, it gains about 1 mile per gallon (MPG) in efficiency.

The team then looks at 17 million accident reports between 1989 and 2005, controlling for improvements in safety technology. It finds the increased dispersion associated with a higher chance of a fatality (if you take two random cars from the lineup and crash them, the probability of a fatality increases). But the team finds the lower average weight associated with a reduction in fatalities – both when the car is involved in an accident by itself or when the crash involves multiple vehicles.

Taking these two changes together, the authors estimate there are between 393 and 439 fewer vehicle fatalities in the United States annually.

Bento and his colleagues are economists, so they monetize the gains. The Department of Transportation values a human life at $9.4 million (macabre, yes, but run with this thought experiment). Totaling lives saved, they estimate the “welfare benefits” – a concept economists use to compare policies – of fuel standards at well over $3.5 billion annually (393 lives saved x $9.4 million = $3.7 billion). Compare that with the cost to the car industry of complying with emissions standards, which the Environmental Protection Agency estimated was around $1.5 billion in 2011. So even if the standards cost carmakers more, the authors declare they “would pass a cost-benefit test based on benefits from reduced fatalities alone.”

Other research:

A 1989 paper in the Journal of Law and Economics determined that CAFE standards were associated with a 500-pound reduction in average vehicle weight and that this lighter vehicle, in an accident, was associated with a 27 percent higher chance of a fatality.

A 2013 paper in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics found a similar effect. For every 1 MPG increase in fuel-efficiency, wrote Mark Jacobsen of the University of California at San Diego, 149 more people die each year on America’s roads. “In other words, the increase in fuel-efficiency requirements that began in 1978 will translate into 2,533 more deaths on the road in 2016,” Jacobsen wrote. The same year, he published a paper in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy that found the costs of efficiency standards fall disproportionately on lower-income households.

A 2011 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research found that drivers involved in a collision with a car heavier than their own are more likely to die.

The conservative Heritage Foundation has argued against fuel-efficiency standards, reasoning that efficient cars are more deadly. Libertarians, too, have rallied against them, arguing that they do not save fuel or reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 33,736 Americans died in car accidents in 2014; vehicle accidents were the leading cause of death for teenagers.

The U.S. introduced fuel-efficiency standards after the 1973 Arab oil embargo. We have a tip sheet on how oil impacts almost every journalistic beat.

The post Fuel-efficient cars may actually be safer than gas guzzlers appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Some seat belt laws may be less effective at reducing traffic deaths

Denise-Marie Ordway — Mon, 03 Apr 2017 18:29:47 +0000

A new study suggests that laws allowing police to directly cite motorists for not wearing seat belts may be less effective than they once were at reducing accident deaths.

The issue: Seat belts save lives by drastically reducing the likelihood that drivers and passengers will die in a motor vehicle crash. An often-cited study published in 2003 by scholars from the National Bureau of Economic Research and Stanford University confirms that “mandatory seat belt laws unambiguously reduce traffic fatalities.” The study also estimates that for each 1 percentage point increase in the proportion of people using seat belts, 136 lives are saved annually.

Over the years, states have adopted what are referred to as “primary enforcement” or “secondary enforcement” seat belt laws. Primary-enforcement laws allow police to pull over motorists and ticket them (or their passengers) if seats belts are not in use. Secondary-enforcement laws permit officers to issue a ticket related to seat belts only if the officer already is citing someone for another traffic infraction. As of early 2017, 34 states and Washington DC have primary-enforcement laws for anyone riding in the front seat of a vehicle, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association, a group of state highway safety offices. Fifteen states have secondary laws for adults riding in front seats. New Hampshire is the only state without a seat belt law for adults.

Previous research has suggested that primary-enforcement laws improve traffic safety more than secondary-enforcement laws. A 2002 study published in Accident Analysis & Prevention, for example, demonstrated a reduction in motor vehicle injuries after California upgraded its seat belt law from secondary enforcement to primary enforcement. A 2006 study in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management indicates that states with primary-enforcement laws have lower vehicle fatality rates than states with secondary-enforcement laws.

But Americans’ driving habits and other circumstances have changed since those studies were completed. Seat belt use alone has risen significantly – from about 71 percent nationally in 2000 to about 90 percent in 2016, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

An academic study worth reading: “Primary Enforcement of Mandatory Seat Belt Laws and Motor Vehicle Crash Deaths,” published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2017.

Study summary: Sam Harper and Erin C. Strumpf of McGill University tested whether primary-enforcement laws still result in lower death rates among drivers and passengers in motor vehicles. The authors analyzed crash data from the Fatal Analysis Reporting System, a census for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, for the years 2000 to 2014. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety provided data on seat-belt policies and the dates that some states upgraded from secondary-enforcement laws to primary-enforcement laws.

Harper and Strumpf considered, as part of their analysis, several factors they believed might influence traffic safety, including recent laws related to maximum speed limits, legal limits for blood alcohol concentration and graduated driver’s license programs.

Among the key findings:

After controlling for certain factors, the authors find that switching from secondary enforcement to primary enforcement has almost no impact on traffic death rates. States that upgrade their laws are estimated to have 0.22 fewer deaths per 100,000 than states that keep their secondary-enforcement laws in place.
These estimates “suggest that the impact of upgrading from secondary to primary enforcement on MVC [Motor Vehicle Crash] death rates may have waned in comparison to earlier studies.”
The authors present several possible reasons why the impact of adopting primary-enforcement laws might have diminished in recent years. There is evidence that road improvements and changes in vehicle safety and design have contributed to lower crash death rates. The growing popularity of speed cameras and traffic roundabouts may have helped reduce deaths. Changes in the economy also may play a role as people tend to do less recreational driving when the economy contracts.

Other resources for journalists:

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration provides a variety of data on traffic crashes and deaths, including those involving motorcycles, pedestrians or impaired drivers.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers state-specific fact sheets related to motor vehicle occupant deaths and seat belt use.
The National Conference of State Legislators monitors legislation related to seat belts and child restraints.

Related research:

A 2005 study from the Transportation Research Board, “Minorities and Primary Versus Secondary Belt Use Enforcement,” looks at how minority motorists were impacted when five states switched from secondary-enforcement laws to primary-enforcement laws for seat belts.
A 2014 paper in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, “Do Traffic Tickets Reduce Motor Vehicle Accidents? Evidence from a Natural Experiment,” finds that tickets reduce car accidents and injuries.
A 2015 study in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention, “The Effects of Vehicle Redesign on the Risk of Driver Death,” finds that “changes in vehicles, whether from government regulations and consumer testing that led to advanced safety designs or from other factors such as consumer demand for different sizes and types of vehicles, have been key contributors to the decline in U.S. motor vehicle occupant crash death rates since the mid-1990s.”
Journalist’s Resource has featured academic research on the dangers of driving while texting and drowsy driving. We also have written about how devices that require speech activation can interfere with visual attention.

The post Some seat belt laws may be less effective at reducing traffic deaths appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Lead emissions from planes may be costing billions in lost earnings

David Trilling — Fri, 16 Dec 2016 18:43:29 +0000

Airplanes are now the largest source of lead pollution in the United States. A new study suggests Americans hurt by lead exposure may be suffering billions in lost wages.

The issue: Decades of research have shown how lead correlates with aggressive behavior, lower intelligence, learning problems in children and lower earnings later in life. Cars used leaded gas until the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandated it be phased out in the 1980s. Federal law banned lead in house paint in 1978. Scientists have not identified any safe amount of lead in children’s bloodstream.

Some researchers believe that the fall in murders in the 1990s is associated with the declining use of lead over the previous 20 years, that fewer children exposed to lead in the early 1980s meant a smaller number of violent young people hitting the streets in the 1990s.

Nowadays, we often speak about lead when there’s a big story – like the Flint water crisis or the traces found in small-town armories that are used as sports facilities. But across the country, lead remains a persistent concern – in our air.

Most commercial airplanes use unleaded jet fuel. But piston-driven aircraft – generally small propeller planes – use aviation gasoline (“avgas”), which contains lead to prevent a chance of sudden engine failure. That’s 167,000 planes in the United States, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Avgas is the only transportation fuel still used in the U.S. that contains lead. Fuel manufacturers have experimented with lead-free avgas for decades, but have yet to bring such a fuel to market. The FAA intends for most aircraft to use an unleaded replacement by 2018.

An academic study worth reading: “Cost of IQ Loss from Leaded Aviation Gasoline Emissions,” in Environmental Science and Technology, 2016.

Study summary: Philip J. Wolfe and his colleagues at MIT look at the amount of leaded avgas used in the continental U.S. in 2008 (248 million gallons) to calculate aviation-attributable lead concentrations in the atmosphere. With those amounts, they calculate the IQ impact on children and then estimate, when those children grow up, the economic impacts from their lower IQs.

Based on government earnings data, they determine a static estimate (the net present value of future earnings reductions) and a dynamic estimate (the impacts of the children’s IQ loss on the economy as a whole). Overall, Wolfe and his colleagues examine three cases based on different airborne lead-exposure levels, offering a broad range of dollar figures and insight into the marginal costs of lead exposure.

Findings:

At current average airborne-lead levels caused by the planes, the average cost to the American economy is $1.63 billion annually (calculated with a 3 percent discount rate over 15 years). That is the value in lost productivity.

To American individuals suffering lower IQ from lead exposure, the annual cost in lost wages is a combined $1.06 billion. (Some of the researchers’ models put the total figure as high as $11.3 billion.)

Avgas is responsible for “a wide dispersion of low concentrations of fine particulate lead emissions.”

Airborne lead particles fell 94 percent between 1980 and 2013 as lead was phased out of automobile gasoline.

Relative to gasoline, aviation fuel was an “insignificant source” of airborne lead during the 1960s and 1970s, when driving cars with leaded fuel peaked. Today — along with lead dust in soil from the period of peak leaded driving, as well as residual lead paint — aviation fuel is one of the most significant sources of lead.

Other research:

Among the many papers testing the relationship between lead and aggressive crime is this 2016 study in Environmental Health.

A 2013 EPA study, the Integrated Science Assessment for Lead, reviews the vast research on airborne lead exposure and the history of American efforts to remove the element entirely from the environment.

Several papers have looked at the economic benefits that seem to be correlated with the elimination of lead from gasoline.

Water packaged in glass bottles contains 26-57 times more lead that waters bottled in plastic, though those lead levels are still far below amounts allowed in Europe and North America, according to a 2012 study in Environmental Health Perspectives.

A widely cited 2003 paper found children more sensitive than adults to the negative health effects of lead.

Journalist’s Resource looked at the physiological effects of lead poisoning and American health policy in light of the Flint emergency that started in 2014 and caught national attention in 2016.

Other resources:

The FAA hosts data on general aviation, airport and fuel use, and industry forecasts. This 2013-2033 forecast includes data on the future consumption of leaded avgas.

The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) is a large advocacy and education organization for pilots.

Keywords: neurotoxicity, poisoning, lead, inequality, children, pollution

The post Lead emissions from planes may be costing billions in lost earnings appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

transportation – The Journalist's Resource

How they did it: Streetsblog exposes underground sales of illicit temporary license plates in New York City

1. Stay alert — is there something weird in your neighborhood?

2. To ‘find your Virgil,’ try old-fashioned cold calling.

3. Use court calendars to find sources involved in active cases.

4. Seek sources outside the spotlight for interesting anecdotes.

Read the stories

Crosswalks and pedestrian safety: What you need to know from recent research

Why pedestrian crashes happen and demographic risk trends

Safety measures for older pedestrians

Research on crosswalk design

The news media and pedestrian safety

Further reading

Electric vehicles: 5 recent studies to inform your coverage

Seat belt use in America: A primer and research roundup

Coming soon: driving season

Stagnating seat belt use rates

How to increase seat belt use: What the research says

Further reading

The truck driver shortage and the trucking industry workforce: 5 studies to consider

Want fewer cars on the roads? Don’t offer parking, research suggests

Define affordable

Totally random

Zone out?

Induced / reduced demand

Further reading

Working from home: What the research says about setting boundaries, staying productive and reshaping cities

My work and home life have completely melded. How can I set boundaries?

How does telework affect worker productivity?

Won’t I miss out on office relationships and opportunities for collaboration?

Will my career growth suffer if I’m not able to go to the office?

What will happen to cities if office workers don’t come back?

How public transportation predicts social media connections in New York City

How transit connections relate to social connections

Just hail a cab?

Transit links ‘shrink’ geographic distance

‘A diverse set of friends’

Cruising into a driverless future: Research on autonomous vehicles

Amtrak safety, rail transit and Positive Train Control: Research roundup

Climate change costing billions in extra road repairs

Body camera footage suggests police treat black drivers with less respect

Fuel-efficient cars may actually be safer than gas guzzlers

Some seat belt laws may be less effective at reducing traffic deaths

Lead emissions from planes may be costing billions in lost earnings