A Taxonomy of Drivers by Car

 I drive a lot and I enjoy it.  But there are other drivers who seem determined to spoil the experience.  I find it surprisingly easy to predict the way a particular driver is likely to drive by the type of car they are driving.  This is of course a stereotype.  Stereotypes are useful to a point.  But they are often wrong, and we need to recognize that.  That you drive a BMW does not necessarily mean you are an asshole.  But in a random sample of drivers, the correlation between BMWs and assholes is quite high.  And all of these driving issues can occur in any make of car, and there are lots of drivers in all these makes of car that behave perfectly well on the road.

Volvo: most likely to do something erratic, like change lanes without looking.  I think a lot of them are distracted by kids in the back or talking on the cell phone, or are simply not good at paying attention.   I think the reason for this correlation is that Volvo markets themselves as the safest car, and while it's not literally true, it has been at times in the past and they remain pretty good on that score.  So people who notice that they're in accidents have a slight preference for Volvos.

Since SUVs and their ilk became popular, there's a new contender for the most erratic drivers.  The Range Rover.  I'm pretty sure these are the same people who would have driven a Volvo 30 years ago, but these big SUVs have the advantage of mass.

In third place are the big SUVs from other carmakers--Jeep Grand Cherokee, GM Yukon/Suburban, etc.

BMW.  As I mentioned above, BMW drivers seem disproportionately to be assholes: cutting in line, aggressive moves, etc.  The problems rarely stem from incompetence or inattention like Volvo drivers, but from a stupid level of aggression.  I think what's going on is that BMW drivers like driving and are good at it, but they think because they're better, they deserve extra rights.  They certainly have more money.  It's frustrating, because they actually are pretty good cars.  But I wouldn't want to be typecast as one.  More than any other car, a really high percentage of BMW drivers fit the stereotype.

Audi... sort of a BMW wanna-be.  far fewer Audi drivers are assholes as BMWs, but it's a higher percentage than other cars.

Tesla.  I think lot of Tesla drivers are BMW drivers who are only driving a Tesla until BMW introduces an electric car to their liking.  (they have a couple already, but they are both aimed at much narrower market than the mainstream BMW).  In the meantime, they're in Teslas.

Mercedes: Some Mercedes drivers are like BMW drivers, others like Volvos.  Most seem to be on the competent side, but you really notice the outliers.

Big Pickup Truck.  They go waaay faster than the other traffic and they often make moves without looking.  Like BMW drivers, they're good at avoiding the accidents they seem determined to cause.  I suspect this is because they're relatively good at determining which drivers are likely to be able to get out of the way, and also they know that because their truck is so much bigger, they're safer even when they get it wrong.   A disproportionate number also have a high hatred for people who drive electric cars, small hybrids, or other small cars.  You will never see a coal roller that is not an oversized pickup truck.

Small East Asian car: this may be a person who is just learning to drive, who can't afford to drive much so their skills are poor,  or who cant see well.   I think there are a sizable number of them that grew up under circumstances where they never expected to learn to drive, and didn't learn to drive until they were in their late 20s and by then found it hard to adapt to the timing and speeds.  They drive well under the speed limit, don't take their turn at intersections, don't take advantage of free right turns, wait 5 seconds or more to move after the light changes.  For some reason people driving equally small or even smaller european cars don't seem to behave like this.

Slow Growth Policies

A lot of cities are struggling with unbalanced growth: some sections are getting intense gentrification and densification.  This unfortunately, is inevitable.  I happen to live in Seattle, so I'll use it as an example.

The symbol of Seattle densification is Amazon.com, which has built an urban campus in an area called South Lake Union--because it is south of a small lake called Lake Union.  The area used to be part of what was called "The Denny Regrade."  In the 1920s a steep hill named for city founder Arthur Denny, a little north of downtown, was sluiced down and the area leveled using hydraulic mining techniques.  It became an area of small industry and commercial buildings, cheap apartments, dive bars and other relatively low cost business. The Seattle Center, site of the 1962 Worlds Fair, was built on one part of it, and the largest freeway off and on ramps in the city passed through it, in a convoluted group of roads that came to be called "The Mercer Mess" after the biggest of the streets involved.  In the 1990s, a group led by Paul Allen began buying up properties with the goal of revitalizing one part of the Regrade and fixing the Mercer Mess.

The timing and location turned out to be perfect for Amazon, which moved its headquarters into SLU, and began to grow.  And grow.  And grow.   Tens of thousands of young professionals came to Seattle to work at Amazon.  City life suited them and they very quickly changed the dynamic of the area.  Where it had been a semi-suburban part of the city, where coming and going was all about the automobile, it suddenly became nearly impossible to find parking and very difficult to even get your car from one side to the other.  The Mercer Mess is symbolic: where it had been nominally 4 lanes in each direction with only a few traffic lights and pretty good access to the rest of the city, now it's 3 lanes in each direction with a traffic light every block and during rush hour, traffic is so dense it often takes more half an hour to get on to Mercer from a side street.  The Amazon workers resorted to moving within walking distance of work, and consequently there are dozens of new, expensive high rises within walking distance.

The people who were already here were screwed.  Thousands of people were kicked out of low rent housing, unable to find affordable housing within 20 miles or more of the area, which for most had also been where they worked.  Seattle is very much a car-focused region and city.  There are some symbolic transit systems, which do work, but their capacity is very low and the better ones cover very, very little of the region.  The bus system has better coverage, but it is terribly limited.  For example, the place I used to live in Redmond had service once an hour, from 6am to 7pm.  It was a half mile walk.  Heaven help a cripple, or someone carrying something big.  It had even shorter hours on weekends. 

The Seattle City Council wants to impose a "Head Tax" to employers over some threshold size.  I think there's the germ of a good idea in this, but the goal is mistaken.   They're trying to discourage big businesses from building downtown.   I think the right thing to do is to tax businesses to build transit.  Grade separated transit, so it can reduce congestion.  Long distance transit, so the people who want to work downtown can get to housing where it's affordable, and people who want to live downtown can get to businesses that are located where it's affordable.

Electric Car Chargers

Electric cars have finally crossed the line from being futuristic possibilities, through hybrids that exploit some of the benefits of electric power but still burn petroleum, to fully electric vehicles.  Tesla and Nissan are the big trendsetters, but now pretty much all the carmakers are on board.

Charging an electric car presents some special problems, mainly stemming from the fact that moving the mass of a car (and passengers) requires quite a bit of energy. Gasoline (and its relatives) have tremendously high energy density.  The breakthrough that's made electric cars finally feasible is the lithium ion battery, which is both smaller and lighter than it's predecessors.  But it still takes much longer to charge a battery than it does to fill a tank with gasoline.

Broadly speaking, there are three types of charger that have evolved, which go by the name "Level 1", "Level 2" and "Level 3".   The first two are not really chargers, but EVSEs "Electric Vehicle Service Equipment".  They just pass the power unchanged, with the addition of some safety equipment.  The charger is on the car.  A level 1 EVSE uses one phase, line voltage power.   In the US, this means 120V, 15 or 12A.   The SAE definition is that a level 1 EVSE is single phase and not capable of charging at faster than 1920W.  A level 2 EVSE is 2 phase, 208 to 240V and may go at up to 80 amps, but very few of them actually do that.  This is a theoretical peak of 19200W, but very few go higher than 7800.   "Level 3" is not defined, but in practice, it's anything that goes higher than 19200W.

The standard EVSE system is SAE J1772, which defines a 5 conductor connector, which has two power conductors, a ground, a "pilot" and a "proximity" conductor.  The latter are used for safety signaling.  The "pilot" carries a 12V 1KHz square wave which is used to detect continuity, and the "proximity" signals to the car that it's plugged in, and blocks the vehicle from being driven until it's disconnected.   Power is just passed through on the three power and ground conductors, but a relay opens the circuit unless pilot and proximity are deemed valid.  The idea is to make it impossible to charge a car with a kludged up power cord, just the sort of thing that might start fires, and to reinforce it, they tell you not to use extension cords when you buy the car. Virtually all electric and plug-in hybrid cars support J1772, although a few, such as Tesla S, require an adapter.  (Tesla exploits their incompatibility to use the same conductors for their "supercharger" level 3 scheme.)

The electric code also requires that lines being heavily loaded for more than half an hour only carry 80% of their design capacity.  This is also to prevent fire--heat builds up gradually, and your charger is likely running while you're sleeping.  This is the reason that a charger wired for 15 amps is only allowed to draw 12, 50 amps only allowed 40, and so forth. 

Level 3 chargers typically use special power arrangements to draw more than 80 amps.  Generally they are called DC chargers but that oversimplifies what they're doing.  They require smart electronics and high power connectors--generally beyond the capacity of home chargers The three main protocols are the still evolving J1772 level 3, the CHAdeMO, and the Tesla Supercharger.   The first two require a very special connector, while the Tesla uses the same connector as level 1 and 2.  (this is the main reason Tesla went its own way rather than allowing J1772 to plug in directly).  BMW and Nissan tried to negotiate a license to use the system during summer 2014, but BMW recently announced that it's building its own network of level 3 chargers using the J1772 "combo" connector, which is a kludge involving a J1772 and a separate, higher capacity connector in the same plug.

Driverless Cars

The first driverless cars are being tested, and a number of new cars are automating some things that people find difficult or dangerous, like parallel parking and emergency stops.  The potential is enormous--for safety.  But as long as there are human drivers on the roads, they provide little improvement in the capacity of our roads.

The safety advantage is enormous.  The cars use a radar or other sensor to detect a foreign object, including pedestrians and other cars, and figure out if a collision is imminent, and if it is, apply the brakes to avoid it.  This is actually fairly straightforward to do, although it is a big engineering challenge, and would have been impossible with the computers of just a few years ago.

But what they do not do is improve road capacity.    While there are human drivers on a road, all cars must obey the same separation rules, speed rules, traffic signals, etc.  Unless there are special, reserved roads for robocars, they can't go any faster, drive any closer together, ignore traffic lights because they know the crossing traffic is also a robocar.   There are, however, a few places they might give a small capacity advantage.  For example, today's short term rental systems, such as zipcar and car2go, require that user go to where the car is being stored. A driverless rental car could come when called, just like a taxi, obviating the need for a large number of parking places.  Or instead of being used like a taxi, it could be used as automated valet parking.   A driverless car is potentially enough cheaper than a human-driven taxi or parking valet that it would increase their use significantly--getting a lot of cars off of our dense urban streets and making the best use of parking space.   But it doesn't help capacity at all in places where parking is already easy to come by: the suburbs.

The transit term for reserving a road so that all vehicles on it can obey special rules is called "grade separation".  This is commonly used for heavy rail vehicles, such as subways and elevated trains.  If small, independently scheduled and routed vehicles are used on such a road, it is called "Personal Rapid Transit".  It is more efficient to use special vehicles and guideways for such a system.  Vehicles that can be driven on roads shared with human drivers are much more complex and heavier than dedicated PRT vehicles.

Where driverless cars have a big advantage is when we can give over a part of the road completely to them.  For example, a dedicated lane on long highways where driverless cars are allowed to draft (including bump-draft)  and go at much higher speeds than would be safe for humans.  This is not a big capacity advantage, but it can be a big throughput advantage, and the passengers are safer and can rest or recreate during their journey.

Types of Electric and Hybrid Vehicle

Ultimately, there are two ways to power a car:

Fuel, usually derived from Petroleum but sometimes agricultural sources or coal (namely Fischer-Tropsch), burned in an internal combustion engine, or Electricity, either generated in the car with an internal combustion energy or fuel cell, or stored in a battery--or both.  Since current batteries have low energy density compared with fossil fuel, all modern electric cars use various means to minimize or recapture electricity, most importantly, regenerative braking.

There are relatively few Pure Electric vehicles on the market although this is changing rapidly.  These must be charged by plugging them into a source of electricity.  The people with electrics I know seem to fall into two classes: about half have installed high power--7KW or more--chargers.  Tesla has a supercharger: 120KW, but as far as I know, nobody has installed one in their home.  The other half have not bothered.  They use ordinary 120V power to charge their cars and do not find it to be a problem.  In all cases, their daily commute is less than 15 miles.  (Most 120V chargers limit power draw to 1200W.  I suspect this is due to concern over sketchy wiring and long extension cords.)

Pure Electric cars include the Tesla (all models), and Nissan Leaf, the Smart ForTwo EV, quite a few others.  The runaway success of the Tesla has provoked nearly all the big carmakers to follow suit.   Most have range well under 100 miles, although the Tesla can go over 200.

The most common type of EV by far right now is the Parallel Hybrid.  All of these can be powered either directly by the internal combustion engine or directly by the electric motors, running off the battery.  This involves a complicated transmission.  The IC engine can power both the transmission, and a generator.  Most are have fairly limited range and top speed under electricity.  the battery and generator are usually quite small.

Nearly all of the parallel hybrid makers are making or soon will make a Plug-in version, which allows you to top up the small battery.  They generally haven't added enough battery to give much all-electric range.  There is a substantial aftermarket for larger batteries and plug-in circuitry.

Parallel Hybrids include the Prius and related Toyota products, such as the Camry, the Ford Focus Hybrid, Most of the Honda hybrids, and quite a few others.  The Chevy Volt and the new Cadillac ELR are technically Parallel Hybrids although they are mostly Series Hybrids.  I'll get into this later.

A Series Hybrid is mostly a pure electric vehicle, but it carries an on-board engine and generator.  This is much simpler and more efficient than a parallel hybrid, but for some reason, most of the carmakers didn't go that way.  I think they were concerned about the size and reliability of batteries when the first hybrids were being introduced.  The power of a series is constrained mainly by its battery: a bigger battery means you don't need as big an engine. 

The most important series hybrid on the market, the Chevy Volt, was apparently felt to not have quite enough oomph going up long hills, but instead of improving the battery, they put in a bigger engine and made a clever clutch device which engages the transmission with the engine when the electrics weren't enough.  This technically makes it a parallel, but as long as the clutch isn't engaged, it's a series.  I believe most buyers of Volts would have preferred to have less power on hills and longer electric range.  Most of my friends who own them rarely if ever drive fast or far enough to engage the engine.  The new Cadillac ELR uses the same mechanism.

GM has another variation, which they've dubbed a Mild Hybrid.  This is an entirely normal internal combustion car, with an oversized battery and starter motor, and a small amount of extra electronics.  When you stop the car, at a traffic light for example, the engine stops.  When you press on the gas pedal, the starter starts the car moving while it's restarting the engine.   I don't think any of them bother with regenerative braking or pure electric while driving at low speed, but if you spend a lot of time idling, this could be a fuel saving.  But it's mostly marketing.

A solar powered car that resembles the performance and comfort of today's cars is impossible.  Noonday equatorial sun on a clear day is about 1000W/square meter.   The total surface area available for exposure to the sun is about 7 square meters on the typical car.  Due to inefficiency, and the fact that most of the time it isn't noon on a clear day, and most of us don't live near the equator, that means we have an average of about 500 watts if the sun is up.  That's about 2/3rds of a horsepower.  even if somebody came up with magic 75% efficient solar panels (today's best are under 40% and most are about 15%), that would only bring it up to about 5hp...still not enough.   But that doesn't mean you can't use solar panels to help recharge the battery of your plug-in.

Flying Cars

When people hear about my support for Personal Rapid Transit, they sometimes compare it to the Jetsons or wonder about Flying Cars.   Unless there is a pretty significant technological breakthrough, I'm pretty skeptical that flying cars will ever happen.

Let's pretend for a moment that the breakthrough occurs and a car can be made to take off and hover without the huge energy expenditure that doing that today requires.  (This might be a breakthrough in anti-gravity, but it's more likely a new, very cheap, very portable source of energy.).  This doesn't change the need for roads, although the new technology would allow them to be in the sky.  Presumably this would mean that they could be built very cheaply, and that they don't interfere so much with other construction.  If more capacity is needed, they could be easily widened or extra decks added.  They are still plainly finite and subject to traffic jams.  Many science fiction movies with flying cars, such as Blade Runner, Star Wars, etc., have recognized this and show nearly all the cars moving in neat rows.  The action of the movie often involves a breakdown in this order but if such disorder were commonplace, flying cars would either crash into each other constantly, or have to stop to avoid such collisions almost as often.

NASA and the FAA have been working for some years on a "NextGen" instrument navigation system, sometimes called "Highway in the Sky".  Early stages of this amount to technological improvements to present instrument flight systems--automated radio frequency handoffs, altitudes and headings transmitted directly to "glass cockpit" navigation systems, etc.  If limited to present instrument routes, it wouldn't have much impact on system capacity, but it would substantially reduce workload and errors for instrument pilots.  But over the long term, it would allow many more routes to be managed.  But without cheap VTOL and hover, the runway would remain exactly the bottleneck it is with aviation today.

Cheap VTOL changes everything.  The "road" could be above the scene, and when you need to stop, you simply leave the road and drop down to whatever your destination is.  Present VTOL and hover consume a tremendous amount of energy.  Present technologies, which are aerodynamic, also require substantial space between vehicles.

---

Interestingly, Personal Rapid Transit allows a bit of an approximation:  As with flying cars, the "roads" are elevated, so they don't consume much real estate on the ground, and can easily go over or around obstructions and other routes.  They're a lot cheaper than other forms of railed transit, although not so cheap as simply reserving a corridor of air.  And you can add a station anywhere you want, without interfering with traffic.  Transportation with PRT is a lot more like taxi service than having a private car.  Like the movie versions of flying cars, the vehicles can run very close together and move a lot of people.  And because they are on fixed guideways, it's very difficult to make them collide.

Christie and the Bridge Closing

There's enough evidence now that New Jersey governor Chris Christie's political career should be at an end.  Being New Jersey, he probably won't step down although he probably should, but there is no interpretation of this story that does not leave him looking either grossly incompetent or pointlessly cruel and vindictive.

The George Washington Bridge, between Manhattan and Fort Lee, New Jersey, is the busiest motor vehicle bridge in the world, its 14 lanes carrying over 100M vehicles a year.  Most of the working residents of the small town of Fort Lee work in Manhattan and commute across the bridge several times a day.    There's some construction on the bridge that began in august, but the lane closures were devised to minimize the disruption.  There is no toll eastbound (into Ft Lee), but there is a toll westbound, and there are 31 toll booths in Ft Lee to collect a toll into Manhattan. All of these booths are on the various through roads that merge together to cross the bridge.  Most of these roads must be entered outside of Fort Lee, but there's an access road that allows 3 of those booths to be accessed from the surface streets of Fort Lee.  Essentially all Fort Lee commuters use those three booths.  There's a barricade that protects the exit/onramp and effectively prevents them from being used by through traffic, and the approach makes it essentially impossible for Fort Lee commuters to use other booths, unless they go a few miles in the wrong direction first, to get onto the through roads from out of town.  During the busy morning commute, those booths are always jam packed.

On the first day of school this year, two of those three booths were ordered closed by their supervisor, a main named David Wildstein, appointed by Mr. Christie, a long time friend and supporter.  No warning and no clear reason was given, and in subsequent investigation, the explanations given were proven to contradict the facts.  Predictably, the traffic from the thousands of people trying to get across the bridge backed up into Fort Lee, clogging surface streets all day long, making many people late for work or miss it entirely, costing jobs, school credit and more.

A few days earlier, Mr. Christie, a Republican, had asked the Mayor of Fort Lee for his endorsement in the gubernatorial election two months later, in which Mr. Christie was leading by double digits in the polls.  The mayor, a Democrat refused.  It's difficult to see how this is not a political retaliation.   Mr Wildstein has already resigned and the people who had reported to him have expressed that there was a culture of fear in the department, and that they are still afraid of testifying even now for fear of retaliation.   (Most of these are low-skill, low pay jobs while the unemployment rate in New Jersey is considerably worse than most at just under 9%, while the national average is 7%.)

The possibilities of what happened are relatively few:
Mr Wildstein was acting on his own, trying to punish the Mayor.
Mr. Wildstein was doing this under orders from the Christie campaign or Christie himself.
Mr. Wildstein actually was, as he claimed, trying to run an experiment in traffic flow manipulation.

If the first or third were true, Mr Wildstein should have been ordered to fix the situation, and probably fired for corruption or incompetence as soon as Christie heard about the situation.  Instead, he laughed it off. Wildstein only resigned under intense public pressure.

Whichever it was, lots of panicked commuters tried to alert authorities to the situation and get it fixed.  That it didn't get to Christie's attention by about 730AM and fixed a few minutes later is evidence of either gross management incompetence, or of tacit or explicit support.    It did take a week to get it fixed.


My suspicion is that Wildstein was doing it on his own, but that Christie didn't mind a little political retribution and didn't really care about what was happening in Wildstein's department.    The "culture of fear" in the department, should be, by itself, a major blow to Christie's political future especially if he is found to have abetted it.  This is the same guy that cancelled the new ARC subway tunnel on the grounds that it cost too much, and claimed New Jersey was on the hook for most of it, even though that was only 17% and that the economic value it would have had for New Jersey was many times its cost.

update 13 Feb 2014
An email trail tells us that Wildstein was ordered to create traffic problems in Fort Lee by Christie's deputy chief of staff, Bridget Kelly.  The phrasing of the order made it clear that this had been planned.  Christie fired her without asking her why she had done this.

Previous discussion between Christie's office and the mayor of Fort Lee included a new, half billion dollar high rise residential development, just over a block from the On-Ramp that was closed, on the same street--just barely beyond the southern edge of the picture above. The money for the buildings comes from private investors, but the units are being sold, predicated entirely on how easy it would be to get into Manhattan.  It this context, it is difficult to see how the shutdown is anything but punishment for Fort Lee and it's mayor.

Today it was revealed that the grand jury is studying the circumstances of the ARC tunnel shutdown and has issued Subpoenas.  It's beginning to look a little like this money was effectively stolen from the port authority (which also runs the subway) to be used to build New Jersey roads...purely so Christie could get credit for building those roads without raising taxes.

At this point, the question is not so much whether Christie will be running for President in 2016 but whether he'll be in prison.

addenda 20 Feb 2014
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Right Turn Lanes

A recent visit to California reminded me how differently they handle right turns there.  At nearly every intersection where there are multiple lanes, there is a dedicated right turn only lane.  Here in Washington state, there are a few such lanes, but not many.

Prior to 1 Jan 1980, most of the country did not have "Right Turn on Red".  This meant that if you were stopped at a traffic light, you had to wait for the light to turn green, whether you were going right, left, or straight.   California and a few other western states, however, allowed you to treat a red light as a stop sign, provided you were turning right (or left onto a one way street from a one way street).  In other words, come to a full stop, check for traffic, and then proceed when it's safe.  During the OPEC oil embargoes of the 1970s, a few states experimented with this and found a noticeable improvement in gas mileage, and the federal government tried to pressure the rest to join in, but many refused, claiming it wasn't safe.  So starting on the 1st of January 1980, every state in the country was mandated to adopt this rule.   Was it safe?  For the first few years, there were on average 84 fatalities a year involving such intersections.  This is a small enough number on the scale of traffic fatalities (about 40,000 a year) as to suggest it was never really a problem.

(I happened to be living in Massachusetts when the change was mandated.  Many right turns, such as ones that cross another street, are not safe to do this on, so signs that specified "No Turn on Red" could be placed at such location.  On New Years Eve 1979 (it was a monday), essentially every traffic light in Massachusetts gained such a sign.  There weren't many state highway workers leaning on their shovels that day.  The feds caught wind of this and made them take about 90% of them down.)

The traffic flow efficiencies come not from idling less, but from more cars being able to make it through the intersection over a given time.  If, say, 20% of cars don't have to wait for the light, that's 20% less time the light needs to be green to allow the same number of cars through.  That means the chance of cars on the cross street having to wait for a red light are reduced by that much.

One consequence of this notion about right turns is that many traffic engineers haven't quite grasped the idea that a busy intersection needs a dedicated right turn lane in order to gain the traffic flow efficiencies.  To some degree this is understandable: when many streets were built, they weren't all that wide, and buildings were placed close to the right of way.  If there's only room for one turn lane, they chose to make it a left turn lane because those cars actually do have to wait for oncoming traffic...the right decision.

But there are lots of places that they have the room and in surprisingly many they have actually gone out of their way to block it. There used to be a right turn lane in the picture to the right, but they actually added the little bumpout about 5 years ago to block free rights.  Are they thinking they're protecting the crosswalk?  That's a bus stop just to the east--but why shouldn't cars use it when buses aren't?

To their credit they are fixing some:  this intersection in Ballard, which I go through almost every week, was improved a few months ago:  That maroon car is parked, the front car in the eastbound right lane is going straight, and probably half the cars waiting behind are turning right, so they are stuck. Since this picture was taken, about 4 cars of parking have been converted to right turn only lanes.  It's still got looonnnnng lines,  but it's a huge improvement.