A blog about societal, cultural, and civilizational collapse, and how to stave it off or survive it. Named after the legendary character "Crazy Eddie" in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye." Expect news and views about culture, politics, economics, technology, and science fiction.
Car brain is insidious, and it seeps into seemingly everything. Let's explore.
I watched this yesterday, then experienced car brain as I drove to work. A man in a Mercedes tailgated me, then gave the "come on" gesture. I sped up to get away from him, then briefly tapped my brakes to tell him to back off. Dude, I'm already driving five miles over the speed limit along a stretch of road that the police patrol. Do you want me to break the law more so you can, too? He then passed me and had to wait for someone else to turn right to get to his destination. Hurry up and wait.
CityNerd Ray reminded me of a video I watched in school more than 50 years ago, Goofy - Motor Mania.
A classic Goofy episode from the 50's!
In fact, from 1950. Car brain has been around that long.
That's the general situation. Follow over the jump for my personal update.
I've often heard that EVERYONE thinks they're an above average driver. Well, I wanted to look at data to see if it's actually true, share research on how the Dunning-Kruger effect impacts driving, and look at wider consequences on our transportation system.
I've been blogging for 15 years and I've never mentioned the Dunning-Kruger effect until now? I'm amazed. I've had so many opportunities to apply it, especially during two administrations of "only the best people." *Snort*
That written, I'm not surprised at either people's inflated self-assessments of their driving skills or how poor they really are. I wish I weren't surprised that the people who did the worst actually upgraded their self-assessments after doing poorly. I guess they thought they did better than they expected. And I have to share the road with them? Ugh.
That's the general driving situation. Follow over the jump for my personal driving update.
I'm switching things up for the first retrospective examining the most read entries of the fourteenth year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News. Instead of featuring the most read entry, I'm beginning with two driving updates that were among the most read posts of the blogging year just ended. To that end, I'm sharing Ray "CityNerd" Delahanty warning his viewers that The New USDOT Is Coming for Your "Woke" Projects.
We're only a few weeks into the new administration and it already feels like years. Let's check in on what the new USDOT is up to.
Klepper and Kosta are covering Governor Hochul's stopping congestionpricing. That's a subject that deserves another post. Maybe if or when CityNerd uploads a video about it.
I was told traffic is worse than it's ever been, especially in New York City. So I went on a research expeditions to find out if it's actually true, and if so — given how many people are working from home and how much vacant office space there is these days — WHY?
This entire video is an exercise in three of Commoner's Laws: "Everything Is Connected to Everything Else" — changes in one part of the transportation system, in this case people moving from transit for commuting to private vehicles for non-work trips, affect the rest of the transportation system, which leads to "Everything Must Go Somewhere" and "There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch" — all those personal vehicle trips have to go somewhere, causing more traffic congestion, and working from home has unforeseen costs, like more non-work trips and longer trips to work when people do commute because of moving away from work. Where's "Nature Knows Best?" Sorry, walking doesn't seem to enter into the equation, although horse-drawn carriages merit a mention for historical comparisons and bicycling barely makes a mark on the pie charts.
The pandemic also appears in the story, serving as another instance of "Everything Is Connected to Everything Else" and "There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch." Fear of infection seems to be a big driver, pun intended, of shifting people in general and New Yorkers in particular from transit ridership to work from home, with personal car use for non-commuting trips. This connects back to "perceived safety" near the beginning of the video; people working from home don't seem to be factoring in the risks of driving. As I wrote in CityNerd explains 'All the Ways Car Dependency Is Wrecking Us', 46,980 Americans died in traffic accidents during 2021 and one million died worldwide.
Randy's plug of Ground News reminds me of what I wrote in Future Proof examines 'The RISE and FALL of Malls in America,' a tale of the Retail Apocalypse, "the paid promotion by Ground News reminds me that I promised a comparison and contrast between AllSides and the Media Bias Chart three years ago." I still haven't done that, but it really is time. Maybe when I make my monthly page view goal and write evergreen entries near the end of the month.
That would make a good post to share next month. Stay tuned to see if I actually write it.
I have a work project due by the end of this month. Maybe after I get that done. Otherwise, I have in penciled in for the last week of February, when I'm off from work. In the meantime, stay tuned for more evergreen entries worth sharing next month through the end of January.
I closed 'Strange Darling' leads Best Thriller Film nominees with seven nominations by noting "I have a driving update to write, since Pearl's odometer rolled over another 1,000 miles yesterday." That was on the 10th, so it's been nearly a week. Since I'm not going to write an entry about the home entertainment nominees at the Saturn Awards, I'm going to post that driving update.
Today we're looking at high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes -- all the permutations (occupancy restrictions, time of day restrictions, lanes vs. facilities, and HOT lanes, which allow single-occupant vehicles to buy their way into a less congested facility).
We'll go on some tangents, as usual, like how different metropolitan regions view HOV lanes differently, and how these kinds of facilities represent the dynamics of Anthony Downs' concept of "triple convergence."
[I]t does have something worth celebrating, a car lane. WOOD-TV mentioned it in MDOT begins 14 year project on I-75 near Detroit [dead link]: "The $90.8 million project, which stretches 18 miles, will add a carpool lane (the first in the state), resurface the highway and replace bridges among other things." That's a small thing, but it is an improvement over the current situation, which does not encourage carpooling.
I've driven on I-75 since, but haven't seen an HOV lane yet. I guess it will be in the segments that haven't been worked on yet. By that time, I might not see them, because I plan on being retired by that time, so I'll be driving less.
That's the big picture. Follow over the jump for my personal driving update.
Against my better judgement, I accepted the idea that Project 2025 isn't Trump's "real" plan, and instead looked into Agenda 47, which I was assured by certain viewers was much more reasonable (and an accurate description of what Trump proposes to do if he wins back the presidency). What I found was disturbing on more levels than I can count.
As CityNerd observed, at least the writers of Project 2025 could put together coherent policy proposals, even though their ideas are bad. They're supposed to persuade Trump and the people around him to adopt them should he be elected. Since a lot of the chapter authors were members of the previous administration and would be likely to be part of the next one, heaven forfend, that isn't a hard lift. On the other hand, the individual items that compose Agenda 47 are emotional appeals that Trump himself can understand and get behind and that he thinks will appeal to his supporters, although it's not always clear who those are. They're definitely not the same supporters for every proposal, which makes them as incoherent as a whole. In that case, they reflect the candidate.
One of those proposals, "freedom cities" to solve the housing crisis, is one of the "cyberpunk villain ideas straight out of SnowCrash that are influencing Vance" I referred to in Kosta, Colbert, and Hayes react to the VP Debate. They're also influencing Trump, too, or this concept wouldn't be in Agenda 47. I wrote "They would be right on target for this blog" so expect me to blog about them.
Five years ago, I juxtaposed two quotes from James Howard Kunstler to reconstruct a prediction about American politics from the movie "The End of Suburbia."
There will be a great battle to preserve the supposed entitlements to suburbia and it will be an epochal act of futility, a huge waste of effort and resources that might have been much better spent in finding new ways to carry on an American civilization.
...
Americans will elect maniacs who promise to allow them to keep their McMansions and their commutes and that’s going to produce a lot of political friction, probably a lot of violence, probably a threat to our democratic institutions.
Kunstler was both right and wrong about that prediction, as I pointed out when I revisited that quote in my comment on Slowly, Then All at Once (ETA: this is now a dead link, as Kunstler has moved to Substack).
As for Trump, you once predicted that Americans would elect maniacs who would promise that they could keep the entitlements of suburbia. Trump has shown you to be right and wrong about that. Yes, they'll elect maniacs to protect the entitlements of suburbia, but those entitlements turned out to be psychological and social, not physical. Trump's support is more a response to threats to the social environment as it is to losing SUVs and McMansions, which with the price of oil being low right now, are not issues like they were in 2008 and 2012. Instead, it's immigration, terrorism, and "law and order."
What I also wrote, but didn't post because I didn't want to inflame Vlad, who now goes by Janos, and his fellow deplorables was a second observation.
The one thing missing from "The End of Suburbia" was any discussion of White Flight; the movement to the suburbs was all phrased in class terms, not racial ones. That's something my students from Detroit and its suburbs notice.
It's not what, it's who Trump promises to save the suburbs from. I know who and so does Governor Whitmer, which is why she called it a dog whistle, one people in Michigan have been hearing for decades. I suspect King does, too, which is why she asked.
Trump is still blowing that dog whistle and it sounds throughout all these proposals.
I got a record number of comments on my recent video on what Project 2025 means for cities and transportation, and a shocking number of them were abjectly stupid. Let's review.
Seeing Ray "CityNerd" Delahanty's advice to check voter registrations and register if one hasn't already also reminded me that yesterday was National Voter Registration Day, an event I've been supporting since I was a director for the Coffee Party. Consequently, I second CityNerd's suggestion!
