{"id":2170,"date":"2010-05-27T12:53:40","date_gmt":"2010-05-27T16:53:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=2170"},"modified":"2010-05-27T12:53:41","modified_gmt":"2010-05-27T16:53:41","slug":"stop-believin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/05\/27\/stop-believin\/","title":{"rendered":"Stop Believin’?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I love reporting that makes us step back and reexamine the most ordinary things around us.\u00a0 Freakonomics<\/a> (which is sometimes kind of annoying) has made this into a cottage industry.<\/p>\n

Anyway, take Slate.com’s recent rethinking of the humble stop sign<\/a>.\u00a0 For example, it turns out more stop signs can actually make drivers go faster.<\/p>\n

Residents of a neighborhood may complain about drivers speeding down their street and petition the city to install stop signs. But stop signs are not a safety device as such, nor a traffic-calming device: They exist to assign right of way. Faced with more stop signs, some studies have shown<\/a>, drivers may actually drive faster to make up time lost for stopping at (or really, slowing through) the intersection; the more signs installed, the lower the compliance<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But what’s really interesting to me in the article is this sentence:<\/p>\n

As Kenneth Todd has pointed out<\/a>, “the traffic control system developed piecemeal. \u2026 [W]hen large numbers of automobiles burst on the scene early in the century, political pressures, guesswork, and panic measures served as substitutes for scientific expertise.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m fascinated by the system of rules and signs that govern how we drive.\u00a0 First, because getting into an automobile is no doubt the riskiest and scariest thing we do in our daily lives.\u00a0 And second, because it’s unbelieveable that millions of rank amateurs driving fast-moving chunks of metal don’t crash into each other and hurt each other more often.<\/p>\n

Based on the number of injuries and deaths on American roads, you’d think the traffic system would be a subject of a major Blue Ribbon panel.\u00a0 Yet we don’t even give it a second thought.<\/p>\n

What do you think would improve our traffic system most?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love reporting that makes us step back and reexamine the most ordinary things around […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2170"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2170"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2172,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2170\/revisions\/2172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}