What’s the root of DC’s hatred for Metro?

So many people use (transit) here that there are a whole lot more opportunities to hear from people that don’t like it. In Cleveland, the same types of professionals who get frustrated with ‘hot cars’ and delayed trains and rude station managers (in Washington) simply aren’t using public transit.

He makes a good point, that transit is an integrated part Washington’s culture in a way that it is not in other cities, but that’s only half the answer. The other half is that Metro just isn’t as good as it used to be, simply because it’s aging, and many of us remember when it was new and perfect. Metro is only about a generation old. It was planned and built since most of its riders have been alive, and for its first couple of decades, nothing went wrong. The maintenance and safety problems that have plagued Metro this decade are for the most part new events, consequences of an aging system that we simply didn’t have to deal with until recently. Read more at greatergreaterwashington.org

Ginzler and other geriatrics experts predict that the issue will explode in the next decade as the leading edge of the 78 million-member baby boom generation hits its 70s. In 2008, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, 78 percent of the 28 million Americans older than 70 had licenses, up from 73 percent in 1997, an upward trend that is expected to continue.

Because more Americans are living longer with progressive, disabling diseases that make driving iffy or downright dangerous — heart problems, stroke, Parkinson’s, dementia and diabetes, to name a few — families are increasingly wrestling with questions that defy easy answers. Although many seniors stop driving voluntarily or sharply limit their driving, others refuse. Some fear being marooned in their suburban homes, while others, like my father, cling tenaciously to the independence a car represents, unaware of how hazardous their driving has become. A survey by the MIT AgeLab and the Hartford insurance company found that age enhances confidence in driving ability. Drivers 75 and older were twice as likely to say they planned to drive into their 90s as did those 65 to 74.

Such confidence can belie reality. A 2007 report by the Government Accountability Office found that drivers 75 and older were more likely than drivers in all other age groups, including adolescents, to be involved in a fatal crash. Read more at www.washingtonpost.com

Melodi Dushane, 25, pulled up to a Toledo-area McDonald’s at 6:30 a.m. on New Year’s Day demanding McNuggets.Read more at jalopnik.com

Much has been written about a war between cyclists and drivers, as if the two groups were such polar opposites that they could never cross in a Venn diagram. But according to new research, people who cycle the most are likely to own at least two cars.

Regular cyclists – those who cycle at least once a week – are also disproportionately likely to read broadsheet newspapers, be well educated, have a household income of at least £50,000 per year and shop at Waitrose, claims the latest Mintel report, Bicycles in the UK 2010. In addition, they are twice as likely to be men as women.

Men of a certain age now pride themselves on their bicycle collection. In a documentary last year, Alan Sugar showed off the full-carbon Pinarello machines he has bought for his many residences at a cost of many thousands of pounds each.

His research reveals that bike sales are being driven by 35- to 45-year-old family men. Where this age group might once have treated themselves to a sports car – in an attempt to hang on to their youth – they now invest in a luxury bike instead. Read more at www.guardian.co.uk

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A flight attendant ran out of patience on a plane that just landed at JFK on Monday afternoon, so he allegedly cursed a blue streak over the p.a. system, grabbed some beers,  pulled the emergency chute, slid down and ran from the plane,  sources said.

Jet Blue employee Steven Slater, 38, was working on Flight 1052 from Pittsburgh to Kennedy Airport, which landed at around 12 p.m., when he got into a verbal altercation with a passenger, law-enforcement sources said.

The argument began when one of the 100 passengers on the flight, got up early to get her luggage from an overhead compartment, according to sources. Slater told the passenger to sit back down — but, as he approached, the woman continued to pull her belongings down and struck him in the head with her bag, authorities said.

Slater asked for an apology but the woman cursed him out, saying in effect “go f–k yourself” and calling him a “mo-fo,” according to law enforcement sources who are still sorting out the specifics. Then Slater got on the flight’s announcement system and allegedly cursed out  everyone on the plane — especially the person who mouthed off to him, according to law enforcement sources.

When his tirade was through, he then took a some beers from the galley and pulled the emergency chute and slid off the Embraer 190 plane.  According to police sources, he threw his luggage down first and said something to the effect of “there goes 28 years,” before he took the plunge.

Slater was later arrested at his home in Belle Harbor, Queens by Port Authority officials.  Police sources said that when authorities found Slater he was either having sexual relations — or had just finished. Read more at www.nbcnewyork.com

NASA researchers have created an online resource that dramatically changed how the agency fosters collaborative research. In this new innovative method capitalizing strengths of the Internet, scientists can share information about systems health and data mining while aiming to help improve aviation safety in ways never before possible. The web site is called Dashlink. DASH stands for Discovery in Aeronautics Systems Health. The name hints at the identity of the particular group of scientists who created this online gathering place in 2008. The site has more than 410 registered users. “The primary goal of Dashlink is to disseminate information on the latest data mining and systems health algorithms, data and research,” said Ashok Srivastava, principal investigator for NASA’s Integrated Vehicle Health Management Project at the agency’s Ames Research Center in California.

Dashlink allows researchers, whether inside or outside NASA, who are working on a particular software application to share the applications they have written, test each other’s work, and openly discuss the results. “It’s totally different from how other projects are run,” Srivastava said, noting that the usual form of communication among scientists is published papers, which can take months to distribute and offer no immediate interaction with the author. Interaction is important because a staple of scientific research is the ability of one group of scientists to duplicate the work of another group and achieve the same results. In the data mining field, duplicating results can be difficult and infrequent.

Dashlink is available to anyone with an interest in integrated vehicle health management software and sensor applications. Those outside NASA can join if a NASA civil servant sponsors the registration. That is what Suratna Budalakoti did when he joined the site in September 2008. Read more at www.nasa.gov

ONLY three times in my life have I been so scared that I trembled — legs quivering, hands jittering, heart out of control. The first was at 12, when I watched “The Exorcist” before I should have. The second was at 41, when, on the kind of dare to which middle-aged men seem peculiarly vulnerable, I got into a canvas harness and prepared to jump some 250 feet into a gorge in Zambia.

The third was a few months ago, on Staten Island, when I was asked by an examiner for the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles to pull out of a parking spot and drive toward a nearby stoplight.

A humdrum task, you say? Undeserving of horror? You’ve never met the examiner. And you don’t yet understand what a crazy-making path I’d traveled to that fraught and climactic point — to the possibility that, at 45, I just might be able to drive legally again.

This is a cautionary tale. Like too many harried New Yorkers without cars or much cause to use them, I let my driver’s license expire — in October 2006. Then, in an unlucky development the next May, I was pick-pocketed. The double whammy of an expired license that I could not physically produce meant I could no longer right the situation with a written exam and a vision check. I was effectively 16 again, on the hook for a five-hour class and the dreaded road test, which I came to fear I’d never reach, given the labyrinth of civil-service incompetence, bureaucratic nonsense and simple misfortune I had tumbled into. Kafka could have had a field day with me. Read more at www.nytimes.com