(Source: via Streetsblog)
The Ad Council has some new material in its campaign aimed at teenage drivers. The gist of the campaign, corresponding with the title of its web site, is “speak up or else” — a name perhaps more suited to hard-hitting PSAs from overseas.
(Source: Guardian.co.uk)
Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai survives car crash but wife Susan killed
Zimbabwean prime minister’s official car collides with lorry near Harare
Susan and Morgan Tsvangirai during the 2005 elections. Photograph: Desmond Kwande/Getty Images
Zimbabwe‘s prime minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, has survived a car crash that killed his wife, Susan, near Harare today.
Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said the prime minister was injured but not critically in the collision with a lorry. He was taken to a clinic in the capital. The driver of his official vehicle was seriously injured. There was no word on the condition of the lorry driver.
The party said there was no immediate reason to believe the accident was suspicious, but it was awaiting full details. An MDC official said that from information at the scene it appeared the lorry driver fell asleep at the wheel.
MDC officials said the couple had been heading to Mr Tsvangirai’s home town of Buhera for a political rally. Mrs Tsvangirai died at the crash scene.
The couple were married for 31 years and had six children.
Mrs Tsvangirai was widely respected in Zimbabwe as the antithesis of President Robert Mugabe’s extravagant and free-spending wife, Grace, who showed little concern for the plight of the many hungry and poor in her country.
Susan Tsvangirai largely avoided the limelight but did speak out on women’s rights and Aids. She was deeply religious.
Zimbabwe’s roads are notoriously dangerous, having deteriorated in recent years through lack of maintenance. Drivers are forced on to the wrong side to weave around potholes. Many vehicles drive without proper lights and brakes because of the difficulty and expense of obtaining spare parts.
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(Source: Ars Technica via Gizmodo.com)
An Italian programmer and over 100 other individuals, including public figures, policemen, and government officials, are currently being investigated for what seems to be a traffic-light-rigging conspiracy.
Stefano Arrighetti, 45, the engineer in charge for programming the T-Redspeed system which is used throughout Italy, is being accused of rigging traffic lights to have shorter yellow lights, causing more motorists to inadvertently speed through red lights. Because the system uses three strategically placed cameras around the intersection, the T-Redspeed system was able to capture exact 3D placement of where the motorists’ cars were the moment it illegally crosses through the intersection, instantly fining them with a €150 ticket.
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(Source: New York Times)
In 1997, one of my proposals was greeted with the usual thunderous silence. I proposed creating the Piazza Broadway by banishing cars from the the Great White Way near Times Square. It wasn’t a strictly original idea — a similar scheme had been proposed in the 1970s — although I do believe I was the first to suggest decorating the plaza with a statue of a three-card monte dealer and a pedestrian bridge modeled on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, to be called the Ponte di Tre Monte.
Anyway, the idea went nowhere — until today. Mayor Bloomberg planned to announce that Broadway will become a pedestrian-only zone around Times Square and Herald Square, according to my colleagues William Neuman and Michael Barbaro. The experiment will start in May and could become permanent if if it works.
Will it work? I’m biased, of course, and I can’t claim I based that 1997 proposal on any rigorous analysis. But today there’s a new tool for examining the proposal: a spreadsheet called the Balanced Transportation Analyzer, or B.T.A.. Charles Komanoff, the economist who developed it, calls it the first transparent and publicly available tool to gauge the varying impacts of changing the transportation options in a city with a dense central core, like New York.
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(Source: AP via Yahoo News)
A good Samaritan who helped push three people out of the path of a pickup truck before being struck and injured has gotten a strange reward for his good deed: A jaywalking ticket.
Family members said 58-year-old bus driver Jim Moffett and another man were helping two elderly women cross a busy Denver street in a snowstorm when he was hit Friday night.
Moffett suffered bleeding in the brain, broken bones, a dislocated shoulder and a possible ruptured spleen. He was in serious but stable condition Wednesday.
The Colorado State Patrol issued the citation. Trooper Ryan Sullivan said that despite Moffett’s intentions, jaywalking contributed to the accident.
Moffett had been driving his bus when the two women got off. In the interest of safety, he got out and, together with another passenger, helped the ladies cross.
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