Post Tagged with: "Driving"

This is why you should not let your Driving License Expire

August 9, 2010 at 12:50 pm

Grrrrr.. Anything to deal with MVA/DMV drives me crazy.. I get so annoyed for all that wait and delay associated with even a simple process.

Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com


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
 
See this Amp at http://bit.ly/avoWFE

Read more Comments Off

Webinar Alert: Driving and the Built Environment: The Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO2 Emissions

October 20, 2009 at 4:03 pm

This webinar will explore the findings of Transportation Research Board Special Report 298: Driving and the Built Environment:  Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO2 Emissions.  This congressionally mandated study examines the relationship between land development patterns and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the United States to assess whether petroleum use, and by extension greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, could be reduced by changes in the design of development patterns.   The study estimates the contributions that changes in residential and mixed-use development patterns and transit investments could make in reducing VMT by 2030 and 2050, and the impact this could have in meeting future transportation-related GHG reduction goals.

Commissioned papers used by the committee to help develop Special Report 298 are available online.  A four page summary of and a press release on the report is also available online.

Image Courtesy: TRB - Click the image to access the report

The committee chair, José A. Gómez-Ibáñez, Derek C. Bok Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy of Harvard University, will present the study findings.   The report estimates the contributions that changes in residential and mixed-use development patterns and transit investments could make in reducing VMT by 2030 and 2050, and the impact this could have in meeting future transportation-related GHG reduction goals.

Questions from the audience will be addressed by Dr. Gómez-Ibáñez and two committee members who also contributed to the report:

  • Dr. Marlon Boarnet, University of California, Irvine
  • Mr. Andrew Cotugno, Portland METRO

Questions may be posed any time during the webinar, and will be answered at the end of the session.
Registration:  There is no fee to join this webinar. Space is limited, so we encourage participants to register 24 hours prior to the start of the webinar.

For questions about using this software, including webinar audio or visual complications, please contact Reggie Gillum at rgillum@nas.edu or 202-334-2382.

Read more Comments Off

“We the Women” demand right to drive in Saudi Arabia; a social dialogue for women’s rights catches fire on the web

May 7, 2009 at 7:12 pm

(Source: Lede – New York Times)

A young Saudi woman has launched an online campaign using YouTube,Facebook and Flickr to get Saudis to discuss, and possibly reconsider, the ban on women drivers in the Kingdom.

Image: "We The Women" campaign @ Flickr

As an article published last month in the English-language Saudi newspaper Arab News explained, the project, called “We the Women,” was started by a 24-year-old Saudi woman studying design in the United States who asked to be identified only by her first name, Areej. According to Arab News, she started thinking about how onerous the ban was when she saw that her retired father was forced to spend much of his time “chauffeuring her, her mother and three sisters.”

Image: "We The Women" campaign @ Flickr

The core of the campaign is a set of stickers, in the form of speech bubbles and bumper stickers, which Saudi men and women are encouraged todownload from Flickr, fill in with their thoughts, and then display. Some people are also taking pictures of what they write on their stickers and then adding those photographs to the project’s Flickr set of “Declarations.”

Printed at the foot of each sticker is the simple message: “To drive, or not to drive, that is the question.”

As the project description on Flickr explains, the woman behind it wants to hear other voices, not just amplify her own:

We the Women is a campaign that aims to raise the issue of women driving in Saudi Arabia and to start a real, public conversation. The We the Women declaration bubbles and bumper stickers were created as a space for self expression. Feel free to fill it out with your opinion on the issue and stick it wherever you feel it needs to be.

The images of the speech bubbles posted on Flickr so far have already sparked debate. Here is part of an exchange the woman running the project had in the comments thread beneath a speech bubble that said, simply, “I don’t like the backseat!” with two other Flickr users, calling themselves Mac Moo and Mr. Nice 2009 (web punctuation intact):

Mac Moo says:

lol….my dear….u are goood at writing,,,but its for your own safety… women must not left alone…in islam…and thats for good of both man and women…. you know how exactly west world is…..i think the government is doing it rite.

N7nu – We the Women says:

just to clarify…This is a user submission. I did not write this. Secondly, do you think that if women were allowed to drive we would be westernized as a society? How come women in the time of the prophet were allowed to ride camels. Isn’t that the same thing?

Click here to read the entire article.
Note: TransportGooru extends full support for this campaign and wish the very best to all the women of Saudi Arabia engaged in this campaign.  Hope the Kingdom’s rulers take a note of your demands and understand that it is not just a “wish” but one of a fight for a fundamental right.   Quoting President Obama’s famous words about fighting for a cause “And because that someone stood up, a few more did. And then a few thousand. And then a few million. And together, they changed the world.”  God speed & good luck!  
Read more 4

Convenience is King – You can take the train to work, but your office is still a mile away from the station. Might as well drive, right? How we can solve the last-mile problem?

April 16, 2009 at 7:28 pm

(Source: Good Magazine)

A couple of months after the presidential election, and a couple of weeks after Barack Obama signed his stimulus bill, the giddiness among transport advocates was enough to induce a contact high: $8 billion for high-speed trains, and another $8.4 billion for mass transit! They were excited for good reason: For years, the country has starved for any attempt to develop green transit, and finally we had the money.

But what if most mass transit is doomed to fail? It isn’t the mere lack of trains and subways that keep people in their cars. It’s what urban planners call the first- and last-mile problem. You know it, intuitively. Let’s say you’d like to commute on public transit. But if you live in a suburb—and ever since 2000, over half of Americans do—it’s unlikely that you live close enough to a station to walk. The same problem arises once you get to your destination: You probably don’t work anywhere near the closest bus or train station. So even if public transit is available, commuters often stay in their cars because the alternative—the hassle of driving, then riding, then getting to your final destination—is inconvenient, if not totally impossible. “Denser areas don’t have these same problems,” says Susan Shaheen, who heads the Innovative Mobility Research group at the University of California, Berkeley. “The problem is really about land use in the United States.”

It sounds nearly impossible to fix: Our suburbs won’t soon disappear, even if some are withering in the present housing decline. But here’s the good news: For the first time in three decades, solving the last-mile problem seems just within reach, owing to vehicle fleets and ingenious ride-sharing schemes that lean on mobile computing, social networks, and smart urban planning. “To make public transit viable, you have it make it just as easy as getting in a car,” says Shaheen. “It can be done.”

The challenge, according to Dan Sturges, the founder of Intrago Mobility, which creates vehicle-sharing technology, is that “no one’s yet putting these innovations together as a system, and the public doesn’t understand the broader problem. But if implemented all together, the things being invented now will make owning a personal car into a joke.” The enemy is really the car’s unequaled convenience; commuters need multiple, equally easy choices before they’ll give up the steering wheel. Several such choices are in the works.

“Right-Size” Fleets

Zipcar—which is now being copied by Hertz and U-Haul—is a godsend for city dwellers who only occasionally need a car. But it can also be used to solve the last-mile problem, when linked with public transit. “We’re at the tip of the iceberg with those systems,” says Sturges. However, for many commutes, a car is overkill. What if the closest bus is just a mile and a half away? A “right-sized” vehicle, suited to your particular last-leg commuting need, is ideal. These might be anything from a Segway (dorky as it may be) to an electric bike or a high-powered electric golf cart. But the vehicles themselves aren’t the solution, since commutes can change every day (say you’re visiting a client one day, and eating lunch at your desk the next).

Click here to read the entire article.

Read more Comments Off

Are women good at driving? Not according to this video..

March 20, 2009 at 3:07 pm

To kick start the weekend in a nice way, here is a crazy, funny & very biased (depending on who is looking at this) compilation of some shocking videos that involve our women drivers.   Is this the reason why women are not allowed to drive in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia?  Can someone tell me how these women drivers on the video managed to survive on the roads and lived to make such a great contribution for the making of this video?  Also, I am now looking for a similar version featuring male drivers for comparision purposes.  Any insights into finding such a priceless gem will be really appreciated. 

 

Read more 1
1 2