Unintended road experiments – how kids cause traffic
medium.com
medium.com
Anyone who drives at rush hour in the summer months, when (UK, at least) schools are on holiday, will know how much quieter the roads are. Come September, and it's back to the jams.
The problem is, "everyone knows" is not scientific reasoning. After all, everyone knows that you only use 10% of your brain, that lightning never strikes the same place twice, and that Napoleon was short. However, all these things are absolutely wrong.
So we frequently see things like this where someone takes a "commonly known" hypothesis and uses scientific data to either refute it or support it.
(He was likely shorter than his Imperial Guards, who were chosen on the basis of height, which would have made him look short by comparison when seen in public, much like Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a little person when he's seen next to Andre the Giant and Wilt Chamberlain.)
By the standards of the Dutch, you're probably a short, tiny little person too. But by the standards of modern America, Napoleon was average: the average height of a man in America in 2017 is 5'7" (last time I checked). Standards vary from place to place and time to time. In modern Japan, he'd probably be considered a little tall. In modern Netherlands, most of us are short.
Makes it very simple.
If we take the relatively safe assumption that people have been growing taller, largely, forever then Napoleon would rank amongst the tallest of his line.
Or in other words you need a contextualising statement "was short compared to 21st Century men".
Of course the whole thing about him being "short" is the "Napoleon complex" which concerns how he related in height to his contemporaries. So that's what most people care about when looking at this historical figures height.
What do you gain by comparing his height to more modern men?
The knowledge that he was short.
Something is going on and it is correlated with the school year but I don't have enough data to pin down any specific cause.
Alas we now have whole generations of children who do not walk to school and this is in a time in which school selection now means that the students are more able to have a school nearer home than the past (or course always exceptions and the countryside always has that aspect).
This not only has a very noticeable impact upon roads (at a time they are least able to accommodate traffic and add to the problem and pollution) but also has seen a rise in child obesity and alas the way this is tackled is by things like sugar tax, that penalizes everybody. Then again you have the same with alcohol, few people drink to much so they want to introduce a minimum price per unit of alcohol to combat that and again, penalise everybody at the expense of the few.
But if a Government can be `seen` to be addressing a problem by adding a TAX over promoting and encouraging a more healthy lifestyle like kids walking to school, then they always go for the TAX option, sadly.
Now what really is a sad situation is many parents drive there kids to school as they feel the roads are not safe with all the traffic, that in itself only add's to the issue and befuddles me, mentality wise.
Maybe time to suggest to goverments that cars should be taxed if a family own's more than one. I'm sure they would jump at that option as they so love to use TAX as a solution. But until then, I love school holidays as it is the only time in which the roads are so much easier and quicker to navigate and that is from a public transport bus perspective alone. One journey I used to make would take an hour during school open times and during school holidays would be, between 25-50% quicker.
Another interesting observation I have made was that during school holidays nowadays there tends to be more road works, which can offset some gains and that is a trend that becomes more and more prominent. I can only surmise they do this to minimise impact, which only highlights the issue with school run cars without addressing and tacking it in any way, shape or form.
Again this is from a UK perspective in the London and surrounding area or urban sprawl and would be interested if the same trends/issues are as common in other countries urban area's.
I've often noticed that my commute is much faster on days without school in Chicago, especially my commute home. I think an equally plausible explanation is that people without kids plan necessarily plan their entire schedule around them.
For instance, if there is a school inservice, is traffic better because people aren't taking their kids to school, or is traffic better because people stay home with their children?
Another thing is that school holidays tend to be local government holidays as well. The local government is one of the largest employers in almost any jurisdiction. If the kids aren't in school because of a holiday or a severe weather event, there's a pretty good chance employees of the local government are not going in to work, not to mention the fact that the school staff probably are probably also not going to work.
The research wouldn't be that hard once you had some data, but of course, gathering data is the hardest part of most research.
In my example, school ended at 1pm or 3 pm, I'd wager not many parents came home, unless they were working part-time or were stay-at-home. I doubt this has changed so much in the last 15 years (since I graduated) although they've switched to 1 year less (so longer lessons) but they're switching back.
I simply think that "one American town with ~200k people" is not a very good data point. Also, I have no clue how school in the UK works, maybe people are driving their children to school everyday. :)
Oh really?
The only conclusion supported by the data is that the threat of severe weather alleviates traffic. Pinning it on kids, just because most of the people the author knows still went to work, is nonsense.
I'd assume this article was satire, but it's written with such sincerity that I don't think it is.
I don't have real-time flow of all data, thus I could be completely wrong. All I have for traffic data is a few Google traffic maps.
On a somewhat different note, it may not be the same there, but around here (Fairfax County, near DC), school opening times are staggered fairly substantially in order to make better use of the bus fleet. Schools here start anywhere from 7:10AM to 9:20AM. This will also spread out car traffic, not that the school district does that intentionally.
I live in a southern city that occasionally gets ice, vast majority of people take that opportunity to just stay home. Nobody in the south can drive in ice. When that happens. Traffic is light whether school is in session or not. Therefore, I say kids have zero impact on traffic. Ha!
The "genius class" on YCombinator isn't my intended audience. Those folks can go jump off a cliff.
My intended audience is the average person who jumps in a car and drives without thinking what is beyond the windshield. I think these people are interesting because they are making to-the-second economic decisions while driving. Given that:
* road space is a fixed asset
* information about upcoming road conditions is uncertain
* people can use devices to gather best-effort information from Google
* a driver can only choose one route
* the choices drivers collectively makes a market
* drivers choose to be risker to save time
The write up today is really just a foundational observations.
Cheers, Chris
This argument is a tautology.
If you are stuck in traffic you have only yourself to blame, you are the traffic.