Day: 2011-08-10

Linklist August 10, 2011

| David Levinson

Kottke Chris Burden’s latest project “a portrait of LA”: “”

and The twilight of the free-running car A model with 1200 Hot Wheels in motion.

Time: , Aug. 03, 1936 Transport: Four Frictions: “Making traffic control the subject of his thesis at Harvard in 1924, red-headed Miller McClintock became the first man ever awarded a doctorate in traffic. Two years later, when Studebaker Corp. offered to finance a Harvard traffic bureau, Dr. McClintock was put in charge. Supported now by the Automobile Manufacturers Association, the Bureau and its chief are recognized as the No. 1 U. S. authority on traffic control, have produced a complete new theory of highway troubles. Says Dr. McClintock: “If we could apply all we know, we could eliminate 98% of all accidents, practically all congestion.””

A Time Geography Approach to Understanding the Impact of Gasoline Price Changes on Traffic Safety

| David Levinson
Gas Prices and Crashes
Gas Prices and Crashes

Working paper:

The impact of gasoline price changes on traffic safety has received increasing attention in empirical studies. However, this important relationship has not been explained within a conceptual or theoretical framework. In this study, we examine this relationship within a time geography framework in an attempt to understand the effect of time-varying fluctuations in gasoline prices and their relationship to traffic safety in a case study of Mississippi from April 2004 to December 2008. We further extend this work by examining the degree to which this relationship is differential in impact by age, gender, and race. The results suggest that changes in gasoline prices have immediate effects on reducing total traffic crashes and crashes of younger drivers, women, and whites. However, changes in gasoline prices do not affect total crashes of older drivers, men, or blacks. Within the theoretical framework of time geography, we understand gasoline prices as one type of capability constraint of the space-time path and space- time prism. As gasoline prices increase (that is, as the capability constraint becomes stronger), traffic crash rates will decrease. However, the effects vary by age, gender, and race because the capability constraint of gasoline prices differs across demographic groups.