In a bold move to punish technically unsophisticated or poor people, Texas’s third wealthiest city enacted a hand held cell phone ban in school zones. With this, Highland Park encourages equally dangerous hands-free use. But hey, as long as you’re rich or know Bluetooth, you’re teh awesomezor!
How “brave.” How “innovative.”
As if its outrageous property values aren’t already tax-tastic enough, Highland Park may soon enhance its traffic ticket profits by giving its cops another reason to hassle motorists: a proposed ordinance will ban cell phone use* within active school zones.
Why the asterisk? *Not applicable when hands-free mode used.
It’s a two-faced ordinance: you can’t talk on a cell phone but you can talk on a cell phone if you use your hands free unit.
But wait, you say, isn’t this about safety? Don’t you need your hands on the wheel?
The “inattention blindness” is equivalent for any cell phone user, so hand placement has minimal bearing on cell phone-related motorist safety. Several studies affirm this equal risk:
By only banning “handed” cell phone use, Highland Park would tacitly endorse an unsafe activity.
Additionally, the law would concentrate profit enhancement punishment on those too poor or technologically unsophisticated to have hands free units, even though these groups may be equally unsafe as hands-free users.
I’ll close with an analogy: suppose a city has a river with too-low, flood-prone levees on each side. Banning only “handed” cell phone use is like only fortifying one levee. The net effect is minimal because whatever water would have flooded over the fortified levee will instead spill over the other, unfortified levee.
Highland Park should either leave the levees alone or fortify both levees. Only fortifying one levee–banning one unsafe activity while encouraging another unsafe activity–makes no sense, except as an anti-motorist profit ploy.
A few weeks ago, I used a spiffy Google feature for the first time: a map you can annotate and share. Click on the picture at right to see an annotated map of east Dallas and all its known neighborhood associations.
Using this feature is simple: go to Google Maps, sign in with your Google account, click on My Maps, and start annotating. The annotation buttons appear near the zoom slider. Be sure to save it!
I created this map to help me understand what areas of far east Dallas are represented by neighborhood associations.
I had an ulterior motive. The area just north of mine, called Lake Highlands (not to be confused with the Old Lake Highlands neighborhood, which is also north of me but not part of Lake Highlands), has an organization called Lake Highlands Area Improvement Association. This association supplements homeowners’ and neighborhood associations by coordinating communications and actions on issues that broadly affect the area. This association has reasonable success getting its message out to the public and government per Dallas Morning News’s search feature.
I envision a similar organization for far east Dallas, possibly called the Garden and Lakes District Council of Neighborhoods. This association would serve the area by providing the same badly-needed coordination of action and communications. I also envision it helping start up and sustain neighborhood associations in areas currently lacking one. An active neighborhood association can make a long-term difference in a neighborhood’s vitality.
Lake Highlands has pockets of dilapidated housing interspersed through its area, but its single family detached neighborhoods are pretty stable. Far east Dallas is different: several neighborhoods are turning into rental communities or ultra-cheap housing. Some of them are fighting this, and doing a good job at it, but it’s tough. Several neighborhoods have no active neighborhood associations, nobody to fight against creeping decline.
I want to change that.
I have emailed this idea to all area neighborhood association presidents, and the response was very positive. The next step is come up with a coherent plan and have a working meeting to put the plan into action. Today I met with a fellow neighborhood association president and an area business owner to discuss ideas on putting a plan into action.
It will be interesting to see how this works out. Sometimes I fear I’m getting in a little over my head, but at the same time, if you never challenge yourself, you’ll never learn new things.
Today I saw a Trinity Vote (the “yes” crowd) brochure featuring a flooded Trinity River from 2007. Clearly they haven’t backed off the spirit of ignorant predictions of flooded roadways by former councilmen John Loza and Sandy Greyson.
Here’s the truth.
To inundate the toll road, a flood would have to crest at least 415.64 feet above sea level, and probably a few feet more due to a mini-levee on the toll road’s river side. That is at least per the designs. Click on the picture at right to see a higher resolution version.
The USGS’s Trinity Gage 08057000, (yes, it’s spelled “gage“) located near the Commerce St. bridge, has the river’s bottom at 368.02 feet above sea level. Simple mathematics says the river has to be at least 47.62 high, a whopping 17.62 feet above flood stage, to get on the toll road.
This gage has taken daily readings since 1987. I put the readings in a spreadsheet, ordered them by height, and found that the highest reading in these 20 years was 45.77 feet from May 3, 1990. This even includes readings not formally approved for publishing. Only 15 readings out of 11,814 (some days have more than one reading), or 0.1%, are even above 40 feet.
What does this mean? In the prior 20 years, the river never rose high enough to flood the road.
What’s clear is that if this road even floods, it’s going to be incredibly rare, possibly counted on one hand during a person’s lifetime.
Between high school and Thanksgiving 2006, I wore the same jeans size.
At that Thanksgiving, I realized those jeans literally fell off me without a belt. I quickly switched to jeans with two inch smaller waist, and they fit well.
Today, I tried on jeans that were an additional inch smaller, and they fit great!
What’s my secret? I’m doing better avoiding junk foods (stuff made with white flour, stuff with partially hydrogenated oils, fruit juices, etc.), I’m further reducing eating when not hungry (you wouldn’t believe how much eating is done not out of hunger), and I exercise 3-5 times a week. That’s really it.