Category: Traffic Safety

Fascinating San Fransisco streetscape video

(EDIT: Replaced first video with much better one.)

This video, shot from a San Francisco streetcar, is from 1906, just a few days before the San Francisco earthquake:

Note the huge numbers of pedestrians on the road, the dangerous interactions between various transportation modes, the lack of efficiency, and the layers of clothing.

I don’t know how many of those buildings survived the 1906 earthquake except–of course–the building at the end.

Here’s a similar scene today:

View Larger Map

…and this guy claims he has a video of the same area from 2005:

I was interviewed by BBC World Service!

I was interviewed by BBC World Service last night. Reporter Jeff Baird, an American BBC employee from Oregon, saw that Fark.com linked to a news article about my Texas speed trap report. Lawrence Pollard did the actual interview.

We did it over Skype. I didn’t have good equipment, so I had to put my face about 4″ from the microphone on my son’s Asus netbook. If you listen to the interview, you’ll hear disturbances in the audio. I guess I leaned too closely or breathed into it?

The Russian subway bombing prevented them from playing it in the London breakfast show, but it played a few times before their dawn.

The interview.

The full 27 minute segment I was on. (I think I am towards the end.)

This plain text belies my excitement, but this was a major high for me. I cannot believe I’ve been broadcasted on wordwide media.

Follow up to WFAA speed trap piece

Above is my interview with Dallas’s WFAA channel 8, broadcast on March 23, 2010, which was about my Texas’s Worst Speed Traps article.

WFAA also talked to Keller Police Chief Mark Hafner. He disputed that Westlake is a speed trap. (Westlake contracts policing to Keller PD.) He says, “When we took over policing in 2002, Highway 114 had 3-4 fatals a year. In the last 2 years, we have not had a fatal accident on highway 114.”

I pulled all Westlake auto fatalities from 1996-2008 on a graph. Remember that Keller took over policing in 2002. Here’s the graph:
Westlake traffic tickets and fatalities
(Important note:1996-1998 really did have 0 fatalities, but no ticket data was available from the state.)

Sorry, I see no correlation. Do you? Except maybe a lack of a correlation between fatal wrecks and tickets–although I admit that you can’t draw much of a conclusion from this limited data. Plus TX-114 was recently rebuilt in the area, but I can’t find answers yet on how this affected Westlake’s portion. (EDIT 3/26/10: According to State disputes Westlake speed limit (Fort Worth Star-Telegram),TX-114 reconstruction through Westlake was completed in late 2002.)

But wait, there’s more!

Let’s narrow down Westlake fatalities just to TX 114:
Westlake traffic tickets and TX-114 fatalities

1 fatality on occasional years on Westlake’s TX-114, a far cry from “3-4 fatals a year.”

Texas’s worst speed traps

EDIT: I was interviewed on Dallas’s WFAA channel 8 for this. See the video and article at Small North Texas town tops list in speeding-ticket revenue. Also see my response to the video.

Texas Municipal Wall of Shame: the 40 most prolific speed traps, ordered by total ticket revenue per citizen.

I am not certain, but I think this covers all tickets written from 2000-2008.

Rank City 2008 population Traffic tickets % of all tickets that are traffic tickets Total ticket revenue Total ticket revenue per citizen Total tickets per citizen
1 Westlake 211 71664 81% $8,919,460 $42,272 340
2 Estelline 155 24269 88% $2,873,199 $18,537 157
3 Domino 50 2656 99% $262,660 $5,253 53
4 Montgomery 596 25523 66% $3,116,988 $5,230 43
5 Martindale 1148 44422 98% $5,496,670 $4,788 39
6 Cuney 147 4598 100% $678,847 $4,618 31
7 Palmer 2258 81653 93% $10,144,689 $4,493 36
8 Rio Vista 818 31508 95% $3,239,383 $3,960 39
9 Riesel 1013 25021 92% $3,911,628 $3,861 25
10 Patton Village 1483 52752 98% $5,570,563 $3,756 36
11 Mount Enterprise 543 16379 99% $2,023,814 $3,727 30
12 Pantego 2381 41830 53% $8,763,955 $3,681 18
13 Wilmer 3576 88731 90% $12,610,497 $3,526 25
14 Dalworthington 2412 60167 66% $8,320,636 $3,450 25
15 Lott 675 11454 85% $2,139,228 $3,169 17
16 Lavon 423 8255 85% $1,319,644 $3,120 20
17 Chillicothe 687 14420 94% $2,127,266 $3,096 21
18 Waskom 2137 48647 98% $6,604,962 $3,091 23
19 Shenandoah 2002 67581 97% $6,004,139 $2,999 34
20 Mustang Ridge 933 25329 90% $2,786,746 $2,987 27
21 Ferris 2566 46764 89% $7,591,029 $2,958 18
22 Covington 302 4192 62% $886,511 $2,935 14
23 Arcola 1230 32449 97% $3,589,616 $2,918 26
24 Northlake 2036 40651 93% $5,763,918 $2,831 20
25 Rice 980 18346 64% $2,708,749 $2,764 19
26 Zavalla 665 15499 96% $1,816,084 $2,731 23
27 Magnolia 1249 35035 86% $3,391,091 $2,715 28
28 Alvarado 4188 83348 79% $11,134,344 $2,659 20
29 Brownsboro 837 17763 91% $2,203,938 $2,633 21
30 Driscoll 802 10353 71% $2,092,793 $2,609 13
31 Rhome 1051 21390 82% $2,731,994 $2,599 20
32 Kemah 2498 45532 83% $6,421,907 $2,571 18
33 Corrigan 1872 28235 83% $4,548,346 $2,430 15
34 Coffee City 207 4566 80% $499,477 $2,413 22
35 Itasca 1696 31532 85% $4,040,627 $2,382 19
36 Eustace 925 14406 77% $2,172,573 $2,349 16
37 Rogers 1138 18659 91% $2,653,569 $2,332 16
38 Southside Place 1667 34778 80% $3,782,674 $2,269 21
39 Calvert 1358 27655 97% $3,070,273 $2,261 20
40 Selma 4632 86332 87% $10,352,606 $2,235 19

This was calculated from data from the Texas Office of Court Administration’s Trial Court Judicial Data Management System.