Bruce Springsteen Almost Didn't Happen

Springsteen Father Hit By Car When Little

Sunset Pavilion, Asbury Park.

It turns out that somebody forgot to childproof the streets of Freehold, N.J., where the Springsteen family was living when Bruce's father, Douglas, was a child. Those new-fangled horseless carriages were just about everywhere, and people were still wrestling with the idea that cars and trucks didn't behave at all like a horse pulling a carriage or a wagon.

Anyway, Douglas, nine years old at the time, was on the way to the movies with his grandmother on a Friday evening in September 1933 "when he ran into the side of a car" and was knocked down, according to a report in a local newspaper. A researcher looking into the history of Freehold found the story in the Freehold Transcript, and the Asbury Park Press shared the news with the world on Bruce Springsteen's birthday in 2018. (For the APP story, click here.)

Fortunately, Douglas was not seriously injured. He was taken to a doctor, who determined that the boy "had suffered nothing more than a bump on his head and a severe shaking up."

His older sister had not been so lucky. In 1927, when Bruce's Aunt Virginia was five years old, she was riding her tricycle when a truck backing out of a gas station ran over her and killed her.

It seems fair to say that the Springsteen family never recovered from this little girl's death. Bruce Springsteen tells the story on pages 5 and 6 of his 2016 autobiography, Born to Run.

As a teenager, Bruce Springsteen had his own brush with vehicular death. This also happened in Freehold. "In 1967, I would crush my leg and suffer a concussion after being T-boned on my small Yamaha motorcycle by a '63 Caddy on my way home up South Street. The bike crunched and slid under the car's front end. I went sailing (no helmet law, no helmet) twenty feet into the air, landing on the hard-ass blacktop on the corner of Institute and South Street. I was knocked out cold for thirty minutes, all the way from Freehold to the hospital in Neptune." (Born to Run, p. 86.)

The good news is that the concussion got him out of the draft. The draft board in Newark classified him 4F (pp. 101-102).

See also Springsteen's Bill of Rights.

One-Eighties

Doing U-Turns in the Oval Office

Schuylkill Banks, in the brief interval between Isaias and the flood.

I think I detect a new wrinkle in the president's modus operandi. It involves doing a u-turn. The first time I noticed this was with the Republican National Convention, which started in North Carolina and then moved (mostly) to Florida and is now back to North Carolina (maybe).

Then he did something similar with mail-in voting. First it was terrible (except when he does it himself). Then it was wonderful in Florida, although it continued to be terrible in Nevada. 

I'm now waiting for a 180-degree turn on his demolition derby at the post office.

(You'll notice, by the way, that none of his one-eighties are clean. The turn always involves some splintering. Everything this man touches becomes a chaotic jumble.) 

I do think the U-ey is a new move for him. I may have missed some earlier examples, and I'd be happy to be corrected. But I do think it's new. And I think it's dangerous for him.

The president has had a couple of standard moves.

Usually, he does something for a while and then just drops it. And then he may pick it up again later on. This is what happened with the coronavirus briefings, now resumed after a hiatus that may have had something to do with the ingestion of bleach. 

For a quicker and apparently more permanent drop, have a look at his proposal to postpone the election. A quick and noisy flash followed by - nothing. An old, old term for this is "flash in the pan." 

The four executive orders, or memoranda, are still playing out, but I think they will also be a flash in the pan. 

I think launch-and-drop is his go-to move. After all, he has the attention span of a gnat, so it fits well with his psychological profile.

Sometimes he does stick with an initiative, slogging ahead in a famous corporate bad move - attempting to make a failure look like a mediocre success. The management consultants will tell you not to try to save face. Just kill the turkey, and spend your time working on stuff that may indeed be a real success.

An example of the president as slogger would be his dogged pursuit of a border wall with Mexico.

He may have some other moves, but I'm not seeing them right now.

And that brings us back to the 180. I mentioned that it was dangerous for him. Why is that? Because it's going to piss off the people who work for him. 

I understand the fascist goal of keeping the people in a state of permanent anxiety - angry, frustrated, uncertain. The 180 is different. The people most disoriented and eventually annoyed are the leader's own troops.

In the army it's called marching and countermarching. As a bright-eyed second lieutenant you line up your platoon and march them down a dirt road from one little village to an identical village five miles away. Then you get a call from headquarters, informing you that you were in the right village in the first place, and you should get back there tout de suite.

And so your soldiers get to walk ten miles in one day, and wind up exactly where they started. This results in sore feet and what the army calls "poor morale."

The army has an old saying: Move with a purpose. The troops know when they're being jerked around, and they don't like it. Meanwhile the people, who are supposed to be "all wee-weed up," as President Obama put it, are actually starting to laugh. (Mr. Obama's phrase, by the way, dates back to Chaucer and puts in an appearance with Shakespeare. For a story, click here.)

Is the president capable of moving with a purpose? I don't think so. Not with his inartful turns, his splintering focus, his tendency to unbalance himself as well as all those around him. What I see most consistently is an impulsive reaction to some outside stimulus and then an ocean of semi-coherent blather. And then on to the next one.

See also Bannon and Co. Aren't Very Good at Being Evil.

Setting Speed Limits for Safety

After 100 Years, the Need for Speed Meets Another Idea

Car show, Ocean Grove, N.J., 2019.

I'm hopeful that NACTO has finally driven a stake through the heart of the old 85 percent rule for setting speed limits. NACTO is the National Association of City Transportation Officials, and it has been doing very good work for a number of years, but this one is near and dear to my heart. The 85 percent rule got its start with some traffic studies on rural roads in the 1940's, and it says you should set the speed limit at a level where 85 percent of drivers are going under the limit, and 15 percent are speeding. You'll notice the concept of safety does not enter into this little construct. In fact, the 85 percent rule essentially lets drivers vote with their wheels, and effectively decide what the speed limit should be on a particular road.

Here's the text from City Limits: Setting Safe Speed Limits on Urban Streets (summer 2020). To see the whole document, click here.

"Current speed limit setting practice in the US uses a percentile-based method, typically set at the 85th percentile, to determine speeds. Traffic engineers record how fast vehicles are traveling on a road, determine the speed that 85 percent of drivers are traveling at or below, then set the new speed limit by rounding from that speed to the nearest 5 mph increment. Traffic engineers who use the 85th percentile method are instructed to raise the speed limit when more than 15% of drivers are driving faster than posted signs. This method forces engineers to adjust speed limits to match observed driver behavior instead of bringing driver behavior in line with safety goals and the law. When it comes to safety, this method is designed to fail.

"Percentile-based speed limit setting methods fail at keeping people safe because they set a permanently moving target based on current human behavior, not safety.

"Two issues are at play. First, percentile-based models are designed to respond to extremes. When enough people drive faster than the set percentile, the model rewards them by instructing traffic engineers to increase the posted speed.

"Second, people decide how fast to drive based on both the street’s design and cues such as the posted speed and other drivers’ speeds. Researchers originally recommended using the 85th percentile approach to determine posted speeds, assuming that drivers always travel at reasonable speeds. But a growing body of research shows that drivers base their decisions at least partially on the posted speed limit. When they see higher posted limits, and see the resulting increased speed of their peers, they drive faster too, which results in an increased speed of the street overall.

"Posting higher speed limits does not increase compliance with the law. Even when higher speed limit signs are posted, some number of people will still choose to drive 5-15 mph faster than the posted limit. These “highend” speeders travel even faster as speed limits rise and typically spread out over a wider range of speeds. This can increase the likelihood of crashes because people are traveling at increasingly different speeds, and increases the likelihood that crashes will be fatal because they occur at higher speeds.

"In cities and other urban contexts, percentile-based speed limit setting methods are particularly dangerous because they are based on outdated research that is inapplicable in urban settings. The 1940s-era research supporting the 85th percentile relied on self-reported crash data and was conducted on two-lane rural highways, devoid of multimodal activity. But these historic roads are a far cry from the vibrant streets and arterials that typify city streets today. In particular, rural roads and highways lack the type or volume of conflicts found in cities, such as people crossing the street, and people biking, walking, or rolling at a variety of speeds. They also lack driveways, loading, parking, and double-parking. 

"Los Angeles’ experience with Zelzah Avenue provides a telling example of the dangers of percentile-based speed limit setting. In 2009, Los Angeles conducted a traffic speed study and raised the speed limit on Zelzah Avenue from 35 mph to 40 mph. In 2018, the city again studied existing traffic speeds, and again raised the speed limit, this time to 45 mph. While other additional factors may also have played a role in speeds inching up over time, absent any design or land use changes, the increase suggests that the 85th percentile operating speed can shift over time in accordance with the posted speed limit. Notably, this time period in LA corresponded to a 92 percent increase in pedestrian fatalities.

"The most commonly cited alternative for the 85th percentile is USLIMITS2, an online tool developed by the Federal Highway Administration that incorporates other factors when determining speed limits. USLIMITS2 is a step forward in that it allows practitioners to also consider the street’s most exposed users. However, it still relies on the 85th or, more commonly in urban areas, the 50th percentile operating speed, which is often still much higher than is safe. Relying on a percentile based system focused on current drive behavior, rather than a defined safety target to set speed limits, significantly limits cities’ ability to reduce traffic deaths." (Pages 18-20. Footnotes omitted.)

The overall report is about how you should set a speed limit, particularly in urban areas. It's nearly 100 pages long, and I've only read a bit of it. Perhaps I will write another story, but I won't keep you in suspense about the main conclusions. NACTO recommends the following speed limits for urban areas: main streets 25 mph, neighborhood streets 20 mph, shared streets (pedestrians and others in street, mixing with cars) 10 mph. 

I think NACTO may have done for speed limits what Professor Donald Shoup did for parking minimums in his 2005 The High Cost of Free Parking - proving intellectual, if not moral, bankruptcy. This makes me very happy. 

See also Death as an Acceptable Outcome; It's the Road Design, Stupid; We Should Not Overestimate the Driving Skills of the Typical Philadelphia Motorist; Do We Secretly Want Ugly Cities and Dangerous Streets?