Imagine two streets intersecting in the city. One street has a green light, and traffic is passing through unimpeded. The cross-street has a red light, and traffic is stopped. All of a sudden, a red four-door sedan on the cross-street enters the intersection against the light at about twenty miles per hour. It clips the rear bumper of a white pick-up truck that was passing through on a green.
Without stopping, the driver of the red car floors it and disappears down the cross-street out of view. Several witnesses pull out their cell phones and call the police to report the accident. The driver of the white pick-up pulls over, gets out, and walks to the back of his truck. He is wearing blue jeans and a white shirt with a business logo on the chest pocket. He looks at the damage—the rear bumper has come off. He picks it up from the street, throws it in the back of the truck, hops back in, and drives away.
Police arrive three minutes later to find little evidence that a car accident ever occurred. There are a few broken pieces of plastic scattered around, but they could have been from this crash, or from a fender-bender a day before, or from any number of other incidents that occur in-and-around that intersection all the time. So the responding officers begin to interview the people nearby and collect witness testimony.
A Similar Boeing 727 (Richard Silagi [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)])Trans-World Airlines (TWA) Flight 514 was a regularly scheduled flight from Indianapolis, Indiana, to Washington, DC, with a stopover in Columbus, Ohio. On December 1, 1974, the flight was serviced by a Boeing 727-231, tail number N54328. It departed from Indianapolis International Airport on-time at 8:53 a.m. and arrived at Port Columbus International Airport without incident at 9:32 a.m.
The captain of Flight 514 on that day was Richard I. Brock, an experienced pilot with over 3,700 flight hours as captain or first officer and another 3,100 hours as a flight engineer. The first officer was Lenard K. Kresheck, another experienced pilot with over 6,200 flight hours. The flight engineer was Thomas C. Safrenek, who had almost 2,800 flight hours. As they prepared to leave Columbus, there were four flight attendants and eighty-five passengers on-board, plus the three members of the cockpit crew, for a total of ninety-two passengers and crew.
Flight 514 departed Columbus at 10:24 a.m., eleven minutes late, en-route to Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia (just outside of Washington, DC). It would never arrive.
Leo Thornton, 22, from Lincolnwood, Illinois, committed suicide on the lower west terrace of the U.S. Capitol on Saturday, April 11, resulting in a lockdown at the Capitol itself and the nearby Capitol Visitor Center. A witness who observed the incident from the Capitol steps reported that a man entered the terrace and then, without warning, shot himself in the head. The man had been carrying a protest sign, as well as a backpack and wheeled suitcase. The backpack and suitcase were handled by a bomb disposal team and determined to be harmless. Nobody else was injured.
Capitol Police lifted the lockdown around 4:00 p.m., but the west terrace remained closed during the investigation. There is no apparent link to terrorism.
Thornton was reported missing by his family on Saturday morning after he failed to return home from work the night before. According to Lincolnwood Deputy Police Chief John Walsh, Thornton suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, which is a form of autism. It is unclear at this time how Thornton got to Washington, DC, from Illinois. He traveled between Friday afternoon and mid-day on Saturday, but there were no travel-related charges on his credit cards and investigators have not announced finding any car that Thornton may have used.
Reports state that Thornton’s protest sign said, “Tax the 1%.” This is likely in reference to the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement’s false claims that the top one percent of American wage earners pay less federal tax than the remaining ninety-nine percent. In 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, the top one percent of wage earning households paid twenty-four percent of all federal taxes though they made only fifteen percent of all national income. On average, the top one percent pay about thirty percent of their income to federal taxes, a higher rate than any other income group (Congressional Budget Office).
Originally posted on Saturday, April 11, 2015.
Updated with new information on Monday, April 14, 2015.
For April Fools Day 2015, Off on a Tangent held a one-day only going out of business sale, with price reductions up to 80%! Of course I don’t sell anything here, so the purported products were my articles, sidebar widgets, the site header and footer, and so on. And of course I didn’t actually go out of business, since I’m not really in business anyway.
In August of last year, the Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD) started a patronizing ‘slow down’ campaign intended to get people to stop speeding through neighborhoods. In and of itself, I’m fine with low speed limits on residential streets, and I’m fine with tough enforcement of those low speed limits. I am not, however, okay with setting residential-style low speed limits on major arterial thoroughfares.
Not long after FCPD launched their campaign, yellow signs (like the one to the right) started cropping up all over the place . . . and on all kinds of roads, not just on residential streets. Some major thoroughfares have speed limits set far below the road’s 85th percentile speed, which is the ‘proper’ limit recommended by most traffic engineers, and this patronizing yellow sign has started cropping up on them too. One glaring example is Braddock Road heading west from Route 28. It has an absurdly low 35 mile-per-hour limit, despite being a major thoroughfare that could easily and safely accommodate 45 or higher . . . and now it has lots of yellow signs in people’s yards.
Braddock is indeed lined with houses, but you can’t move into a house on a major suburban-to-rural thoroughfare and expect that everybody will start treating that thoroughfare like it’s a cul-de-sac. That’s not how it works. If you move into a house that abuts a major arterial road, then fast moving traffic is just something you are going to have to deal with. If you didn’t like the idea of living on a major thoroughfare, well, maybe you should have moved to one of the cul-de-sacs around the corner instead.
When it comes to speed, people tend not to look beyond the headlines. They hear about crashes where ‘excessive speed was a factor,’ or cases where a child ran out into a road and was seriously hurt or even killed. But we seem to forget that those ‘excessive speed’ accidents involve people going 60 in a 25, or 80 in a 55. Most drivers are not so reckless; those that are will ignore the speed limits no matter what they are. We also forget that the best way for a child to avoid getting hit by a car is not to slow down everybody on the road, but to teach the child how to look both ways before crossing, and to supervise them properly. And don’t forget that our ‘standard’ speed limits (25 residential, 35 feeder, 45 arterial, 55 highway) were set in the 1950s and ’60s . . . when stopping distances were much longer and cars were much less maneuverable. A modern vehicle can come to a stop from 60 faster than many 1950s cars could stop from 30. And a crash at 70 is more survivable today than a crash at 50 was just a few short decades ago, thanks to incredible improvements in automotive safety. Maybe it is time to reevaluate our standards.
And why does it matter? Because badly set speed limits have real world costs. They are difficult to quantify in the way that we can quantify traffic deaths or ‘speed related’ accidents, but they are no less real. How many people drive Braddock Road in a day? Probably thousands. And if we can save thousands of people even five minutes in their day, we have made a small but real improvement to their quality of life. And appropriate speed limits also reduce speed disparity (the difference in speed between the ‘goody two shoes’ driving at the limit and people like me who drive at the highest safe speed for the road and the conditions) . . . and reducing speed disparity has been shown to significantly reduce accidents, road rage, traffic tie-ups, and driver stress. Michigan learned this when they began requiring that speed limits in the state be set on the basis of sound traffic engineering rather than revenue concerns; the limits went up, and accidents and tie-ups went down.
So, with all of this in mind, I designed my own sign in a similar style to the one that Fairfax County has been producing. Let me know what you think. . . .
Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.
X
Site Information
Off on a Tangent Website 26.0 “Sarah”
Theme: 26.0.83
Plugin: 6.0.163
Scribentes veritatem ab anno Domini MCMXCV
(Writing the truth since A.D. 1995)
Official Time:
Keyboard Shortcuts
Just type these sequences on the keyboard, or enter them in the search bar!
![A Similar Boeing 727 (Richard Silagi [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)])](https://www.scottbradford.ch/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/twa514-twa727200.jpg?x87692)
