Transportation vs The Texas Chain Saw Massacre?

Not everyone listens to radio, but I do. The other evening, a broadcast of "Freakonomics Radio" held my rapt attention. I'd encourage you to turn on your computer or player's speakers, and follow this link to an entertaining, and interesting, half-hour of radio conversation: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/where-have-all-the-hitchhikers-gone-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/

You may find some interesting take-aways that inform your own work. For instance.....

The fear of strangers, which seems to be hard-wired in human nature, is a fear that seems to be far out of scale with statistical likelihood. That fear factor reminds us of a tangential transportation conundrum: the outsized fear that many parents, community members, or even school officials (such as this news piece from a school on the outskirts of Houston: http://www.fox26houston.com/news/117783912-story) have of letting children walk to school. The folks at the National Center for Safe Routes to School not long ago reported that only 13 percent of school-age children walked or biked to school in 2009, down from 48 percent of school kids in 1969. Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention see a correlation between the lack of walking and biking and ever-higher rates of childhood obesity, and local officials everywhere struggle with the challenge of managing the traffic at schools, where long lines of parents' cars queue up every morning and afternoon as part of the modern-day school attendance ritual.

The notion of how we look at transportation system capacity. As the show's hosts point out, if we gauged personal vehicle utilization with the same lenses through which many critics like to view public transportation, we'd be outraged at the fact that 80 percent of the seating capacity of personal vehicles typically goes unused, even when the vehicles are in operation, never mind that most of these vehicles sit idle for the vast majority of the hours in every day. The implication is that if buses were operating at no more than 20 percent of capacity in peak hours, and weren't being used at all in off-peak hours, we would wonder why we're even bothering to invest in the system.

A third take-away from this radio piece was the fascination that people everywhere have with the spontaneous ride-sharing, or "slugging," that exists in the DC metro area and a handful of other cities. This is how we manage to have the transportation guru Alan Pisarski and the horror movie franchise of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" mentioned together in the span of a few minutes. To hear how this plays out, you've just got to listen to the Freakonomics piece....