This is a fairly simple diary, along with a poll.  I want to know if you all feel that I should remove my Obama 2008 bumper sticker or not.  If you feel you need to understand my justification for removing it, keep reading below.

Car crash deaths in the United States declined last year, reaching the lowest level in more than a decade. Only 41,059 people were killed in highway crashes, down by more than 1,000 from 2006. Great news! This makes sense since people drove less in the past year, in part due to higher gas prices.

But, seriously think about that: 40 thousand people. I don't know why we put up with such a high death rate. Yes, we are a nation of millions, but car crashes account for more than half of accidental deaths. Car crashes kill people in all stages of life and disproportionately impact teenagers.  

A couple weeks ago I posted this Diary on the dangers of driving while talking on cell phones. It was generally well-received, but as always there were a few who insisted that "they were different".

Not so much.

For years, psychologists who study driving and attention have argued that switching to "hands free" is not a real solution to the hazards caused by yakking on the mobile in the car. "The impairments aren't because your hands aren't on the wheel. It's because your mind isn't the road," says David Strayer, professor of psychology at the University of Utah, whose research has found driving while talking on a cellphone to be as dangerous as driving drunk.

I will not be citing any scholarly studies in this Diary, because I'm not aware of any that are based on gathering observations for over 100,000 miles a year since the advent of portable phones. I have watched, with interest, since "portable phones" came in bags with shoulder straps and weighed ten pounds, and were rare as virgin dancers in Las Vegas.

You, or a family member, are more likely to be injured or killed by a driver talking on a cell phone than a drunk driver!!

An individual driver on the phone is slightly less dangerous than a drunk, but in the aggregate they are far worse because they vastly outnumber drunks, particularly during the daytime. Their contribution to motor vehicle accidents is grossly under-reported and under-appreciated because, unlike drunks, there's a cellphone in damned-near every car and truck on the road, so it's usually not even worthy of note.

A New York Times blog from February of this year made the counterintuitive assertion that  driving was actually better for the planet than walking. The author  argued that walking burns calories, which eventually have to be  replenished with food, and that there is an enormous amount of fossil  fuels, not to mention greenhouse gases, used in the transportation and  production of the food. At first glance, the argument appears to carry  some weight.

I've spent the last couple of days dealing with car trouble. A car's failing alternator, & having to deal with the dealership trying to find a part, has delayed work & publishing of all things "Irrelevant & Crap" until tomorrow night.

While wasting moments of my life in a dealership waiting room, I decided to spend the time talking to my Mother on the cell. So with all that's happening & all the issues in the world, she wanted to talk about the price of gas, other drivers, and roads. It's an issue that probably resonates more on a local level, but if you wanna get "Mama Rimjob" pissed off, just ask her about the quality of roads. My home state of Tennessee is the only place I've ever lived where the solution to a pothole was to put a 5 inch thick metal plate on the problem for vehicles to drive over at 60 mph, so TDOT (Tennessee Department of Transportation) can take their sweet ass time to fix it.

So with that in mind, it gave me an idea for a topic. Which state has the worst drivers and/or roads?

    I am sick to death of hearing all this crap about needing to drill, drill, drill to put more oil on the market which supposedly will lower prices (it won't).  So, now America seems to think oh yes, DRILL, DRILL NOW!  Except it won't help them, not one bit.  But there is one thing, one thing RIGHT now that we could all do which would add 50 million barrels of oil to our supplies each day.

Slow the Fricken hell DOWN!  Yes, DRIVE 55 miles an hour!  Wow, how novel, easy and immediate.  Why, dear lord, why isn't our party, our leaders, our candidates shouting this from high and low?  

We need to regain this drill argument, and we can, if we can offer an immediate solution, a solution that won't cost anything, will save everyone money, save lives and will result in more oil each day.

More

Recently I came across an offbeat proposal for saving gas when one drives: Coasting. The author (whom I can't remember now) noted how he (pretty sure it was a he) has been letting off the gas pedal and coasting down hills for a while now, and has seen a modest but real decrease in his fuel consumption.

The idea intrigued me, and I tried it out. The driving I do, primarily at nonrush hours on gently undulating back roads, is well-suited to such an experiment, offering a plethora of opportunities and a paucity of other drivers I might inconvenience by failing to put the pedal to the metal at all times.

So how's that working out for me?  Follow below the fold:

So far in this series, we've talked about how I came to EVs, Saudi Arabia's investment in battery research, the state of modern battery technology, a flawed EV tax credit, and a much improved one.  That's all nice and good, but we haven't really touched solidly on the issue that's going to be number one for most potential EV buyers and other interested parties: economics.  

That's the topic of today's diary, and we're going into it in detail.  Read on for more information.

Americans drive too much.  Way too much.  There are lots of reasons, but one is that driving is subsidized.... it's subsidized through free highways (paid for by everyone, not just drivers), and by taxes on gas that don't begin to cover the costs and damages that burning gas does to the world.

I think gas taxes should be much, much higher, but that's not going to go anywhere, politically.  

But here's something that might, that I read about in the NYTimes Magazine on 4/20/08: Pay As You Drive Insurance.

more below the fold

The difference between drunk drivers and stoned drivers:

The drunk driver will speed through the stop sign without noticing it.

The stoned driver will stop and patiently wait for it to turn green.

The invoked boogeyman of reefer-crazed drivers on the road has been one of the convenient tools of the prohibitionist. The experienced marijuana smoker knows better -- they know from experience that they avoid driving, and when they do drive, they drive more cautiously/less recklessly, more paranoid and alert even than when they're sober, due to the marijuana-induced self-awareness of their impediment. But they also know that any attempt to explain that to the propaganda-fed general public will sound like the deluded braggadocio of the drunk who claims to be OK to drive.

Nobody on here, I presume, would think of drinking alcohol and then driving. How may though would still drive and use a cellphone at the same time? Yet tests prove that making a call slows your reaction time and impairs your driving ability more than if you have drunk the legal limit of alcohol. That applies even if you are using a "hands free" set.

Not only are you at least four times more likely to have an accident while you are making a call, the increase in risk extends for 10 minutes after you have hung up.

In many counties you can be fined or lose your license for a period if you are caught using a hand-held cellphone. If it causes your driving to be really bad, you can even go to jail. Because of the proven dangers, some transport companies are starting to ban their employees using hands-free sets while driving.

With the ongoing ice storm now kicking Missouri's ass and moving toward Chicago, and the crap I waded through last week in Western Montana and Northern Idaho, this seems like a good time to try to remind folks of what they forget every year and have to relearn; that shit on the road is slick: slow your ass down!

I regularly drive the most capable highway vehicle on the road for winter driving conditions: a tractor-trailer truck. I have, if needed, 8 drive tires for pulling traction and my two steering tires have more surface contact with the road than all four of your tires combined, but I'm regularly literally blown past by idiots driving twice my speed, idiots I frequently pass in a ditch within a very few miles. I no longer even bother to check on them, just call 911 and report their location, figuring if they freeze to death before anybody gets to them at least they won't reproduce further and add their obviously deficient genes to our rapidly shallowing gene pool.

Following the thread from Ecogeek to
Autogreenblog:

CarChip E/X by Davis is a device that logs how you are driving. The CarChip E/X can even be set to beep if you brake too fast, speed or accelerate too fast. Changing these behaviors are the top three things a driver can do to increase fuel efficiency without changing the car. The CarChip EX attaches to the OBD (On Board Data) port which is present on most cars made since 1996...  It can store up to 300 hours of driving data and downloads that data to your computer via a USB port.

A teaching tool for more fuel-efficient driving?  

Here in Massachusetts there has been an on-again, off-again attempt to raise the age at which one can get a driver's license from 16 to 17 or even 18.  But every time it's been broached it's met with pretty strong resistance.  So the Massachusetts legislature has opted for a different tack -- making it harder for poor kids to get their licenses.

Did you know you can deduct parking expenses up to $215/month from your pre-tax income, while you can only deduct $100/month of public transportation charges? Yet another federal government incentive to promote congested roads and increased consumption of oil and emission of CO2. This
NY Times article today goes into the details - and the contrast between this incentive to promote driving, and the new congestion pricing fees that NY City wants to impose, with federal support, that act the other way. Why do we have the federal government paying on both sides of this issue?

At least Senator Schumer has a proposal to put both deduction limits at $200/month - better would be to eliminate the parking deduction altogether!

Update - I should note the poll is partly inspired by chapter1's diary on bicycles the other day.

I think I have road rage.  Or at least road annoyance.  But it could easily grow into the real deal.

I'm not the only one.  Road rage is spreading like the monkey-borne virus from "28 Days Later."  And not without reason – people just don't seem to know how to drive unless its in a manner that imposes the maximum amount of inconvenience upon other drivers.  Anyone who’s taken 45 minutes to cover three miles knows exactly what I’m talking about.

I try to like the police. I really do. I think, honestly, we really and truly need them, if we are to believe all the crime-is-rampant fearmongering people get via the MSM and the evening news.

Many readers already know I think the war on drugs and their cross-eyed and grossly inappropriate fixation with cannabis - Reefer Madness - is more than a giant waste of their time: it has led to them getting way too much power, despite their constant whining about the Constitution tying their hands.

I have 2 related incidents dealing with a law in Georgia called the seatbelt law. Another snactimonious "We are saving lives" law that is more about getting cops into your car. Probable cause is now "I didn't see his or her seatbelt."

Buckle up and make the jump.