Category: Transportation

Anything related to transportation, including cars, traffic, other modes of transport, and so on.

Post #1908: I returned a broken jar of jam to Amazon today …

 

… and I’m still not quite sure how I feel about that.

I packed it in something leak-proof and put a Post-It on it saying “broken glass”.  But I didn’t even need a box, as I dropped it off at the Amazon returns counter at my local Whole Foods.

But …

Shipping a broken jar of jam is clearly fundamentally stupid.

And yet …

Shipping a broken jar of jam was the right thing to do.

I will now outline the whole series of events, so that I may justify to myself what I just did.  But it boils down to “there’s no way to tell Amazon that I should just toss this in the trash”.

So … you want your money back, you want to play by the rules?

Then you ship them back their broken jar of jam.

Do be do be do

Amazon gives you the option of having a week’s packages all delivered on one given day.  Friday, for me.  That’s instead of having different orders arriving throughout the week.

Trying to be a good do-bee, I take them up on that option. Particularly at this time of year, when I’m ordering Christmas presents.  I do it because I think it’s (ever-so-slightly) more environmentally friendly, but mostly because it cuts down (for Amazon) the total work involved in delivering my packages.

I’d guess that means a greater likelihood of getting a large carton packed with multiple unrelated items.  (Compared to having items arriving on different days.)  But I’m not sure about that.

At any rate, today’s shipment had a $10 jar of fancy jam, broken, inside a multi-item carton.  The carton had a lot of empty space with no filler material.  Not a good plan when you’re shipping glass jars.  The only thing that prevented that jar from painting the inside of the carton with jam was a single layer of bubble wrap taped around the jar.  As it was, I had to sponge smears of jam off the rest of the items in the box.

Despite this, I still think having all your Amazon packages delivered one day a week is the do-bee way.  When feasible.  But I might reconsider that after this event.

What to do about the broken jar of jam?

Amazon returns

So I go on-line, to get Amazon to send a replacement or refund for that $10 jar of fancy Christmas-present jam that got smashed.

Amazon says, sure old buddy, no problem.  When are you going to return the first one to us?

And I’m like, return it?  God no.  That’s just plain stupid.  It’s a mess.  Its a smashed jam jar, held together by leaking bubble wrap.  It needs to go straight into the trash.

On the Amazon on-line form, there’s no check box for that.  Or anything like that.  No option for “trust me, you don’t want this back”.  If I want a replacement or a refund, I need to return it.

I know that, in theory, I can somehow get in touch with somebody at Amazon and they may OK a refund without the stupidity of returning the jar of jam.    But I didn’t want to go to that effort of working my way through their customer service process trying to find somebody to do that for me.

(I once had an empty package delivered from Amazon.  You think it’s tough returning a broken jar of jam, try returning the contents of an empty package.  That’s how I know that if you can find a human, you can at least sometimes get an exception to what’s shown on the return form.)

And as an economist, I can see that’s its an open invitation to criminal abuse if you let people easily claim a refund without returning the items refunded.  So I have no problem at all if Amazon wants you to have to jump through hoops to do that, as a matter of course.  I just wasn’t up to hoop-jumping today.

What to do?  To get my money back,  I have to ship a broken, oozing jar of jam as if it were merchandise.

Either that, or cut my way through Amazon customer service.

Shipping it is, then.

Nesco to the rescue

One uses the gizmo pictured above, plus special plastic bags, to produce vacuum-sealed food.  Or, in this case, vacuum-sealed garbage.  The bags are heat-sealed (i.e., melted shut), and so are leak-proof as long as the seal doesn’t fail.

I duly sealed the broken jar (bubble wrap, oozing jam, and all) inside a seal-a-meal bag, along with two big sticky notes saying “Broken Glass”.  This, to prepare it for its journey back to Amazon.

I then drove to my nearby Whole Foods, and handed that over the Amazon return counter there.  If you return it that way, you don’t have to pack it in a box.  Whole Foods staff handle that in some fashion.

The guy at the counter was, I think, the biggest person I had ever seen working a counter at Whole Foods.  Big and tall, like a college linebacker.  Neither here nor there, merely unexpected.  The Whole Foods clerks in this area tend to be fit 20-somethings.  This was like seeing a bear onstage among the ballerinas.

I let the clerk at the return counter know I was returning a broken jar of jam, with my apology for shipping back something that stupid.

He didn’t bat an eye.  Took the package, scanned the QR code Amazon had given me (displayed on my phone), and said I was done.  As far as Amazon was concerned, it has been returned.  They’ll send an email shortly.

The entire return transaction took about ten seconds.  He practically had to shoo me away, as I stood there in disbelief.  I thanked him profusely, and walked off to pick up a few grocery items while I was at a grocery store.

In any case, when I decided to return it, I was betting that this ridiculous return has relatively modest environmental impact, relative to just tossing it in the trash.  The fact that you don’t have to box your item probably means that they fill a bin with returns, at Whole Foods, then everything gets trucked to some Amazon return center.

I probably used no more than one KWH for the in-town round trip to the store, which would equate to about 0.65 lbs C02 emissions here in Virginia.  Full trucks, by contrast, are vastly more efficient than empty autos, for moving freight, on order of 100 ton-miles per gallon of fuel.  Pro-rated to my 12 ounce jam jar, the fuel cost from Whole Foods back to Amazon was nugatory.  So I’m hope-guessing that the entire return trip “to Amazon” resulted in release of less than a pound of C02.  If I’d decided to toss that $10 item in the trash and take the loss, for environmental reasons, that would have worked out to a ludicrous $20,000 per ton C02 avoided.

That in no way suggests that it’s smart to return a broken jar of jam to Amazon.  It remains fundamentally stupid.  It’s just that if I’m going to burn up $10 to save the environment, there are for more effective ways to burn it.

This takes no account of the effort and energy expended after this broken jar of jam gets back to Amazon.  I have no firm idea of what happens after I hand my return over the counter at Whole Foods.  Presumably, between my reason for return, the big yellow stickies inside the package saying “Broken Glass”, and the purple goop encapsulated in the vacuum-seal bag, oozing around the bubble wrap, somebody along the line will have the good sense to throw this away.  It’s just a question of how much effort it takes to do that.

The upshot is that, no matter how stupid it seems, returning the smashed jar of  jam to Amazon was not a particularly bad thing to do.  (Assuming my sanitary packing holds up.)  It turned out to be almost no hassle, given that I owned a vacuum sealer (though a zip-lock might have been acceptable too, for all I know.)  Tossing it in the trash, solely to avoid C02 emissions, would have been ludicrously inefficient.

Plus, damnit, they owed me a new one.

Will I ever see this jam again?

It got me to wondering.  In Amazon comments, you will frequently (enough) read of somebody who claims to have gotten an obviously used item sent to them as a new item.  The presumption is that the vendor got a return, and sent them a returned item instead of a brand-new item.

I now wonder about the extent to which this is an urban legend.  Or not.  I see it enough, from a wide enough variety of people, that I’m thinking it’s true, and not an urban legend.

And sure enough, here’s what a CNBC article says about those returns.  Amazon will return the merchandise to the seller, at the seller’s option.

When an item can’t be sold as new, Amazon gives the seller up to four options for what to do with returns: each with a fee: Return to Seller, Disposal, Liquidation, or (by invitation only for now) Fulfillment by Amazon Grade and Resell.

Presumably, the original vendor can tell Amazon (for a fee) just to dump this particular return.  And this whole sad episode will come to a close.

Closure

Is it any wonder that I am increasingly baffled by the modern world.

Shipping a broken jar of jam is clearly fundamentally stupid.

Shipping a broken jar of jam was the right thing to do.

In any case, it’s Amazon’s problem now.

Post #1853: Urban bicycling really is as dangerous as it looks.

 

Bottom line:  Per mile, risk of death on a bicycle is about thirteen times higher than risk of death in a car/SUV/van.  Calculation shown below.

Background

I read a story in the Washington Post today, about a woman who was killed while bicycling, in the bike lane, alongside River Road in Bethesda.  Crushed by a careless commercial truck driver making a right turn.  Leaving behind a husband and two young kids.

The truck driver was given the maximum sentence allowed by law, which in this case was a $2000 fine.  And a brief moment of shame in court.  He’s still on the road, driving a truck.

I looked up the accident scene on Google, and it was the worst kind of grudging, cheap, zero-effort retrofit urban bike lane that the very least of your tax dollars can produce. Based on historical images, they took a narrow, disused shoulder of a 35-MPH urban arterial highway, and painted little arrows and bike icons in it. 

Well, there’s your bike lane, right there.  Problem solved.   The result of that zero-effort accommodation of bicyclists is every bit as safe as you might reasonably expect.

Above, the middle red circle is the site of death.  It’s just one of many driveways opening into the busy commercial establishments that line the road.  It’s located just 500 feet from the Capital Crescent Trail, a dedicated bike path whose road-crossing bridge can be seen circled in the background.  Which is almost certainly why they bothered to re-paint the road shoulder.

In the foreground is a sign.  Based on Google street view, that sign was only placed there a few months ago.  If you don’t routinely bike in an urban area, you’d think that sign was there to remind motorists to use caution, and look before they turn.  But for that purpose, in this context, a sign like that is useless.  Motorists don’t even perceive signs like that, in the crowded visual field of an urban motorway, at 35 MPH and up.  The actual, practical purpose of the sign is to warn bicyclists and pedestrians that they are in the middle of a war zone, and that they should act accordingly if and as possible.

But in this situation, there’s not much a bicyclist can do.  The bike lane appears to be just under 3′ wide.  The curb is about a foot to your right, so there’s no escape in that direction.  Your life depends on the caution and good sense of the drivers passing a couple of feet to your left.

A slender reed, for sure.

But is it really as dangerous as it looks?

Yes it is. 

And, for some reason, this appears to be an answer that absolutely infuriates bicycle advocates.  Not because they don’t want to make roadways safer for bikes.  But simply because they don’t want to believe that there are significant downsides to bicycle transport in America.  This, even if everybody grasps what a drag it is to (e.g.) bike in bad weather.

(And, to be clear, I’m a lifetime bicycling enthusiast.  But I’m also a realist.)

Years ago, I did the homework to answer this question, to my own satisfaction.  I came up with an estimate that bicycling is about ten times as dangerous as driving, per mile traveled.  That’s in terms of risk of death.  It’s even higher in terms of risk of injury requiring medical attention.  Those specific calculations are lost in the mists of time.  So I thought I might update and document that here.

Any estimate of bicycling safety ends up combining data from two separate sources. That’s always a risk for accuracy, but it is what it is.

Information on traffic-related deaths comes from a motor vehicle crash reporting system maintained by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System.  Whatever its limitations, that’s the U.S. gold standard for counting traffic-related fatalities in the U.S.

(Secondarily, if you have an interest, you can use nationally-available hospital statistics from the U.S. Public Health Service’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project to find the number of hospitalizations and outpatient visits related to bicycle accidents.  But non-fatal injuries actually show an even grimmer picture for bicycling versus driving, so it’s probably sufficient to settle on an estimate of risk-of-death while bicycling versus driving, per mile.)

So, bicyclists accounted for about 2.4% of all U.S. traffic deaths in 2020.  That figure is roughly constant over time.

Information on bicycle-miles traveled comes from the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS).  This is based on a log-diary survey of thousands of U.S. households, capturing how and why they traveled over the course of a week.  Near as I can tell, it’s the only nationally-representative information on actual use of bicycles versus other modes of transportation.

Source:  2017 National Household Travel Survey

Based on that large, nationally-representative log-diary survey, bicycle transport accounted for 0.2% of all U.S. household transportation, or about 8.5 billion bicycle-miles per year in 2017.  (Sounds like a lot until you realize there are about 330 million U.S. residents, so that works out to about 25 bike-miles per person per year.)

We have to re-calculate the percentages above, to restrict this to cars versus bikes.  After that, it’s just simple math.

Summary.

Yes, bicycle transportation really is as dangerous as it looks, as you drive along the road.

Using two gold-standard U.S. databases, bicycling appears vastly riskier than driving a car.  In this most recent calculation, I estimate about 13 times higher risk of death, per mile, on a bike, versus in a car.  That’s reasonably consistent with the estimate I got years ago. 

And, as I recall, if you expand to non-fatal injuries requiring medical attention, the relative risk is actually much higher.  More like 50 or 60 times the risk, per mile.  That’s for the obvious reason that a collision that produces only minor bumps and scrapes to car occupants can produce severe wounds to an unprotected bicyclist.

Four things are worth noting.

First, the absolute risk is low.  If you bicycle 1000 miles a year — which is a lot — your risk of death-via-bike is about 0.01% per year.

Second, for older adults, the exercise benefit vastly outweighs the crash risk.  This is another one that I did the homework years ago, then lost the analysis somewhere.  For the average 65-year-old man, all-causes risk of death is about 2% per year.  Best available research suggests that frequent vigorous exercise roughly cuts that in half.  The health benefits of frequent bicycling likely outweigh the risk-of-traffic-death by an order of magnitude or two.

Third, on paper at least, walking around traffic is more hazardous than bicycling. I’m not sure to the extent this is driven solely by work-related pedestrian accidents in big cities.  But whatever the cause, this too seems plausible.  In effect, we let amateurs drive 3-ton pieces of machinery, at high speed, around crowds, with virtually no enforcement of rules or penalties for engaging in risky behavior.  It’s a wonder that so few pedestrian deaths result.

Finally, if you do a deep dive in the FARS database, you’ll find that dead pedestrians and dead bicyclists have something in common with dead drivers.  An astounding fraction of them are dead drunk at the time.  Roughly half, in each case.  The moral of the story is that BUI and WUI are maybe not as deadly to others as DUI, but they clearly up your risk of death on the roadways.

But in this case, that’s irrelevant.  It was broad daylight, and the victim was returning from a school function for her kids.  The death was just the result of a toxic combination of thoughtless, zero-effort bike lane design, and bad luck.  Ten seconds sooner, or ten seconds later, and she’d have been fine.  It’s just an unavoidable risk of bicycling in most urban areas of the U.S.

Post #1841: Used electric vehicle prices are plummeting?

Caveat emptor.

It has been a long time since I last bought a used car. 

I have forgotten just how sleazy the low end of the used car market can be.

But I’m getting educated in a hurry.

Today’s lesson in low-end used cars?  A few weeks back, I was interested enough in an older Nissan Leaf that I scheduled an appointment with the dealer, to have a look at it.  Then I did my homework, and cancelled the appointment.

And, foolish me, I figured I at least owed the guy an explanation of why I wasn’t interested.  Because that’s what reasonable people do.

The ad for the car claimed excellent battery health, and a 110-mile range, per the independent estimate from Recurrent.com.  By contrast, once I learned to read the “gas gauge” of a Nissan Leaf, photos of the dashboard revealed barely 60 miles of range left, as well as a battery that was in mediocre health.  Via email, I told the dealer that’s why I was no longer interested.  The car really didn’t have adequate range left.

I continue to track the ad for that car, just to try to get a handle on the used car market.

In response to my explanation of that cancelled appointment, what do you think the used car dealer did to the ad for that car?

  1. Nothing.
  2. Removed the falsely inflated range estimate from Recurrent.com
  3. Removed the photos of the car that revealed the actual range.

If you guessed “c”, then you’re a lot less naive about the used car market than I am.  Or was.

As an economist, I really shouldn’t use the word “sleazy”, when the behavior is rational.  The dealer represents seller, plain and simple.  The dealer’s job is to get the best price for the seller, within some reasonable timeframe.  Anything that  increases the odds of selling the car, without getting thrown in jail, is fair game.  So, if fuzzying-up the information on range might help sell the car, then fuzzying should occur.  It’s up to the buyer to understand that and act accordingly.

In fairness, the dealer keeps dropping the price of that 2016 Nissan Leaf.  In any case, I’ve already made up my mind that I don’t want anything earlier than a 2018 Leaf, due to the rapid degradation of the battery in earlier model years of Leafs.

The lesson here is that it’s still a used car, even if its electric.  With everything that buying a used car entails.  Just because it’s eco-friendly doesn’t mean the dealer is friendly.  The upshot is that in trying to be a straight shooter, in a room full of crooks, all I did was help the crooks to be better crooks.

My local used EV market still appears too hot for my liking.

In addition to that 2016 Leaf, I have been tracking three 2018-or-later Leafs.  These have a different battery chemistry from older Leafs.  They retain their battery health and range much better than the pre-2018s and are priced accordingly.

Of the three cars I begin tracking less than two weeks ago, two have already sold.

Assuming that’s not just some kind of fluke, either I have an exceptional eye for a good deal, or the market for a reliable used EV is pretty hot.  At least around here. 

But the internet assures me that used EV prices are plummeting.

Official U.S. Consumer Price Index data are all-but-useless for judging long-term trends in the price of new and used cars.  I went through that in Post #1836.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, via the Federal Reserve of St. Louis FRED system

The quality adjustment embedded in the CPI car price data mean that the price trends as published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics have nothing to do with how much money you’ll need to shell out to buy a basic car.  Such as Toyota Corolla, shown in yellow below.

But if car prices move fast enough, the actual change in prices will swamp the BLS quality adjustments.  And so, for sharp short-term price movements, the BLS data aren’t too bad.  From the BLS, we can see that used car prices peaked at the end of 2021, and have been mostly falling since.

Source:  Underlying data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve (FRED)

The BLS does not appear to publish any data separating electric vehicles from other types of vehicles.  So I have to turn to privately-produced price statistics if I want to get a handle on what’s happening to EV prices, as distinct from other types of vehicles.

And that’s where things turn a bit odd.  Because, as far as I can tell, a lot of private-sector price estimates show that the price of used EVs is plummeting.

Here are two such estimates, from what I believe to be independent data sources:

The devil is in the details.

The iSeeCars study is a study of used cars one to five years old.  And the measured price reduction in that segment was driven by Tesla’s decision to cut the price of its new cars.  More-or-less, what they measured is that the price of used Teslas fell about 30%.  In addition, it appears that they do not adjust for changes in the mix of vehicles sold, but simply take the change in the average asking price for a used EV.

The Recurrent study is also a study of used cars one to five years old.  It appears to be based on the simple average of the asking prices of seven common used EVs and PHEVs.  And, as with the iSeeCars study, a big chunk of the reduction is attributed to Tesla’s decision to cut the price of their new cars substantially.

That said, the Recurrent study shows a corresponding increase in (e.g.) the fraction of the used EV market offered for sale at less than $25K.  I’m pretty sure that excludes most Teslas.  The inference would be that these price declines affected the broader market, not just Tesla.

I’m still in no particular hurry to buy.

When all is said and done, my guess is that I should be in no hurry to buy a used EV.  Prices for relatively new models (one-to-five years old) appear to be falling, in large part due to new-car price cuts by market leader Tesla.  I don’t perceive that among low-end models, in my geographic area.  But its possible I simply tracked an unusual small sample of cars.

Although the price trends may be murky, one aspect is clear.  I’m still something of a babe in the woods when it comes to buying a used EV.  I need to get a lot smarter before I put my money down on a used car.  Even if it is an eco-friendly electric car.

Post #1838: Two electrical issues from our recent vacation.

 

My wife and I just returned from a brief vacation in Ocean City (OC), Maryland. 

Our annual OC vacation has changed since our kids have grown up.  Without the need to entertain the kids, the beach experience becomes a lot more, eh, ritualized, for want of a better term. Continue reading Post #1838: Two electrical issues from our recent vacation.

Post #1804: Speed limits in Fairfax County, how much slack?

 

Background:  A speed limit + 10 rule?

Source:  WTOP.

There was an article today on the local news-radio website (WTOP) regarding speeding in school zones.  I took note, because I routinely drive through one of those zones where Fairfax County VA operates speed cameras.  The zone is clearly marked, and you’d have to be blind to miss it, as shown above.

And yet:

In total, 23,431 cars were caught going 10 or more miles per hour above the speed limit in April, May and June combined.

I supposed I should be impressed by the sheer numbers.  But instead, a completely different figure caught my eye:  They only ticketed folks for going at least 10 MPH over the limit.

First, I thought it was intemperate of the reporter to note that exact figure.  Anybody reading the article realizes that there’s no risk of a ticket at anything up to the posted speed plus 9 MPH.  So, presumably, if generally known, that now becomes the de facto speed limit.

But second, I’d heard that same figure before, a few years back, in a discussion of red-light cameras and speeding cameras in Vienna, a town in Fairfax County.  There it was phrased as “we don’t ticket unless they are going at least 11 MPH over the posted limit.”  The explanation given at the time was that Fairfax County courts would not accept cases for any infraction less than that.

Is that the rule here, and if so, why?

Short answer is, yes and no.

In theory, by Virginia statute, you can get ticketed for traveling one mile an hour over the speed limit in a residential area.  This is my interpretation of § 46.2-878.2 of Virginia statute, which says :

Operation of any motor vehicle in excess of a maximum speed limit ... in a residence district of a county, city, or town ... shall be unlawful and constitute a traffic infraction punishable by a fine of $200, in addition to other penalties provided by law.

The black-letter law provides no slack.  If you’re in a residential district, on a highway (meaning, in Virginia, any public alley, street, road, or highway), and you’re going a mile over the limit, you can, in theory, be ticketed and will owe a minimum of $200.

Except that the law spells out a different set of penalties for drivers caught by speed cameras in school zones.  My interpretation is that because the process is, in effect, automated, they cut drivers a lot more slack than they would if they’d been pulled over, in person, by a uniformed officer.

In the case of speed cameras in a school zone (§ 46.2-882.1), emphasis mine:

1. The operator ... shall be liable for a monetary civil penalty ... if such vehicle is found ... to be traveling at speeds of at least 10 miles per hour above the posted ...  speed limit ... .  Such civil penalty shall not exceed $100 ...

...

4. Imposition of a penalty pursuant to this section ... shall not be made part of the operating record of the person upon whom such liability is imposed, nor shall it be used for insurance purposes in the provision of motor vehicle insurance coverage.

The bottom line

There appears to be no hard-and-fast rule regarding ticketing for how much “slack” you get, speeding in a residential area in Virginia.  The plain language of State law in Virginia law says that if you exceed the posted limit, you can be ticketed.  I believe that pre-empts any local law, as we are a Dillon Rule state.   That is, local governments can only make their own rules where the Commonwealth grants them permission to do so.  And nothing in Commonwealth statute appears to do that, with a few limited and explicit exceptions spelled out in the law.

Except that “ten miles over the limit” is written into law, in Virginia, for speed-zone cameras.  There, the Commonwealth leans heavily in the direction of protecting drivers’ rights, and avoiding Big Brother information harvesting.  So, in exchange for what is basically an automated process, you face a small fine.  There’s a monetary penalty, but (as I read it) no points on the license.

Extras for experts:  Two non-obvious reasons not to speed in residential areas.

First, if you are speeding, in Virginia, you lose any claim to having right-of-way.  So if some bonehead does something to get you in a car accident, where you had the right of way, but you were speeding at the time … tough luck.  You cannot claim right-of-way while you are speeding.

§ 46.2-823. Unlawful speed forfeits right-of-way.

The driver of any vehicle traveling at an unlawful speed shall forfeit any right-of-way which he might otherwise have under this article.

The reason for that is pretty clear.  Traveling at excess speed makes it difficult for other drivers to judge whether or not an accident will occur.

We had a horrific accident in this area, last year, that is a classic illustration of that.  The culprit was a bozo who was driving a BMW about 80 MPH in a 35 MPH zone.  His car got struck by a car turning left, and his car subsequently jumped the sidewalk and killed two high school student who were on the sidewalk, walking home from school.

Normally, the car going straight has the right of way.  Should the car turning left have therefore been charged with the accident, for failure to yield right-of-way?   I don’t think any sane person would suggest that.  If nothing else, on a curved road, excessive speed of that magnitude more-or-less prevents drivers from seeing you coming in time.  The accident was entirely the fault of the speeding driver.

Second, if you speed significantly in areas with red lights, you will run red lights. 

Not may, will.

This point is courtesy of Road Guy Rob on YouTube.  Yellow light duration is set based on expected traffic speed.  (Plus regional variation, I guess).  High-speed roads have long yellow lights, low speed roads have short yellow lights.  In both cases, the length of the yellow allows drivers that are far from the intersection to stop before the light turns red.

If you drive at high speed, on a low speed road, there will be a stretch of pavement, and a rage of excess speeds, so that if you see the yellow light while you’re in that zone, you will literally be unable to avoid running the red.  That’s because, between your reaction time and the car’s stopping distance, your car will travel much further than the engineers who set up the light expected.  If you are within just the right range of excess speeds, if you see the light turn yellow, you both a) can’t make it through the intersection before the light turns red, and b) can’t stop before entering the intersection.  No  matter what you do — hit the brakes, hit the gas — you go through the red light. 

And so, at some level, excessive speeding and running red lights go hand-in-hand.  There’s a certain pleasing symmetry to that.  My guess is, the folks who don’t care about the first, don’t much care about the second either.

Post #1781: No comment on electric vehicles

 

The Washington Post just published one of its weekly anti-Electric-Vehicle (EV) screeds.

This thing:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/04/15/electic-cars-biden-epa-climate/

And, God help me, I just spent a couple of hours posting comments.  I gotta stop doing that.

My wife suggest that I compile and post all my comments. Think of it as a collection of short, related essays.

Sometimes, thoughtful comments in the Post allow me to discover something new.  As in red, below.  But my main takeaway from all this is that I have to stop commenting on Washington Post articles. Continue reading Post #1781: No comment on electric vehicles