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ALCO

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I was reading about the decline of ALCO in Schenectady. A pretty common sad story, new technology comes out and a business is slow and half heartily adopting as they can’t imagine a world where there old profit center doesn’t exist any more.

ALCO believed in steam locomotives, as they very profitable at one point, and while they adopted diesel electric locomotives eventually by outsourcing technology development to GE, they couldn’t be bothered to spend much money on developing a good diesel electric locomotive in house even though GM EMD and eventually GE developed their own superior models in their final 40 years that the corporation limped along.

Anatomy of a Car Crash

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Anatomy of a Car Crash

Without the details of how crashes happen, we tend to dismiss them as the work of “idiots”—drivers who occupy the lower echelons of driving skill and common sense. But while humankind’s measured intelligence is increasing, so is the number of deadly car crashes. After a lifetime of improvement, we saw an 8 percent jump in crash fatalities during 2015, the largest in 50 years. That number rose again in 2016, when more than 40,000 people died in collisions.

Fortunately, science is coming to the rescue. We no longer have to rely solely on dents, skid marks, and the lawyer-vetted remarks of drivers to figure out what happened and to tell us how to avoid the next crash. In a landmark study published in 2008, researchers at the University of Michigan combed the scene of 6,950 crashes to give us a more detailed analysis of what happened during each crash. Naturalistic driving studies are now equipping cars with accelerometers, sonar, sensors that track driver inputs, and lots of video cameras. Drivers sign up to participate in these studies, and they sometimes crash, leaving researchers with valuable data. We’re also benefiting from the rise of road cams—dashboard-mounted video cameras owned by everyday drivers, aka cammers, who cruise around, record crashes, and then post them on websites like Reddit.

 

NPR

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During The Pandemic Lockdown, Traffic Deaths Soared To The Highest Level In 13 Years : NPR

U.S. traffic deaths rose 7% last year, the biggest increase in 13 years even though people drove fewer miles due to the coronavirus pandemic, the government's road safety agency reported Thursday.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration blamed the increase on drivers taking more risks on less-congested roads by speeding, failing to wear seat belts, or driving while impaired by drugs or alcohol.

An estimated 38,680 people died in traffic crashes last year, the most of any year since 2007, the agency said in releasing preliminary numbers. Final numbers normally come out in the fall.

The increase came even though the number of miles traveled by vehicle fell 13% from 2019.