AUTOMOTIVE - VEHICULAR ARTICLES PAGE 2

10/19/2009· Automotive - Vehicular

The Transportation Training Conundrum

By: Ned Einstein

Recently, I conducted a workshop on safety and liability for transportation directors. I asked innocently, "What do you do after training?" Several attendees shouted out, "More training!"

6/20/2012· Automotive - Vehicular

Ten Most Stupid Things about Buses and Motorcoaches and their Operations

By: Ned Einstein

One of the unfortunate problems with non-news-oriented magazines is the juxtaposition of their readers' limited long-term memories coupled with the publishers' reluctance to repeat themes (much less whole articles) that are not linked to stories that reflect continuing news or problems.

4/10/2014· Automotive - Vehicular

Buses and Motorcoaches: New Thinking about Crossing Safety

By: Ned Einstein

Drummed into my head as a schoolchild was the mantra, "Cross at the Green, Not In Between." This slogan still provides the basis for Today's thinking about following the pedestrian path to and from school or a student's bus stop. When last year, a study of 7,000 pedestrian accidents in New York City over a four-year period was released, its findings turned this century-old cliché on its head. The implications for the pupil transportation industry are dramatic, and should awaken all of us to a new reality that may save hundreds if not thousands of lives a year, since most vehicle-pedestrian accidents happen to students walking or cycling to school, as well most of those traveling by schoolbus who are struck when crossing by third-party vehicles.

5/16/2014· Automotive - Vehicular

Buses and Motorcoaches: Directing the Students Across

By: Ned Einstein

At the rudimentary level at which most crossing procedures are executed, schoolbus drivers are supposed to "direct" the students across the roadway when they are certain that either the traffic has been stopped in both directions or it is so distant (if even visible) that the students could easily complete their crossing before any oncoming vehicles reach the bus. The bus would obviously have its red flashers and stop arm engaged as a "fail safe."

7/14/2017· Automotive - Vehicular

Autonomous and Inevitable, Part 6: The Transition to Complete Autonomy

By: Ned Einstein

When an asteroid strikes a planet, things tend to change quickly. Most other changes occur gradually, even while a small handful are occasionally more significant. These latter changes are sometimes referred to as "paradigm shifts," largely because they affect so many things around them, and cause such dramatic changes in the things they affect directly.

8/24/2017· Automotive - Vehicular

Autonomous and Inevitable, Part 8: Access and Accountability

By: Ned Einstein

What is interesting, and the focus of this installment, is the glaring disparity between the magnitude of information available about a vehicle or driver's performance and the general disinterest in examining it. This disparity is not a technological problem. It is largely an institutional and attitudinal problem. Or one might characterize it as a cultural problem. Or a values problem in a money-oriented society. Nevertheless, it raises an important point about driverless vehicles: While a vehicle's brain may contribute to and/or improve safety (fewer accidents and incidents) and performance (e.g., better mileage, less pollution), this brain's extraordinary analytical capabilities may be pointless because no non-robot is likely to ever examine the data.

9/12/2017· Automotive - Vehicular

Autonomous and Inevitable, Part 9: Conclusion -- The Best of Both Worlds

By: Ned Einstein

The past eight installments of this series covered a lot of ground -- some technical, but mostly socio-economic and conceptual. But in the debate over the pros and cons of human versus robotic drivers, is it not possible to have the wisdom to take the best of both worlds? In early articles I acknowledged some of the advantages of Highly-Automated Vehicles (HAVs), including:

9/28/2017· Automotive - Vehicular

Safety Compromises: Part 1, Introduction

By: Ned Einstein

This new National Bus Trader piece is the first installment of likely a year-long series about types of incidents that result from trade-offs of safety for other benefits -- adherence to unrealistically-tight schedules (or drivers running behind schedule) being the principal culprit. Frankly, of the more than 600 public transportation-related lawsuits in which I have served as an expert witness, roughly half of all incidents see to be the result of some deliberate safety compromise.

10/16/2017· Automotive - Vehicular

Safety Compromises, Part 2: On-Board Slips and Falls

By: Ned Einstein

In Part 1 of this series, I introduced the notion that roughly half of all public transportation-related incidents are the result of a deliberate trade-off of passenger safety for some system or owner's benefit. The most common benefit is the service provider's operating a schedule that is too tight.

1/31/2018· Automotive - Vehicular

Safety Compromises, Part 3: Wheelchair and Passenger Securement

By: Ned Einstein

Among all the safety compromises pandemic to the public transportation industry, wheelchair tipovers are, by far, the least common to the motorcoach sector compared to other services which deploy accessible vehicles. Of course, this is largely because so few wheelchair users travel by motorcoach.