Note the word “solvable” in the title. For some unknown reason, otherwise intelligent people talk as if urban traffic congestion is a fact of life that we’ll never solve forever amen.

I disagree. The problem is solvable if we are willing to make tougher decisions than we’ve made so far.

First we have to have a quick understanding of traffic congestion: the main problem is that you have more cars entering the road than you have leaving the road. If you have equal or less cars entering the road as leaving the road, you have static or decreasing congestion. When more cars are entering the road system than leaving it, trip times increase, and when trip times increase, cars get off the road slower yet, and traffic gets worse exponentially.

It’s important to understand that it’s not just the width of the road, but with what efficiency it is being used. When you think of cars think of trip times and when you think of roads thinks of cars/second. These are the dominant factors that cause inflationary congestion. Trip times get longer because roads move cars slower.

Because there are so many cars on the road, small efficiencies make a big difference. If we increase trip times by 40% and the average trip time is 20 minutes, that’s 8 more minutes per car. Take that times 50,000 cars and you have 6000 more car hours to deal with than you would have. It pays to stop congestion before it starts.

So we have two areas we need to make sure we keep efficient: trip times and cars/sec, which are clearly related.

The answer is flow. Traffic is like a data network. It should go as fast as it can and it should be slowed down never. Our freeways are currently clumpy, chaotic battlegrounds where people jockey for position. If you think of driver behavior as a bell curve, with the slowest drivers on one end and the fastest drivers on the other, the peak of the bell curve is pretty wide — these are the rational drivers. We need to rid the road of the 20% worst drivers (10% on either side). It should be harder to get and keep your driver’s license. The problem is, we are enforcing the wrong side. It is not just the fastest drivers that should be pulled over, but the slowest and the stupidest. All drivers who drive non-cooperatively should be off the road. We have to stop enforcing speed and start enforcing cooperative driving behavior.

Except in residential areas, you have to pretty much throw out speed limits. They aren’t working. The middle of the bell curve above, if speed limits were working, would be centered on the speed limit. Instead it is centered 10 mph (or more) above the speed limit. At the edge of the bell curve you have a small minority of people who obey the speed limit, and they become dangerous eddies in the traffic flow and end up causing congestion and accidents. You always hear about how “speeds kills”. This is only true if you have accidents. It’s the accidents that do the killing and accidents are much more likely when you have large differences in speed. With 95% of the people driving 10 or 20 miles per hour over the speed limit, the 5% going the speed limit are dangerous obstacles. You can’t argue with the middle of the bell curve.

So this is one way to smooth out the traffic flow: enforce a very small range in speeds. Perhaps the freeways have a speed limit of 72-74. Or perhaps the speed limit signs change to regulate speed. If you truly enforced speed, but had speed limits where they should be, you could control traffic flow, perhaps even dynamically.

Another traffic control option would be to restrict lane changes during capacity traffic. This creates the oscillating speeding up and slowing down. When you merge traffic in during capacity traffic you need to do it slowly, even though it will piss off the people trying to get on the road. Road systems need to be designed to move people as fast as possible. Traffic control systems need to be intelligent, with a model of the traffic dynamic, and keeps cars and traffic moving. Our traffic control systems are way too stupid. We have a system that stops you every 1 block. We put traffic lights on roads that should be throughways. The only tool we seem to have in our toolbox is slowing and stopping traffic, yet that is the main culprit in creating congestion. We can’t just build lanes, we need to build dynamic traffic control systems.

So in a nutshell, to solve traffic congestion on an on-going basis:

1. Raise the standards for getting and keeping your license. Let’s get non-cooperative drivers off the road.
2. Raise speed limits to the speed that people are actually driving and then enforce the hell out of it.
3. Stop or slow down traffic as seldom as possible, hopefully never. This is a major change from current systems.
4. Educate drivers and then enforce cooperative, attentive and rational driving.
5. Expand and modernize infrastructure. Modern cities need modern road systems.

Soon the bias against gay people will go the way as bias against racial minorities went (or at least is going). There is no rational reason to discriminate against homosexual people in any way, shape or form. The people who are against same sex marriage are caught in a trap of moral superiority where they believe that their disapproval of another’s lifestyle matters. It doesn’t. They are almost always religious. They believe that things like homosexuality are sins and that society has an obligation to prohibit them. Wake up, folks! I don’t believe in the Bible and my citizenship in this country does not require that I do. You are free to express your opinions on morality but you are not free to impose your morality on me. You think being gay is a sin? Fine, don’t be gay then. But keep your hateful and intolerant opinion out of our laws and courts. No one elected you the morality police.

The majority in this country that is against same-sex marriage is the same majority that thinks the ten commandments should be in our public buildings. They are the majority that thinks “under God” needs to be in the pledge of allegiance. The problem is: two plus two does not equal five no matter how many people vote for it. This majority is plain wrong, just like they were wrong about slavery, wrong about civil rights, wrong about women’s rights and wrong about every progressive movement we’ve seen in this country. Our constitution guarantees that all people in this country, whether straight or gay, have the same rights. Read that sentence again: all people have the same rights.

Let’s take a quick swing through the moronic reasons people try to use to rationalize discrimination against same sex couples:

1. Marriage is for procreation. This is too stupid to address but I will anyway. A substantial percentage of heterosexual marriages do not procreate and it does not effect the status of their marriage. Civil marriage has nothing to do with procreation.

2. Heterosexual marriage is the foundation of a healthy family structure. 50% of marriages fail. At least 15% of marriages are subject to extra-marital affairs. I agree that positive marriages result in better families and better children. However, heterosexual marriage does not have a great record in this regard. We need all the positive marriages we can get, whether heterosexual or homosexual.

3. Public endorsement of same-sex marriage reinforces homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle. Yes, I agree, it does. I don’t see that as a problem. I’m not here to write about homosexuality, per se, but I do think it is funny that people argue that it is somehow unnatural. Think of it this way — since the beginning of humanity it has been normal to expect a certain percentage of the population to be homosexual. It is perfectly normal in this regard.

4. Same-sex marriage will be used frivolously to gain the economic advantages of marriage. This is the only rational argument against same-sex marriage. If anyone can marry anyone, will people be more likely to use marriage as a vehicle for economic advantage. If that was going to be true, we would see a lot more heterosexual marriages of convenience. Even if this did turn out to be true, I see no reason why heterosexuals should be allowed marriages of convenience but not homosexuals.

The bottom line on this is that same-sex couples have the right to protect their families, their children and their estates. Being a committed couple is much harder if you need to jump through legal hoops to insure that your mate will have the same rights to joint custody of your children and your estate as heterosexual couples. Marriage, in addition to whatever religious covenant some people choose, is a legal arrangement. It is a civil union. As such by definition is it an option for all citizens regardless of who they are or who their mate is.

I’ll close with a story about how people change. My uncle was gay. He was diagnosed with AIDS in the 1980’s. His parents, my grandparents, were as conservative as you can imagine — Lutheran North Dakota farmers with barely a high school diploma. When they discovered their son was gay and dying of AIDS they dropped everything and supported him lovingly until the day he died. They stood by him in a way that makes me so proud. They decided that the God they believed in wanted them to love their son more than he wanted them to believe some preacher in some church who condemned homosexuals as sinners destined for hell.

It’s not just gay people who suffer from this prejudice — it’s their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters and friends. For every loving same-sex couple in this country there is a web of hundreds of people who love and support them. We will not take no for an answer.

A new poll of the rich was conducted. There is an article about it at the Star Tribune. It brings up something I have been thinking about: we should be able to expect more from the rich and they constantly disappoint us. Example, the article says “Three of every eight wealthy people don’t feel an obligation to give back to their communities financially.” How do they think they got rich? Could they have gotten rich in other places as easily? The answer is no: they got rich here because we have a society and a government that creates opportunity. We have a talented work force, a large economy and an environment that allows people to succeed to disgusting degrees. Why is it that people with plenty become more selfish than people with little? Almost half of rich people feel no obligation to give back? That is ludicrious.

Which brings up a quote I heard: luxury dulls the character. Many (not all) of the rich people in this country could not cut warm butter with their character.

The article also states:

“By far, the top concern of affluent investors is sustaining and increasing their wealth,” according to an online survey conducted by Harris Interactive for Community Foundations of America and HNW Inc., a financial services company.

So the richer you are the more preoccupied with wealth you become. Far from being the freedom that so many think it is, wealth becomes a drug like crack cocaine. These people are drug addicts. This is clear in many ways: the Enron’s, the mutual fund scam, the CEO pay issue. The common factor here is that the richer you are the more important it is that you get richer. How fucking dumb is that. Where does this bottomless greed come from?

But what really makes me laugh is that also high on the worries of the rich is what a bunch of losers their children are. The article states: “Nevertheless, six out of 10 say they worry that wealth will spoil their children.” So the message to their children is, accumulate wealth, do not share it, but be fearful of what morons your kids will be as a result. Nice.

Lest I be unclear, wealth is not bad. I am happy that I live in a country that allows us to create wealth for ourselves. I am not advocating class warfare and my remarks are not based on envy of the rich. I could be rich if I wanted. I see how people do it and I’m not willing. If you want to pursue dollars above all else, go for it.

My point, besides the fact that rich people are drug addicts and their drug is money, is that we as a nation have to have some rational on how we can continue this great nation moving forward. Benjamin Franklin, one of our brightest founding fathers, was concerned that the welfare of the nation would be jeopardized if wealth were allowed to grow unchecked. Bill Gates, Sr.’s book “Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes” sums this up pretty good. We have a duty as a nation to make sure that the extreme wealth of the few does not unbalance the promises of our great Constitution. As one reviewer of the book said “With the estate tax repeal proposed by the Bush administration, we might be facing the future that Teddy Roosevelt feared-where huge fortunes amassed and untaxed would evolve into a dangerous and permanent aristocracy.”

If the rich do not recognize how their fortune was made possible by the country as a whole, the country as a whole will need to remind them. This is why progressive taxation is good. This is why the estate tax is good. Rich people are lucky. There is no person that would rather be poor and pay no taxes than be rich and pay a lot of taxes. This is where I expect more from the rich: quit bitching about taxes, quit bitching about “class warfare”, quit being petty, pampered snobs and be the great people you could be. Be the great people you should be. Be an American first.

George W. Bush is going to lose the presidential election in 2004. Here’s why.

We all remember the 2000 presidential election. It was a close one. Very close. The way the election was decided by the Supreme Court was unique in American history. In terms of the upcoming election in 2004, the main thing to remember from the 2000 election is that George W. Bush did not come close to getting the most votes. Al Gore alone got more votes than Bush, but when you add in Nader, more people voted for liberals than George Bush by a fairly significant margin. (Gore+Nader got 3.4 million more votes than Bush.) So a big question now is: are the people that voted for Gore or Nader likely to vote for Bush? Do you think Bush is likely to get new voters out there? The answer to both questions is no. This fact alone could spell doom for the idiot king Bush.

But there’s more: given that Bush narrowly won the 2000 election, you’d think he would have some sense that the country is split. There was no clear mandate for a right-wing agenda in that election. Yet the puppet masters who run Bush have had a hay day implementing a radical right wing agenda. The list is impressive: making abortion illegal, hacking back environmental laws, going to war over oil, appalling tax cuts for the rich, a premeditated attack on public education, infiltrating government with faith-based this and that. This guy has done nothing for the majority of voters who did not vote for him. He basically lied about being a compassionate conservative to get elected and then reverted to the ol’ boy right wing corporate whore that he is. For the hoards of intelligent, fiscally conservative, environmentally conscience and socially progressive folks out there, this guy is a loser.

Now clearly there are a lot of conservatives in this country. Many or most of them are intelligent people with the best interest of the country at heart. Many of them will not vote for a Democrat no matter what happens. They’d rather have a bad conservative than a good liberal. These confused people that think flag waving is patriotic and paying your taxes isn’t are going to mobilize in a big way to keep the irrational tax cutter guy in office. While they claim to be fiscally conservative, they want to put the war in Iraq on the credit card and have their kids pay the bill instead of them. A segment of these folks can be reasoned with, but the fact remains that this next election will be close.

There are two main things that could happen that could put ol’ dubbya back in the White House. One, we could get a strong liberal third-party candidate. The conservatives are too smart (or too stupid) to ever back a third-party candidate. Liberals, by definition, are willing to consider alternatives to this dumb-ass two party partisan paralysis we are locked into. As much as I think we need to break the two-party stranglehold, now ain’t the time. Nader, please sit this one out. Two, the Democrats could choose a insincere plastic wannaba like Gore. Gore was a crappy candidate. What’s funny is: Gore could have probably made a very good president. It was the candidate part he sucked at. So far all of the Democratic hopefuls look pretty good. I think Bush is going to be outmatched in virtually every measurable quality in regards to the capabilities of a leader.

You have to do your part in this. First of all, vote. If you don’t vote it means that George W. Bush is your man. A lot of people that didn’t vote in 2000 hate this president. You gotta fucking vote. Second, spread the word a bit. Speak out in reasonable and rational ways about the deeply disturbing policies of this administration. Get people thinking about this stuff a little deeper than their own pocket books. Most of all, get your friends to vote, regardless of who they will vote for. Drive them to the voting booth if necessary. Put a voter registration form in front of them. The more people that vote in this next election the less chance there is that George W. Dumbass will win. The imbecile cowboy has got to go.

Even if you think people should not have abortions, they should be legal.

As I’ve stated elsewhere, no one wants abortions, per se. Abortions are used to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Everyone should agree that the goal is to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place. This is why no one should ever do anything to prevent people from having access to birth control, especially young adults who are most adversely effected by unwanted pregnancies. The anti-abortion people like to characterize pro-choice people as pro-abortion, and that is not accurate. A better word for the pro-choice movement would be pro-privacy. Basically the pro-life folks think that the government should have an eye and ear in the room when you and your doctor discuss your personal health. The pro-choice people are saying that the decision as to whether to terminate a pregnancy should be between a woman, her doctor, her partner and her clergy. The government should not be at the table. It is hard for me to believe that anyone would disagree with this.

The argument they use, which is not irrational, is that abortion is murder. Is it though? There are two issues we have to tackle. 1) When does a fertilized egg become a person and; 2) when is the termination of this egg/person considered murder? If you want to argue that abortion is murder you have to establish that the unborn fetus is a person in a legal sense of the word, meaning a citizen. When is an unborn child endowed with rights? If you wish to argue that at conception a fertilized egg is endowed with rights under the State, we should issue a legal document at conception. Call it a pre-birth certificate. From that point on the welfare of that “child” is protected by the State. This essentially means a woman would have to notify the government as soon as it was clear she was pregnant. Do you believe we should do that? On top of this, there is a fuzzy line as to when a fertilized egg becomes a person, just like there is a fuzzy line between when a child becomes an adult. There are 18 year olds who are not adults and who are exploited because of the bright line legal definition. There are also people who are mature as adults who are less than 18 years old. The legal system had to adopt a bright line definition so we say if you are 18 or older you are an adult.

Do we have a bright line definition of when a fertilized egg becomes a person? If you say at conception, this means every failed pregnancy is the death of a person. Some of these deaths would need to be investigated as murder or negligence. The paper should be full of funeral notices for every failed pregnancy. Is it rational to say that a fertilized egg is a person? Note the difference between the words “life” and “person”. You can say that life begins at birth but that does not mean it is a person. My blood is alive but it is not a person. It is living cells. The way I’ve best heard it described is that a fertilized egg is a possible person, a fetus developed beyond 13 weeks is a probable person and a baby living outside the womb IS a person. Currently our bright line legal definition of when a fetus becomes a person is when they are born and issued a birth certificate. Prior to that time there is no legal person.

Let’s rewind a bit: abortions are bad. If we plan well there should rarely be a need for abortions. Let’s prevent unwanted pregnancies. Women have always had and will always have the ability to end their pregnancies, either safely or violently. When you are saying that abortion should be illegal you are A) putting the government in the examination room between a woman and her doctor and; B) dooming woman to ending their unwanted pregnancies through backroom and violent means. If you want to end abortions you should work to prevent unwanted pregnancies. You should not work to put woman and their doctors in jail.

This is a tough issue. A lot of people feel that abortion is immoral. They may be right. As a secular country, though, our task is to figure out whether it should be criminalized. The win-win situation is obvious: we can eliminate abortions without criminalizing them by working together to make family planning as effective as it can be. Let’s end the debate on criminalization and instead focus on our common goal of good, healthy family planning.