You can’t just declare Vision Zero and have it happen

Traffic fatalities have doubled since D.C.’s promise of zero [gift link]

D.C.’s Vision Zero plan has relied heavily on camera enforcement to catch speeders, who are more likely to cause dangerous crashes. But The Post found that of the 33 people killed in traffic crashes this year, nine died within 250 feet of a traffic camera.

There’s A LOT to unpack here about inequitable streets and placement of traffic cameras, and I’m not going to do it here because it’s already been done by people who know more about it than I do.

The problem with DC’s Vision Zero is that Mayor Bowser did it like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy on The Office. Saying you’re going to do Vision Zero is great, but unfortunately for DC, that’s where it ended.

You may not know what Vision Zero IS, aside from a plan to get to zero traffic fatalities. That’s ok. I have a great analogy. We go live to the press conference.

Voiceover: Mayor Muriel Bowser presents…. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s new diet.

Mayor Muriel Bowser (standing at podium. On the podium is a jumbo slice of pizza and a Bud Light): Thank you for coming. I am pleased to announce that, going forward, I will be on a 100% paleo diet. The diet of our prehistoric ancestors, truly native Washingtonians, is the only way foward.

MMB: (Takes large bite of pizza)

Reporter: Mayor Bowser, aren’t dairy and grains forbidden in a paleo diet?

MMB (takes long drink from Bud Light): The first inhabitants of Washington DC ,some hundred million years ago, followed a strict paleo diet, and so will I.

Reporter: Alcohol isn’t allowed either…

MMB (Glares): Off with his head.

Cars I’ve owned

While I’m a bike and pedestrian advocate, we still live in a society where it’s pretty tough to live without a car. And I DO like to drive. Today Facebook reminded me it’s been four years since our trusty Mazda 3 was rear-ended. Given that our latest car was stolen two weeks ago (a story for another day), I got to thinking about the cars I’ve had.

1988 Acura Integra

This was my first car. My parents bought it for me because I was going to high school an hour away from home and they couldn’t get me there (at least not without turning their lives upside down). Such a great little car. Reliability of a Honda Civic but SO much more fun to drive. I didn’t have it long – I was rear-ended on 97N on the way to take the AP Spanish test. I got a ride to school from a Maryland state trooper and I was deeply disappointed that everyone was in class by then so no one saw me getting dropped off.

1989 Acura Integra

Insurance paid for the replacement. This was one trim level up from the first one. I loved it even more. Both Integras had giant subwoofers in the trunk and I installed a kill switch to turn them off as I approached my house so my mom didn’t get mad. When I went to college I didn’t get to keep the car. I think my siblings ran it into the ground.

1988 Honda Accord

It had 175,000 miles when I got it. Incredibly well-maintained, incredibly boring. It had a manual transmission and a sunroof, though, so it wasn’t all bad.

1995 Toyota Tacoma

This was the first car I purchased myself. Manual transmission, 4X4. It could drive over anything. Highlights include 1) putting a tarp in the back for a house party, filling it with ice, and using it as a cooler 2) pulling a stuck Chevy pickup out of the mud 3) driving in the snow 4) having a cicada fly in the window on 66 and explode against the back window. Lowlights were mostly helping literally everyone in the DMV move at one time or another. It had 70K miles when I bought it. I sold it to my then-brother-in-law with 235K and the original clutch. It broke 250k before the transmission died on him and he got rid of it. It’s probably still out there somewhere.

2006 Mazda 3

My first new car. I had just bought a condo and was living on my own for the first time. The condo was not the greatest investment (absolute peak of the market, I had a $31,000 escalation clause on my offer) but the I got my money’s worth out of the Mazda. It drove my wife to the birth center to give birth to both our kids and carted them around through middle school. It was rear-ended on the way home from Rehoboth summer of 2020.

2020 Toyota RAV4 hybrid

First time I ever owned an automatic transmission. Good car. You could coax 52 MPG out of it if you were easy on the gas. 40 MPG with normal driving. It was stolen from outside our hotel in Montreal two weeks ago.

Next?

Almost definitely another RAV4 hybrid. I would love something fully electric but they are SUPER expensive and we don’t have off-street parking to charge it, so it would be a constant hassle.

The shelf-life of a baseball reliever

Ever since I read Moneyball, which turned me into a baseball stat super genius, as it did for everyone else, I have wondered about the value of a relief pitcher. For the most part, they come and go pretty quickly. Today’s top set up guy is tomorrow’s DFA.

Mason Miller, the A’s closer, has been fantastic. A lot of people think he’ll move at the trade deadline, as the A’s certainly don’t need him to finish last again. How much would you give up for him? If we’re just talking “We need a top closer to win the World Series this year”, fine. But how many years is he going to be a top closer?

My theory was three years is the max except for really top-end guys. The corollary to my theory is that this doesn’t apply to Mariano Rivera, who was the best reliever ever by a large margin. To test my theory, I finally got a subscription to FanGraphs, dumped all data for relievers from 2000-2024, ranked them by WAR each year, and then counted how many times a guy was in the top 25.

PlayerYears in the top 25 in WAR
Mariano Rivera12
Kenley Jansen9
Joe Nathan8
David Robertson8
Craig Kimbrel8
Aroldis Chapman8
Trevor Hoffman7
Rafael Betancourt7
Jonathan Papelbon7
Francisco Rodríguez7
Billy Wagner7
Joakim Soria6
Octavio Dotel5
Liam Hendriks5
J.J. Putz5
Greg Holland5
Francisco Cordero5
Edwin Díaz5
Ryan Pressly4
Roberto Osuna4
Raisel Iglesias4
Matt Thornton4
Mark Melancon4
Ken Giles4
Keith Foulke4
Josh Hader4
Jonathan Broxton4
Joaquín Benoit4
Huston Street4
Heath Bell4
Emmanuel Clase4
Devin Williams4
Dellin Betances4
Byung-Hyun Kim4
Brad Lidge4
Brad Hand4
Bobby Jenks4
B.J. Ryan4
Andrew Miller4

There you go. 39 players since 2000 have been top 25 relievers more than 3 years. I might redo the analysis a bit – WAR may not be the best way to rank a reliever.

I was definitely right about Mariano Rivera.

Rivera warming up
Mariano Rivera throwing in the bullpen, spring training, 2013. Photo by the author

Of the 318 players who ranked in the top 25 in WAR in the 2000’s, 192 did it once. 60 did it twice and 27 three times. The rest is the list above.

Everyone involved here is wrong

While 1) banning the resale of legally purchased tickets should be illegal and 2) TIcketmaster totally deserves this, I wonder if anyone told them that every time the barcode changes it’s a separate felony charge under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?

By reverse-engineering how Ticketmaster and AXS actually make their electronic tickets, scalpers have essentially figured out how to regenerate specific, genuine tickets that they have legally purchased from scratch onto infrastructure that they control. In doing so, they are removing the anti-scalping restrictions put on the tickets by Ticketmaster and AXS. 

https://www.404media.co/scalpers-are-working-with-hackers-to-liberate-non-transferable-tickets-from-ticketmasters-ecosystem

Red lights – optional if you’re very special

I just walked down the 800 block of Park Rd NW, just near my house. This block contains a police station, though the only reason you can tell is there are always police cars double parked all down the block.

At both ends of the block, a driver ran the red light. And not a “oops, I should have stopped on that late yellow”, but “I see the light is red and I am consciously choosing to ignore that”.

At the New Hampshire Ave end, a driver heading east crossed the center line to pass two other drivers who were stopping for the yellow.

At the Georgia Ave end, a driver stopped in the crosswalk then floored it after the light turned. Honestly couldn’t tell you what he was thinking.

I sometimes wonder why we even have police.

Remembering family history, Willie Mays edition

I have long had it in my head that my grandmother was at the game where Willie Mays made The Catch. I just confirmed with my uncle that it was NOT that game, but rather another fantastic catch by Mays that they saw at the 1962 All Star Game at RFK Stadium in DC. They were sitting in straighaway center field and the catch was right beneath them so they didn’t actually see it until later on tv.

There’s a lot of old family history that gets misremembered here and there. I write the REAL stories down and spoil the fun for everyone because that’s how I roll.

RIP Willie

Solving software problems the hard way

Many years ago, I wrote software for the federal government. Our application helped a couple of agencies produce the documents they send to the President and Congress to ask for money. I mean their official annual budget request, not like “Hey, Joe, you got five bucks on you?” I assume they did that in person. The basic process was our code produced some boilerplate, some tables based on numbers they uploaded, and then inserted text documents that they also uploaded. It then spit out a completed document. With modern technology, this would be pretty straightforward, but this was 2008 federal government tech, so it was held back by all sorts of things.

The code mostly worked fine without major changes EXCEPT for one thing. Treasury liked to change the table heading colors every year. This was a HUGE problem. At the time, we were using a very old document type called Rich Text Format. Maybe you are old enough to have seen an RTF file. It was made by Microsoft to be compatible with non-Microsoft Word programs. In hindsight this is sort of hilarious. To change the color on an RTF file, the code ripped the header off the file and inserted a new one. Then you ran the code and hoped that you did it right. Usually, you did not, so you tried again. It was an ENORMOUS amount of work for something that I thought should be trivial – there were all sorts of escape characters and weird abbreviations and none of it made any sense. It was sort of like HTML with a CSS file except where CSS is supposed to be simple and straightforward (Cascading Simple Straightforward, that’s CSS), this was the opposite.

So I thought, surely there is software out there that we can use to do this instead of rolling our own. And there was! We were a Java team, and at the time, Apache POI was what everyone in Java used to do text documents. I was excited! A polished open source program that was free to use! No more headaches!

And then there were headaches. You see, our Java code lived inside an Oracle database. And the Oracle database version we were stuck on only supported Java version 1.4. Apache POI required 1.5. There was no way I, a lowly software contractor, could get them to move to a newer Oracle version that would support 1.5.

So I did what any young software person in that situation would do – I wrote my own code to create and manipulate DOCX files. Do not attempt to read this code, you will cry, I promise. Interesting note – most (all?) Microsoft Office files (.docx and .xlsx for sure) are just a zipped folder of human-readable XML files. You can just unzip them and look at the files. During my time writing this code, I looked at those files A LOT. More than was healthy, probably. Much longer and I would have been able to open a Word document and see the XML, Matrix-style.

But in the end, it worked! You can see some of the documents my code produced if you look at the Congressional Justification and Budget in Brief at treasury.gov. I don’t know how many years they used my code – I left the project in 2010 – but I’m sure they used it in 2008. I get a kick out of knowing that budgeting decisions were made in part using a document I coded.

Crash right in front of me – thankfully no one injured

I was in Annapolis to have lunch with my mom today and made a quick stop at the complex with the Best Buy on Generals Highway. As I was leaving, at the light to turn out, I noticed a car to my right waiting to turn left into the complex. I noticed the car was pretty far back – it’s a HUGE intersection, and I would have come towards the middle to make the left shorter.

As I sat there, she began to turn. Oncoming traffic still had a green, and an SUV with the right of way smashed into the turning car.

Everyone seemed to be ok – I called 911 and I commend Anne Arundel county for their responsiveness. I think a police officer was on site in 3 minutes and the ambulance in maybe 5. The SUV driver was pretty freaked out – I think she was driving with her mom and son, 3-ish years old. I don’t blame her for being freaked out. The other driver hadn’t gotten out of the car when I left but I overheard a woman who had spoken to her tell another witness that the woman was upset she’d have to tell her daughter she’d “gotten into another accident”.

It got me thinking a lot about how our car-dependent areas really hurt us as we age. This woman was coming from somewhere west of Annapolis, so no chance she could get anywhere without a car. My grandmother was like this – she never learned to drive, and it never mattered until they moved to the suburbs and then my grandfather passed away at 61 and she was stuck in that house until someone came and picked her up.

The woman in this crash today probably shouldn’t be driving anymore, but how are you going to tell her that when that’s her only way out of the house?

Parenting perks – trolling your kids

Parenting is hard sometimes. Kids are THE WORST. They’re always there, wanting things, complaining, making messes.

But they’re also great. And one of the side benefits of them getting older is you can troll them to great effect. My younger one has a stack of Principal’s List awards on the dining room table. I’m not sure 1) why she has so many or 2) why they are in a pile on the table. But my wife was teasing her about it and about how they seem to keep multiplying. Of course, this is a GOOD thing, as being on the Principal’s List is a nice achievement and we are of course happy that she is doing well in school.

So I had to take it a step further. When she was at school one day, I scanned one of the papers, put some new dates on, and printed out copies. I taped one to her bedroom door and put one under her pillow. And I added two to the stack on the table. And, my favorite, I mailed one to her. It’ll probably arrive tomorrow after she’s mostly forgotten the first batch.