One of the many things that smartphones are good for is car navigation. Android comes with the Google Maps navigation system, but you may be interested in alternatives either because there may be something better out there (there is) or because you want to be able to use maps offline. So over the past several weeks, I’ve been using nearly every mapping option I could find, looking for the perfect free or near-free offline navigating option. Unfortunately, I didn’t find it. I did find some options that would work in a pinch. I looked at Accuracy (How up-to-date and comprehensive are the maps), Appearance (Does it look cool?), Addressing (How capable and convenient was it finding addresses), Estimations (How well it could guess how long it would take), Exploration (Can you use it to drive around without a destination in mind?) Offline Status (does it work offline), Retention (Did the program stay open and remember your route if you switched over to the music player and back), Features (what else it can do), and Voice (Whether it pauses your music while it’s talking, for example). Any grade not listed is a “C” which means that it was satisfactory but did not exceed expectations at all. (more…)

We hadn’t noticed the problem until we got to the airport, which is a clear hour from our house. I asked Clancy where the diaper bag was. Instead of informing me that it was still in the car, she turned while. I went over in my mind everything I’d packed, and there was a duffel-sized hole in my memory.

The bad news, other than the obvious, was that this was the one time that we didn’t pack any diapers in her suitcase. We’re seeing the folks in two weeks anyway, so why not just have them keep the extras?

The good news was that we’d changed Lain right before leaving. Also, she tends to go rarely-and-big rather than frequently and small. So there was an off-chance that she would actually hold back until we got home?

We were not willing to bet on that (which turned out to be a good thing, because she didn’t. At all.) An airport worker noticed out distress and asked if there was any problem. She suggested that we go talk to Lost Luggage because they usually keep some spare diapers down there. The thought had never occurred to us, but it actually made sense. People whose luggage got lost freaking out because the diapers were on the suitcase. (Keeping all of your diapers in the suitcase? Ridiculous! The only thing dumber than that is… having them all packed in a bag you left at home.)

As it turns out, they did have diapers to spare. They didn’t have Lain’s size sixes, but they had size fours which required more care in putting on and aggressive changing, but would usually do the job. And did! Really, the only inconvenience was that I had to change her in the changing compartment in the plane’s tiny lavatory.

Other than that, the flight home went pretty well. Lain is getting impatient about being in the car seat throughout the flight. We get her a ticket precisely so that she won’t be sitting in our lap, but that was very much where she wanted to be.

So tomorrow we fly back home for July Fourth with the wife’s extended family and my more limited one. My folks will be joining us at the Corrigan Compound with the in-laws. They are curiously more open to such things now that there is a grandchild involved.

Anyhow, connectivity at the Corrigan Compound is relatively limited. There’ll be a new post up almost every day, but don’t expect rapid responses (which I have been trying to be better about in recent weeks).

Clancy lost her drivers license and we’re set to get on a plane tomorrow. So I want to repeat this complaint:

The point of having identification at the airport is not to make sure that you have your papers in order (unless you’re leaving the country). The point of having identification at the airport is to ascertain or validate your identity.

Your driver’s license or passport need not be current in order to do this. It could have expired yesterday. It could have a hole punched through it because you relocated. You did not cease to be who you were when you got a new license or a new passport.

Granted, if you’re talking about identification that is fifteen years old, maybe the license isn’t the best way to ascertain your identity. But two of the three licenses I had would have been valid had it not been for a relocation.

Because we have straightforwardly accurate identification in the form of old drivers’ licenses. Contrary to the title of this post, she did not actually cease being herself. Her address changed (she can provide proof of address, if that matters), and she is no longer eligible to drive under the license in Arapaho. But her identity? Hasn’t changed.

The only danger here is that by allowing expired drivers licenses, a terrorist or something could get a hold of someone’s DL that they look vaguely like. Since it’s an old license, the previous person may not notice. So there is a slightly elevated risk, I suppose. But get real. First of all, that sort of thing could happen anyway because not all expired licenses have the hole punched.

It was a positive development when DMV’s started allowing us to keep old DL’s with a hole punched in them precisely for the reason that the TSA is rejecting here. Apart from the ability to drive, or the address on the license, it’s helpful to be able to identify that you are a person and you are this person.

Clancy is going to get another copy of her license. She may or may not get the physical license today. If she gets a temporary one, the TSA will probably allow that. They have in the past. Which only adds to the ridiculousness. Temporary licenses are easier to forge and the pictures on them are less identifiable, then her no-longer-valid Arapaho license.

Could the solution to distracted driving be something as simple as a cleaner typefont?

I think there’s a fair number of adjustments we could make to cut down on technology-based distracted driving. In some cases, we’re moving in the wrong direction. I don’t mean by having more and more devices that distract us. Rather, because we’re moving away from physical buttons and knobs, which are easier to manage without taking your eyes off the road for very long, to touchscreens which require more precision and, thus, more attention.

The biggest thing we can do, though, is really ramp up R&D on voice control. I have my smartphone set up so that it reads text messages to me as they come in. I’m not far from being able to reply with little more effort than changing a radio dial. But the last inches seem to be the hardest.

More to the point, though, I’ve had to “rig” my devices to do what I can do.

So hasn’t more effort been put into this? Well, a lot of effort has been. Especially by the carmakers themselves.

Studies have demonstrated that voice systems are actually a hazard in themselves:

What makes the use of these speech-to-text systems so risky is that they create a significant cognitive distraction, the researchers found. The brain is so taxed interacting with the system that, even with hands on the wheel and eyes on the road, the driver’s reaction time and ability to process what is happening on the road are impaired.

The research was led by David Strayer, a neuroscientist at the University of Utah who for two decades has applied the principles of attention science to driver behavior. His research has showed, for example, that talking on a phone while driving creates the same level of crash risk as someone with a 0.08 blood-alcohol level, the legal level for intoxication across the country.

The counterargument to this is that, well, people are going to have the technology anyway. Even if you ban them from the cars themselves. Would we rather they be using it trying to tap virtual screens on a small keyboard, or talking back and forth with the device? The latter is obviously the safer in the abstract.

The concern, then, would be that people who wouldn’t pick up a device will talk to the device. So leading to less danger on a per-user individual, but a higher collective hazard because more people are doing it. This is possible, though it starts to move closer to the territory of the argument against ecigarettes (the danger being in its comparative safety).

Keeping this technology out of the cars themselves won’t keep them off the phones that will be in the cars. Laws against texting and driving don’t work. Obama’s former TranSec Ray LaHood wanted to disable phones in cars, but that disables passenger phones as well as driver phones.

The underlying problem won’t really go away until the cars drive themselves.

This weekend was Leaguefest, which was in DC. I won’t bore you with the details of having met up with various people you all don’t know. Instead I am just going to write about DC for a bit.

One of the conveniences of living out here is that my sister-in-law Zoey lives in DC. Which, for those of you who don’t keep track, is not too far from where we live.

She moved there shortly after getting back from abroad and settled in as it’s a great place to be a young person. I was not all that surprised that she chose to sell her car, but after this weekend, I am convinced that I would sell my cars if I lived there. Public transportation never looked so attractive.

We drove there on Friday night and spent about an hour looking for a parking spot, which we found in a garage about a mile away. That turned out to be the best parking situation I’d have all weekend.

I went out by myself on Saturday. Retracing my steps, I ended up walking 8.9 miles. After my bad experiences on Friday, I don’t know what possessed me to wear anything but tennis shoes on Saturday, but I did and have a blister on my foot the size of Delaware. Retracing my steps, I determined that I walked at least 8.9 miles.

There are a number of parking garages in the area, but they’re surprisingly hard to find and Google is of comparatively little help. A lot of them are inexplicably closed on weekend. Actually, it’s quite explicable, I suppose. They cater exclusively to commuters and I am guessing that renting them out to others on the weekends is just not worth the hassle. At a parking garage I ended up in, someone had laid a pie-sized dump on the floor. Ahhh, the majesty of our nation’s capital.

There’s also nothing like spending time in a city to make me appreciate certain aspects of living far outside of one. Besides things like parking (back in Callie, I hated walking three blocks), the lack of public restrooms (hence the poop pie, I guess) and public amenities in general is pretty noticeable. The low-trust environment leads to convenience stores and grocery stores closing earlier rather than later, no restrooms if they are open, and so on.

I was at least a half-hour out of town on my drive home when I stopped off to get a soft drink, and even there the most convenient convenience store had to buzz me in. The others stayed locked and you had to talk to them from the outside, through probably bullet-proof glass.

All of that said, I enjoyed myself until my feet became inoperable. I missed two museums due to the parking situation. I did get to see the Spy Museum, which was pretty cool. I had good – although outrageously expensive – food.

I’ve been wanting to take some trips to DC for a while. Now I realize the extent to which I am absolutely going to have to plan ahead of time so that I don’t spend all my time looking for parking spots.

The Obama administration wants to give states more ability to charge tolls on existing Interstates:

In a major shift for how governments fund transportation projects, the administration wants to let states charge tolls on interstate highways. A federal ban currently bars states from doing so in most places, but the latest White House push could change that.

Tucked into the GROW AMERICA Act, the White House’s $302 billion transportation bill, is a toll provision that calls for eliminating “the prohibition on tolling existing free Interstate highways, subject to the approval of the Secretary, for purposes of reconstruction.”

It also allows states more flexibility to use toll revenue for repairs “on all components of their highway systems.”

The proposal reflects the growing need for new sources of funding to maintain the nation’s aging transportation infrastructure. But it’s also a slippery slope — any driver knows that once a toll is in place, they become a handy tool for milking motorists. Tolls, for instance, just increased on I-95 and elsewhere in Maryland last year.

Of course, we wouldn’t have to engage in slippery slope Interstate funding if we more properly funded Interstate construction and upkeep. Fox, I presume, looks at this as a new tax of sorts. But more than anything it’s a biproduct of our unwillingness to consider higher gasoline taxes.

It should also be pointed out that this addresses an issue through a mechanism economic conservatives and libertarians should generally support, which is that it’s user-fee based. The percentage of highway funding taken care of through usage fees has declined precipitously as costs for an increasingly complex automobile infrastructure have increased but the gas taxes have remained static. But we want things built and building things costs money.

I would be perfectly find with insisting that virtually all roads be usage-funded if it weren’t for the regressive nature of such a funding system. I tend towards skepticism of Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) taxes, in addition to tolls and the gasoline taxes we pay in part due to the slippery slope concerns Fox has about increasing tolls. But… the solution to that is increased gasoline taxes, which I doubt Fox is in favor.

It’s been a bit of a shock to the system how many tolls we have to pay for roads out here. My inclination is to wonder why we can’t do this through gas taxes, but there definitely are cases where you pass through an entire state without refilling the tank. In those cases, it does make sense for it to be toll-based. And the user-based approach is inherently problematic off the major thoroughfares. Ideally, we would put GPS in our car and monitor our driving habits for better federal and state funding allocation. Perhaps then we could rely almost exclusively on a VMT (taking into account weight and perhaps environmental impact if we want to get Pigouvian about it). That would, of course, require a trust in government institutions that is now lacking.

In addition to the ability to add tolls, it will also increase variable price tolling. I have mixed feelings about that. Jonathan Last discusses peak pricing in his article on High-Occupancy Toll lanes:

At first the economists fixated on “peak pricing,” that is, charging a toll during rush hour. But flat tolls were a crude mechanism. What they longed for was a dynamic system that would always reflect the “true” cost of usage. In 1993, two economists at the Reason Foundation, Gordon Fielding and Daniel Klein, proposed a regime of variable pricing: When traffic was light, the toll might be 50 cents; when traffic was heavy, it might jump to $8. Dynamic pricing would force drivers to pay a true price to avoid traffic. The market would then cause driver economicus to regulate his behavior in the most efficient manner.

The creation of cheap, passive Radio Frequency Identification transponders in the early 1990s made dynamic pricing possible. Drivers registered for transponders (such as the E-ZPass system in the northeast, or SunPass in Florida) that were tied to a credit card. Tolls could be collected electronically while the car was moving. With the problem of collection solved, adjusting prices on the fly was easy. All that was needed was a system of sensors at on-ramps and exits to track the movement of vehicles within the network and a computer algorithm that could raise or lower prices so that traffic volume in the HOT lanes was kept moving at some predetermined minimum speed, say, 50 mph. The first HOT lanes in America, on SR-91 in Orange County, California, opened in 1995.

I support variable pricing at least in theory, but start having a problem with it when it’s as opaque as described here. Not that I mistrust whatever formula they’re using, but that it’s hard to use prices to nudge people when they don’t know at the outset how much it’s going to cost before you leave. Raising prices from the hours of 7-10 AM and them from 4-7 PM on Monday through Friday to nudge people to modify is fair and predictable. Adding costs because as it turns out on 2pm on a particular Tuesday there are a lot of cars on the road on that day is adding insult to injury as their blood pressure is rising and they are stuck in traffic. There’s not much nudging to be done when they’re already out in traffic.

So our trip to Las Vegas was not, alas, what we were hoping nor. Not that our expectations were particularly high. We were going because that’s where the convention was. I had offered to Clancy that the baby and I stay behind, but she deferred.

We are not, it seems, Las Vegas material. The most obvious way this was apparent was that we could never get over the price of everything. It reminded us a big of the Pacific Northwest where we stopped going out to eat because, though the food wasn’t bad, it never seemed good enough to justify the inflated tab.

Since we didn’t have a car, our options were even more limited. We couldn’t stomach the price of the restaurants (or room service) of the hotel, so we ended up ordering delivery. At least that way, for our $30, we were getting a fair amount of food. Other than the bill, that part turned out okay. I got to eat pizza, Thai, Italian, and all sorts of good stuff.

The WiFi was terrible and even the data reception from my phone wasn’t very good.

The epitome of the trip occurred when we realized that we were running low on baby food. The main grocery store option was a Whole Foods that was about two miles away. I walked the two miles and then realized that I had forgotten my wallet. By the time I got back, it was too late for another trip. Clancy decided to walk down in the morning. We finally got the baby food.

If we had to do it all over again, we’d do just about everything differently from better foreplanning to breaking down and going to the market on the first day. Also, just buying a crib.

I can’t remember the last time we were this glad to be back from a trip. The baby is sick with a temperature of 101, but she is at least sleeping in her own (more reasonably priced) crib.

The value of thirty-five times x is greater than the value of 60 if x is an integer with a value greater than one.

So we made it to Vegas. We knew that Mandalay Bay, the hotel resort where we are staying, offered cribs. What we did not know is that they charged an exorbitant $35 day a fee for them. We tried to see if we could get around it, but it became obvious last night that we weren’t going to be able to. So we called to have one sent up. As an aside, you would think that if we call the front desk at 11pm and say “We need a crib” the importance of getting it sooner rather than later would be implied. It’s 11 at night, after all. But at midnight we had to call again and ask how that crib was coming. It arrived shortly thereafter.

I was expecting for $35 in a hotel where rooms go for over $200, it would at least be a nice crib. It was, in fact, roughly the same as the Graco playpen at have at home. The one that cost $60.

So, to clarify, if you’re going to “rent” a crib at Mandalay Bay for more than a single day, it’s actually cheaper to buy one off Amazon and have it sent to the hotel than it is to actually rent theirs. For three days, which is our duration, it’s much cheaper. You can have it shipped back and still come out ahead and with a new playard to boot. Or you could donate it to charity. Don’t leave it in the room, though, because they will probably charge $35 to someone else to let them use it.

The past week or two, I have been trying to manipulate the baby’s bed time to synchronize things so that we are all going to sleep and waking up together. We’e all night owls by inclination, though of course Clancy has to get up early for work. Lain seems to have taken from her parents in this regard. The books all say that the ideal bed time for a baby is early, but it’s often pulling teeth to get her to move her bed time up.

The main reason for the synchronization was in preparation for our Las Vegas trip, which we embarked on yesterday due to a professional conference for Clancy. Because we were all going to be in a hotel room, in became particularly important that we be going to sleep together so that Clancy got enough sleep to actually be awake for the reason that we’re here.

Everything kind of went off the rails the night before when the baby declined to go to sleep early, pushing back our own packing plans. I was up till midnight getting everything together. Clancy was up till 2:30. We had to leave for the airport at 5:30 (a coworker of hers was picking us up).

The entire day we were obsessed with the baby’s sleep patterns for fear of what it might have meant in the night. So much so that we forgot about a critical component: us. There was little or no sleeping on the plane due to the small seats and a baby who did not appreciate being on a plane for five straight hours. We have historically preferred non-stop flights, and figured it would become even more important with the peanut. As it turns out, a layover in St. Louis or Chicago would have done us some good.

By the time we got here, we were hungry and tired. I was so tired that I just couldn’t even think straight. Clancy was even more tired despite having gotten a little nap on the plane. (She runs bigger sleep deficits more generally, and she got significantly less sleep than me the night before.) Late naps tend not to be good for the baby, but there came a point where we just had no choice. We had to risk her sleep schedule for our sleep schedule. We ended up taking a collective nap from about 5 to 8:30. I actually only slept until six but woke up completely rejuvenated. But even at 8:30 it was tough getting Clancy and Lain awake.

As it turned out, things ended up just kind of falling into place. The massive sleep deficits prevailed and when it was time for bed again, none of us had difficulty going back to sleep. And now we’re on the schedule that we had intended to be all along. More or less.