Tag: bay area

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Weather Friday

Storm’s brewing. For connoisseurs of the National Weather Service’s Monterey, California, area forecast discussion, today’s early-morning report tends towards “War and Peace” in terms of length, though in all capital letters and without quite the mastery of dramatic language one loves in a good non-Harlequin novel. An excerpt:

“AS INTENSE FRONTAL CONVERGENCE APPROACHES…INCREASING PRECIPITABLE WATER PLUME SWINGS UNDERNEATH. THIS WILL SET THE STAGE FOR PERIODS OF VERY HEAVY RAIN WITH RAIN RATES PROBABLY NEARING 0.75”. TRICKY PART OF FORECAST IS HOW FAR EAST THIS BAND GETS BEFORE IT BECOMES QUASI-STATIONARY FOR AN EXTENDED PERIOD. WHERE THIS BOUNDARY ALIGNS ITSELF WILL MARK THE LOCATIONS WHERE HEAVY … FLOODING RAINS WILL PERSIST FOR AT LEAST 12 HOURS. ECMWF/GFS HAVE BEEN REMARKABLY SIMILAR IN TARGETING SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS SOUTHWARD TO BIG SUR FROM ABOUT 18Z FRI THRU 06Z SAT. IF THIS WAS TO OCCUR…WE WOULD SEE AT A MINIMUM SERIOUS URBAN AND SMALL STREAM FLOODING AND AT WORST FLASH FLOODING. SLIGHT CHANGE HAS BEEN NOTED ON 06Z GFS…AS IT LIMITS THE INLAND INTRUSION OF THIS INITIAL

CONVERGENCE BAND AND ALIGNS IT PERILOUSLY CLOSE TO SHORE … THEN LIFTS IT NORTH DROPPING A LARGER MAJORITY OF THE RAIN IN THE OCEAN. CERTAINLY NOT CONFIDENT ENOUGH BASED ON ONE MODEL RUN … BUT THIS INDICATES HOW DANGEROUSLY CLOSE THIS SITUATION CAN EVOLVE FROM SERIOUS FLOODING TO A LESSER THREAT.”

In layperson’s terms, what the forecaster is describing is a storm that the weather models can’t quite decide will sit right over the coast, which would cause flooding, or linger offshore, and dump into the ocean. The very good CBS/Channel 5 radar has a good picture of how things look now: There is lots of rain happening, but mostly just off the coast; unlike many storms here, the rain is moving from south to north instead of west to east (a result of the storm center being well off the coast and the Bay Area being on the “right” side of ; the place that’s experiencing the heaviest soaking so far is north of the Golden Gate, on Point Reyes, not far to the south as described in the discussion. I’m hoping we’ll dodge the worst of this.

[Update/Saturday night: We did get a good long soaking all through the Bay Area from midmorning Friday until nearly midnight. Around here and in San Francisco, where I was working, lots of water running in the gutters and sometimes ponding on the streets and freeways. A little more excitement to the north of here in Marin County, where creeks rose very quickly and threatened to flood out some of the tonier suburban downtowns; nothing came of that threat, though, aside from some streamside gawkers and excited newscasters. Stopped raining late, and then we had an unexpectedly beautiful, warm day today; a long bike ride involving the randonneuring freaks got a miraculous break in the weather, too — instead of 125 miles in a windy downpour, the riders, however many there were, got the mildest, friendliest conditions for a January brevet in several years. And then tonight, after the ride was done, it started raining again.]

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Pedestrian Matters

7th Avenue and W. 34th Street

Early last week, we were in New York. I spent most of one hot afternoon at the American Museum of Natural History, on the Upper West Side, and afterward decided to walk down to Penn Station — nearly three miles on the wandering out-of-towner’s course I took — to meet Kate, who was coming in on a commuter train from New Jersey.

Always striking about New York: the number of people on the street, at all hours; and of course, the effect is magnified at the end of the work day as you go from the placid precincts of Central Park West toward Midtown. A commuter crowd mobbed the area around 7th Avenue and West 34th Street, a block up from the station, all going home to the suburbs.

Standing at that corner (above), I was conscious of something I’d been seeing all along my walk: The New York pedestrian’s habit of stepping off the curb when waiting for the lights to change, crowding right up to the traffic lane in some cases getting ready to hustle across against the light if there was an opening in traffic — unlikely on 7th Avenue, not so unusual on less-busy side streets. For a visitor, the New York walking style seems aggressive, disorderly and even dangerous. But it is fast: The only places I got stopped along the way were major intersections. The key is keeping your eyes open and remembering that the drivers you’re looking at are aggressive, too, and that the laws of physics are against you in a collision, even if you think you have the right of way.

It’s a fundamentally different way of street thinking from the prevalent attitude in the Bay Area. In California, state law gives pedestrians virtually universal right of way (with the obvious exceptions: against red lights, for instance). The law aims to make it safer for pedestrians to cross the street, but its effect actually goes well beyond that: It has created a sense of righteous entitlement among pedestrians, who by their behavior apparently believe that all considerations — courtesy, common sense, drivers’ reaction times, night-time visibility, the aforementioned laws of physics — have been suspended by statute.

Yeah, a less car-centric world would be a much better place in many ways. And we ought to make the streets safe for everyone who uses them. But planting the idea in people’s heads that they can step off the curb into the path of a speeding car — and that the car will stop, damn it — promotes naivete and selfishness more than safety.

Some suggestive stats: According to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration numbers, in eight of the 10 years between 1995 and 2004, the most recent statistical year available, New York state had a lower pedestrian fatality rate than California. On the other hand, New York appears to have a much higher percentage of pedestrians killed at intersections — consistently on the order of 40 to 50 percent of the state total compared to California’s 25 percent or so. For the past several reported years, “improper crossing of roadway or intersection” is the top listed factor in pedestrian fatalities in New York; in California, that factor is in a dead heat for No. 1 with “failure to yield right of way” (which I take to mean pedestrians’ failure to yield).

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