Uber—not a bus company—has proposed a formula for optimization of curb space that makes buses look pretty good:

(quoting directly from the article)

Activity/(Time x Space)

“Activity” is the number of passengers using the curb space by a specific mode, “time” is the duration of their usage, and “space” is the total amount of curb footage dedicated to that use.

Here’s the example that the consultants use in their report, where a 20-foot length of curb is used for four hours as a parking spot by a single car carrying two people:

2 passengers/(4 hours x 20 feet) = .025 passengers/hour-feet, or 0.5 passengers per hour per 20 feet of curb

But if that space is instead used as part of an 80-foot bus stop serving 100 people in that four-hour block, the equation looks like this:

100 passengers/(4 hours x 80 feet) = .3125 passengers/hour-feet, or 6.25 passengers served per hour per 20 feet of curb

Clearly, the bus stop is a better use of public space. And naturally, those Uber cars that don’t take up curb parking look good, too. No surprise there, considering the source.

John Gagliardi is dead, which means that the Nick Saban school of coaching just got a little stronger. That’s a tragedy

My antipathy toward football is cresting (just search for “football” in this site and you’ll see why). But who can argue with a philosophy like this one?

“Gagliardi essentially preached a philosophy of anti-coaching, one that prized self-reliance and self-motivation and abhorred cruelty and authoritarianism. These were not bullshit, repackaged, supposedly out-of-the-box ideas like you find coming out of Silicon Valley. Gagliardi’s philosophy was deeply HUMAN, and deeply trusting. It also happened to be highly effective, so much so that similar techniques are now widely used in parenting books, academic teaching, and other fields.”

One thing the best coaches I’ve had did well—in sports, medicine, music, or other—was to make me feel good about what I was doing. They made me feel good about the process of improvement, no matter my starting point in terms of skill. They essentially told me, “I know you’re a person who tries hard. Let me help you direct that effort in the way that will get the most out of your foundational ability.”

A Texas neurosurgeon was so bad at his job that he got life in prison

When I was a resident, a local doc prescribed so many narcotics to so many patients at such outrageous doses that admitting one of his patients was a near certainty on any overnight call shift. But what did the guy in wasn’t that he was committing malpractice on a daily basis; it was that he improperly supervised his wife as a mid-level provider, leading to money laundering and conspiracy convictions.

We in medicine do a bad job of policing our own. The surgeon who body-checked Dr. Death away from the operating table in Texas deserves major credit.

On a lighter note, What Bars? lets you compare the shape, drop/rise, and weight of a few dozen different handlebars