Want to feel better about your own commute?

If so, then check out IBM’s 2011 Survey of Commuter Pain. Researchers interviewed more than eight thousand commuters in twenty cities on six continents to get the details about their daily drive to work. Results were compiled and compared, ranking these cities from best to worst in terms of how painful it is to commute to a job.

Of the 20 cities in the survey, Mexico City was ranked as the most painful city for a daily commute. The highest ranking USA city was Los Angeles, but the survey also included New York City and Chicago.

“Commuter pain” on this survey is a combination of hours spent in traffic, gas prices, and stress felt by drivers. This is the fourth year that IBM has conducted the survey.

Here’s another Texas driver, making the rest of us so proud.

On August 14, Timothy Raines of Ft Worth was spotted driving erratically south of the TCU campus on a forklift, which was later revealed to have been stolen from Holiday Inn construction site at Rosedale Street and Forest Park Boulevard. According to the news account that followed, Raines had his dog along as a passenger and drank his beer as he drove along, even hurling empty cans at the police cars that followed.

Beers, dogs, stolen forklift, and running from the cops — there’s got to be a country song in there somewhere.

UTA student Nathan Lowery, also of Fort Worth, was driving south on South University Drive to get gas when he spotted the freewheeling forklift, made a U-turn, and whipped out his camera. As a result we have this wonderful video footage below.

View more videos at: http://nbcdfw.com.

In a later story, Fort Worth Police stated that Lowery and his roommate, who was riding along as a passenger, may face charges for violating traffic laws while putting themselves and the public in danger by following the chase.

Pay attention now, because there are a lot of states involved here.

On August 10, two Colorado police officers were driving through Goshen County, Wyoming on their way to a funeral for two officers recently killed in the line of duty in South Dakota. A volunteer fireman spotted the car, which was reportedly speeding, driving erratically, and using its emergency lights to pass other vehicles.

Goshen County Sheriff’s Capt. Brian Morehouse said he clocked the car going 57 mph in a 40 mph zone. After pulling them over, he smelled alcohol and found beer in a cooler inside the car. The officer driving was charged careless driving and speeding. His breathalyzer test revealed a BAC of .07, just under the legal limit of .08. As a result of this, he was charged with the misdemeanor DWUI instead of DUI.

Check out the local news coverage here.

On occasion, people complain that Comedy Guys dedicates so much time in its defensive driving classes to the dangerous combination of alcohol and moving vehicles. Well, law enforcement people hear about this more than you’ll hear in ten defensive driving classes, and still they can forget the risks and take stupid chances with their own and others’ lives and safety.

Over the holiday weekend, a New York motorcyclist willed in an accident while participating in the 11th annual ride protesting the New York law that requires motorcycle riders to wear helmets.

Phillip Contos, a New York truck driver and former US soldier, was taking part in the Independance Ride, an annual protest ride sponsored by the Syracuse, New York chapter of  ABATE, American Bikers Aimed Toward Education.  The group is not necessarily opposed to helmets; they protest instead laws that make their use mandatory.

The collision occurred after the 55-year-old Contos hit his brakes. His Harley-Davidson fishtailed out of control and hit a guardrail, sending Contos over the handlebars to land on his head. Medical experts have suggested that his life would have been saved had he been wearing helmet.

By the afternoon following the crash, Phillip Contos’s older brother Richard was already sick of getting calls from reporters, pointing out the irony of the death. Calling his brother “a rebel,” he told reporters that if his brother had it to do all over again, he’d probably still ride without a helmet.

Last week, GMAC Insurance announce the results of its 7th annual National Drivers Test, and the results are only slightly surprising to anyone who spends much time on the road, driving among their fellow Americans.

The survey polled over 5000 licensed drivers, between the ages of 16 to 65 and in all 50 states and DC. These drivers were asked 20 questions from state DMV tests, the same tests that prospective drivers take to get their license in the first place.

And roughly 18% of them couldn’t pass the test. That’s 36.9 million drivers on American roads who couldn’t get a license if they were taking the test today for the first time. 85% of those taking the test didn’t know what to do if approaching a steady yellow light, and 75% didn’t know what a safe following distance was. These are exactly the kinds of things that we cover in our defensive driving classes.

The low score is still something of an improvement over 2010. Last year, the average score was 76.2 which increased to 77.9 in 2011. Kansas continued to hold first place, with an average score of 82.9. Last place in 2010 went to New York, but the New Yorkers were bumped out of last place this year by Washington, DC, with an average score of 71.8 percent. Wyoming was the state with the lowest percentage of failures: only 1 of 20 (4.5 percent) failed the test

The test is still available at the GMAC website if you want to take the test for yourself.

Cadillac announced today that it would be ending its four-year absence from auto racing with its CTS-V Coupe. The car will be developed by the Michigan engineering firm Pratt & Miller.

Yesterday’s biggest driving story was the news release from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety regarding its study into how the varying heights of auto bumpers create damage in a collision that could have been prevented.

Specifically, the relative height between the bumper on a car with the bumper on an SUV, pickup, or minivan.

To quote Joe Nolan, the Institute’s chief administrative officer, “The problem is they don’t share the same bumper rules, and consumers end up paying the price.”

For this test, the people of the IIHS crashed cars and SUVs from the same manufacturer together and evaluated the cost of the resulting damage. A Nissan Sentra versus a Nissan Rogue. A Ford Escape versus a Ford Focus. Get the whole story here.

Of course, bumpers only reason for existing is to minimize collision damage to the less durable, more expensive parts of the vehicle — which often includes the nut that holds the wheel — and standardizing the height among the various kinds of motor vehicles on the road makes sense.

But it would be nice if, just sometimes, our government’s response to a driving danger would be to put better trained drivers on the road.

The Biggest Repair Bill: A Corolla hitting a RAV4 resulted in nearly
$10,000 in repairs. More than half of that was for the RAV4.

There are a lot of reasons why teen drivers can be considered unsafe.

New to driving, they don’t have the experience that many older drivers do. Often the young feel invulnerable, so they make take chances that older drivers won’t. Typically sociable, they travel in small groups, making it more likely that they will have noisy, distracting friends with them in the car. And because the part of the brain that makes it possible to evaluate risks doesn’t fully kick in until about 26, teenage drivers may think things like driving while texting or punching in a phone number seem like good ideas.

(In the interest of fairness, I should mention that too many adults do all of this stuff, too. I think maybe that for some people, the risk evaluating part of the brain never fully kicks in.)

So, as a group, teenagers are among the most dangerous drivers. But teenagers, as a group, are also as smart, resourceful, and self-interested as any other groups of people, which means they can be taught the habits and attitudes that will make them safer drivers.

And that’s the entire idea behind National Teen Driver Safety Week.

Begun in 2007 by the US Congress, the third week in October is set aside as a time to bring more attention to the dangers faced by and often caused by teenage drivers. Through school programs and special events, groups across the country take this week as an opportunity to educate new drivers about the real risks of the road and to better prepare them to handle those risks.

This year’s theme is Reducing Distractions. Distracted driving is the number 1 cause of collisions involving younger drivers, and auto collisions is the number 1 cause of death among adolescents. According to Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) Fatality Facts 2008: Teenagers, the fatality rate for drivers ages 16 to 19, based on miles driven, is four times higher than for drivers ages 25 to 69.

Whether it’s texting or cell phone calls or finding a song that isn’t lame or just friends talking constantly from the back seat, distractions are especially dangerous to teenage drivers. Driving is a complicated set of actions and awarenesses, requiring a great deal of concentration. And the less experience a driver has, the more concentration is needed. This makes distracted driving, dangerous to all drivers, even more dangerous to inexperienced teenage drivers.

ComedyGuys.com continues to make mobile defensive driving more fun and convenient for Texas drivers with their online defensive driving course for Google’s Android smartphone operating system.

Richardson, TX — Recently, Comedy Guys Defensive Driving made online defensive driving in Texas  more convenient by formatting the online version of their comedy driving safety course  for Apple’s iPhone and iPad. Not satisfied with making their online traffic school work with Apple’s mobile technology, ComedyGuys.com has now made the course compatible with Google’s new Android operating system for multiple smartphones and carriers.

After registering online, customers may take the course from any computer with Internet access or using their iPhone, iPad, and now Android smartphone. And because nothing is downloaded and all information is stored on Comedy Guys’ servers, switching back and forth among different devices is no problem.

“Time-wise, our online defensive driving course is flexible because people can login and out whenever they want,” says ComedyGuys’ Cash Cooper. “Now by making it available on mobile devices, our course is available wherever our customers are.”

Offering online defensive driving to mobile phones allows users to login when they have time to kill and no computer. Regardless of where a customer is — at their desk during lunch, on the treadmill at the health club, or on the bus or train ride home — as long as they have Internet access via their smartphone, they can work on the course, making defensive driving fit into their schedule instead of the other way round.

“A lot of our customers really like not having to sit at the computer,” Cooper adds. “They love the fact that they can take the course sitting in a lounge chair at Starbucks or even laying in bed. It really makes our course the most convenient in the defensive driving industry.”

“Having our course work on Apple’s iPhone and iPad is great, but we don’t want people to think we have a man crush on Steve Jobs. With the course working on Android phones, we are now able to deliver online defensive driving to customers of other mobile broadband providers. Sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile all have new Android phones.”

The company’s state approved defensive driving curriculum covers all required content for a Texas driving safety course, but Comedy Guys uses professional comedians to make the course more entertaining. Comedy writers wrote the original curriculum and the text for the online course, and comics appear in the video clips throughout the course.

In addition to the online course, ComedyGuys.com continues to offer Texas defensive driving courses in over 30 locations. A complete schedule of defensive driving classes is available at the Comedy Guys website or by calling 877-826-6339.

Getting a speeding ticket can cause all kinds of nasty stress and aggravation, but the good people who run the city government in Cambridge, Massachusetts want to counter the negative energy of getting a ticket with the beneficial karma of yoga.

The newly re-designed moving violation tickets in Cambridge now include relaxation instructions and even diagrams of calming yoga positions, so that after getting pulled over, drivers can channel any resulting feelings of anger and frustration out into the universe.

The 40,000 yoga parking tickets is part of a public art project created by artist-in-residence Daniel Peltz. The project also includes new street signs that explain traffic rules in creative ways;  a mural called “10,000 Excuses” featuring explanations offered up by ticketed drivers; and “soft-boots” that immobilize your car but without being so nasty about it.

So far, public reaction seems mixed, ranging from mild amusement to “how much of my tax money did they waste on this?”

Get the more complete story at BostonHerald.com.

This week, September 19-25, is National Child Passenger Safety Week, a week dedicated to raising awareness of the importance of having the proper child safety seat and using it correctly.

The number 1 cause of deaths for children between the ages of 3 and 14 are car crashes, and many of these deaths could be prevented by using the proper safety restraints every single time you put the child in the car.

Properly these seats can save children from injury and death. Between 1975 and 2008, 9000 children were saved by these seats. They can reduce the risk of fatal injury for children under 1 year old by 71% and by 54% for children between 1 and 4.

Buying the Right Child Safety Seat
The appropriate seat for each child depends on the child’s age and size, and the type of vehicle. You can get further advice from manufacturers or children’s stores, but here is a quick guide:

Infants should be secured in a rear-facing seat until at least one year old and 20 pounds. Recent research has shown that leaving the child in such a seat until they reach 23 months is the safest practice.

After the infant seat, move the child into a convertible child safety seat, one that can be positioned facing the rear and turned to face forward as the child grows. And if you’ve seen how kids can outgrow their shoes as you carry them from the shoe store to the car, you know how fast that growing can happen.

Until the child reaches the height/weight limits of the seat – usually 40-65lbs or 50 inches – they should ride in a forward-facing seat with a harness.

Beyond the limits of that seat, place the child in a booster seat. This will raise them up high enough to use the vehicle’s safety belts (and, incidentally, help to prevent road sickness by letting them see out the front window). Just like an adult passenger, the lap belt needs to go across the upper thighs and the shoulder belt across the rib cage and over the shoulder.

Once a child outgrows the booster seat, they should sit in the back seat and wear the lap-and-shoulder belt. If necessary, equip your safety belt with a belt extender so that it fits the child properly. No child should ride in the front seat until they reach the age of 13.

Using the Child Safety Seat Properly
The NHTSA estimates that 75% of parents do not properly use their child restraints. Improper use makes them far less effective at keeping your child safe in the event of a collision.

Whenever you purchase a child safety seat, take the time to get properly trained in its installation and use.

Local law enforcement departments have especially trained experts that can assess the safety of your child’s safety seat and instruct you in its proper use. To find a police child safety seat inspector in your ZIP code, click here.

The best motivation for using a child safety restraint is, of course, concern for your child, but there are also legal considerations.

Under the 2009 changes to Texas law, any child under 8 years old and less than 4 feet 9 inches tall must be secured in a child safety seat, according to the manufacturer’s instructions regarding the use of the seat. If the child is younger than eight years old, BUT they are already 4’9” tall, they are not legally required to be in a child safety seat system. If a child is eight years old or older, and not yet 4’9” tall, they are not legally required to be in a child safety seat system.

Anyone convicted under this misdemeanor offense may be fined from $25 for a first offense and no more than $250 for subsequent offenses.

This morning the winner of the three-year $10 million Automotive X Prize, a contest in designing a vehicle capable of getting 100 miles per gallon, was announced. First prize of $5 million went to the Very Light Car created by the Edison2 team of Lynchburg, Virginia.

Criteria for winning cars also included the viability of commercial production, traveling 200 miles on a single tank or charge, and passing a variety of tests: speed trials, safety tests and measurement of engine power in the a dynamometer chamber at Argonne National Laboratory. On July 27, an efficiency and performance run was made at a two-mile Michigan International Speedway with the vehicles making 50 laps maintaining a speed between 45 and 70 miles per hour in a chicane along the backstretch.

Contest entrants were divided into two classes: gas-powered Mainstream cars, which was for four-seat vehicles, and Alternative fuel vehicles, which had two divisions: two-seats side-by-side and two seats configured in a tandem position, or one in front of the other.

The Winning Car: Edison2′s Very Light Car
Weighing in at 830 pounds, the Edison2 was the only non-electric and the only four-seat car to reach the final stage of the competition.

The car has a wheelbase of 100-inches, a chassis of welded steel tubing, and a body shape that looks something like a propeller-less helicopter flying upside-down and backwards. The single-cylinder motorcycle engine mounted in the rear creates 40 horsepower, burning a 85% ethanol/15% gasoline mix.

The Edison 2 team included top race-car designers with Formula, Indy Car, and ALMS series experience. The fabrictators and mechanics have worked for racing teams from events like the 24 Hours of Daytona and Indianapolis 500. The team was founded and funded by Virginia real estate developer Oliver Kuttner. The team’s cars were driven by Emanuele Pirro, five-time winner of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and Brad Jaeger, a Vanderbilt University engineering graduate and veteran of the Firestone Indy Lights series.

Edison2 began with four entrants, two in each class, including one in each of the Alternative divisions. Only the Mainstream cars made it far enough in the competition to achieve the equivalent of 102.5 mpg on E85 ethanol. Mechanically identical, the two Mainstream cars performed very differently during trials, which the team attributed to weather conditions and other factors.

Other Competitors
The winning car was chosen from a field that began with 136 cars in 2007. That group was eventually narrowed to 41 then 24 and finally nine before the final three winners were chosen.

In the New York Times, X Prize Foundation chair Peter Diamandis explained it this way: “When we set out to design an X Prize, and were trying to meet that intersection between audacious and achievable, it’s a difficult target to hit. I think we hit it by virtue of the fact that we did have teams able to achieve the objective, but we didn’t have 50 teams able to achieve the objective.”

Additional prizes of $2.5 million each to the Wave II, a battery-electric vehicle from Li-Ion Motors of Mooresville, N.C. and the E-Tracer, a battery-electric, enclosed motorcycle-like vehicle from Peraves of Winterthur, Switzerland.

For an brief comparison of the contest entrants, see this article.

Contest History
The contest was the creation of the X Prize Foundation of Playa Vista, California – the same people who sponsored the $10 million Ansari Space X Prize that led to the creation of SpaceShipOne. Progressive Insurance sponsored the  contest, deducting the prize money from its advertising budget over a number of years.

Sources: Consumer Reports and The New York Times

— Wes Williams

ComedyGuys.com continues to expand mobile defensive driving to make it more convenient and enjoyable for Texas drivers by launching their online defensive driving course for Apple’s iPhone and the new iPad.

Recently, Comedy Guys Defensive Driving made online defensive driving more convenient by formatting their comedy version of their online course for Apple’s iPhone. Now, they continue to innovate in the industry by making the course compatible with Apple’s new iPad. After registering online, customers may take the course from any computer with Internet access or their iPhone and now the iPad. And because nothing is downloaded and all information is stored on Comedy Guys’ servers, switching back and forth among different devices is no problem.

“Time-wise, our online defensive driving course is flexible because people can login and out whenever they want. Now by making it available on mobile devices, our course is available wherever our customers are,” says ComedyGuys’ Cash Cooper. “Our mobile defensive driving course allows users to login when they have time to kill and no computer. It really makes our course the most convenient in the defensive driving industry.”

ComedyGuys.com uses a combination of text and video to deliver its defensive driving course. Comedy, defensive driving, and convenience make Comedy Guys the choice of the new mobile population. Adapting the course to the iPhone and iPad was simplified by the fact that the company created its video content without using Flash, which can create problems with some Web browsers and doesn’t work on the iPhone or iPad.

But the Comedy Guys are quick to point out that adapting their driving safety course to the iPad is just one more step in making defensive driving mobile. They’re already at work making mobile defensive driving available on other smart phones as well.

The state approved curriculum covers all required content for a driving safety course, but Comedy Guys uses professional comedians to make the course more entertaining. Comedy writers worked on the original curriculum and the text for the online course, and comics appear in the video clips throughout the course

The company sees this iPhone and iPad version of its online driving safety course as the next improvement in driving safety classes. “Combining defensive driving with stand up comedy was a great idea. People learn a lot more when they’re not snoring,” said Comedy Guys founder Mark Cooper. “Putting defensive driving online made it so much easier for busy people to fit into a busy schedule. Now by offering our class on the iPhone and iPad makes even more convenient.”

In addition to the online course, ComedyGuys.com continues to offer Texas defensive driving courses in over 30 locations. A complete schedule of defensive driving classes is available at the Comedy Guys website or by calling 877-826-6339.

In a July 13th story, the Online Wall Street Journal released unofficial data from the NHTSA the 3000+ complaints of sudden acceleration in Toyotas that plagued the country and filled the news media earlier this year.

And if the NHTSA’s preliminary data proves accurate, the culprit was more often pedal confusion than any kind of flaw in the design/construction of the vehicles themselves. In the cars examined so far by NHTSA, which has teamed up with NASA for the research, many of them show indications that the brakes were not applied prior to the crashes, but that the gas pedal was floored.

Once again, this is all speculation based on incomplete and unofficial data so far: not actual proven results. Don’t expect a final report of the NHTSA investigation for months yet.

Adding fuel to the speculation is the fact that in November 2009, Toyota announced a recall of almost 4 million vehicles, and three months later there was a rapid increase in the number of complaints filed with the NHTSA. (See our spiffy chart for a visualization of this increase.)

This raises a question: if the problem was actually drivers hitting the gas instead of the brake, how many of them did it because of confusion and how many did it to make some money?

To read the original story and see a video clip of an interview with WSJ’s Michael Ramsey, click here.

If you’ve yelled that some drivers shouldn’t even be on the road, here’s some vindication for you.

20% of  US drivers couldn’t pass the written test if they had to take it today, according to the 4th annual  GMAC Insurance National Drivers test. After researchers polled more than 5,000 drivers in all fifty states, their data showed that as many as 38 million drivers in the USA don’t know what they need to to get the driver’s license they already have in their pockets.

The poll consisted of 20 questions from each state’s DMV written test. The average score of all participants was 76.2%, down somewhat from 2009′s average score of 76.6%.

Compared on a state-by-state basis, Kansas drivers scored the highest, with an average score of 82.3%. New York came in the last with 70%.  Texas was part of the three-way tie for 18th place, with Michigan and Vermont.

If you’d like to see how you compare, take the 2010 driving test for yourself.

Other details from the report:

• Older is better. Drivers 35 and over are most likely to pass the test.
• Gender is something of an issue: 20% of female participants would fail the test, compared to 13% of the males.
• Some test items are widely known. 98% of those polled knew the correct response to solid yellow lines,  hydroplaning, flashing lights on an approaching vehicle.

DISTRACTED DRIVING ISSUES
A second aspect of the poll questioned people about their multi-tasking while behind the wheel, with some frightening results.

Roughly 25% of the drivers in the poll admitted to driving while eating, talking on a cell phone, or adjusting their radios or iPods.

Only 5% of drivers admitted to texting while driving, but in a study where subject “self report” on behavior, some lying to make themselves look better is always possible. Even if the 5% number is accurate, that is still almost 10 million drivers on the road who are sending text messages.

“The really sad thing is that you see this more and more in young drivers,” added Wade Bontrager, senior vice president of GMAC Insurance. “They are not only the least experienced, but also need to pay the most attention to the road.”

CNNMoney.com has reported on this test and even added a very cool interactive map: click on the unwise behavior of your choice and see how the various states measure up against each other.