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The Baytown ExxonMobil refinery is located about 25 miles east of Houston. Built in 1920, it is the company’s largest oil refinery in the United States. According to the company’s website, it produces 584,000 barrels of crude oil per day.
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In 2019, another fire broke out at the facility. It injured 37 people.
The Sheriff’s office has asked residents to avoid the area around the facility, but no other evacuation or shelter-in-place orders have been issued.
The bar’s proximity to a busy bike path and the recent incident in Waller County could have been good reasons (among many others) to refrain from making the “joke,” but Truck Yard went ahead anyway, and then proceeded to display its marquee sign on the internet — which is both public and subject to significantly more criticism.
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The negative backlash from the cycling groups was enough to prompt the business to limit social media users’ ability to engage with the bar online, per Eater, and Truck Yard issued the apology pictured below on Monday:
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The “joke” message has since been taken down and replaced, and pictures of Sunday’s marquee have been scrubbed from the bar’s social media channels.
In this case, the passenger wasn’t inebriated on to-go alcohol from an airport concession stand. At this time, the cause of the outburst is unknown. The flight diverted to Honolulu, where it landed safely. American Airlines says that it put passengers on other flights or put them in hotel rooms.
While the flight attendant is seen unraveling a large strip of duct tape in the video, American Airlines says that the teen was retrained with flexible handcuffs, not duct tape. But how do flight attendants get to the point where they need to tape or cuff a passenger down?
Some flight attendants spoke to Business Insider and indicated that the first step in calming a passenger is trying to talk it out:
Before using any physical restraints, flight attendants are trained to de-escalate situations by verbally calming down aggressive passengers, one Chicago-based flight attendant said. (Some flight attendants asked to keep their name and airline anonymous to speak freely. Insider confirmed the employment of each flight attendant prior to publishing.)
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If that passenger becomes a danger to the flight or other passengers and de-escalation tactics have failed, then the attendants may choose to restrain them for the remainder of the flight. But, as the Points Guy notes, it’s not as simple as grabbing some tape or zip ties:
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) explained to TPG that restraining a passenger is only ever used as a last resort, where all other methods of de-escalating a situation have failed.
“Before restraining a passenger, the cabin crew will always seek the permission of the Commander (Captain) who will give their authorization if they perceive a risk to the safety of the flight, the crew or other persons onboard.” Katherine Kaczynska, a spokesperson from IATA said.
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Restraining a passenger also comes with a potential danger. The Federal Aviation Administration says that for an aircraft to be certified, it has to be able to be evacuated in an emergency within 90 seconds. A passenger duct taped or zip tied to a seat complicates that, as they now need to be unrestrained while everyone is dealing with an emergency.
As of August 8, the FAA has received 3,810 reports of unruly passengers and is conducting 655 investigations. The regulator says 112 of those investigations have resulted in fines.
Georgia governor Brian Kemp suspended driving tests in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, instead granting new licenses to people without requiring them to jump through any hoops. But despite warnings that it would be a disaster, we haven’t seen any massive fallout from it. That prompted Jalopnik alum Aaron Gordon to offer a very controversial pitch: abolish the driving test.
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https://jalopnik.com/your-driver-s-license-has-nothing-to-do-with-safety-1847114268
It seems almost counterintuitive at first, but Gordon notes that there’s no real research that correlates driving tests to increased road safety; instead, the tests mostly bolster the driving education industry but don’t appear to have any measurable impact on actual performance on the road. Gordon also points out the inequalities that come into play. From his Vice article:
Fixing the way we think about driving tests, and abolishing them altogether, is important for more than just having fewer people die on U.S. roads. It is emblematic of the larger American struggle to make our institutions fairer. The implication of earning a driver’s license is that the license can be suspended or revoked for driving like a maniac. And, indeed, they can be, including for dangerous behavior like drunk driving. But such cases are the exception, not the rule. One study looking at New Jersey licenses found that in 2018, 5.5 percent of all licenses were suspended, but a whopping 91 percent of those suspended licenses were for non-driving-related reasons such as failure to pay fines. By and large, licenses are suspended as a punishment not for driving poorly, but for being poor. It is an extension of our national policy of criminalizing poverty and using traffic enforcement as an excuse to extract fines to pay for a bloated criminal justice system financed through those very fines. And by having a suspended license, it is harder for that person to get and hold a job, a necessary prerequisite to paying the very fines that resulted in the license suspension in the first place.
When I saw Gordon’s headline, I jumped immediately to my own conclusion: no. We need to keep the tests. How are we supposed to regulate who gets on the roads? How do we prevent unsafe drivers from driving?
But as I read his story, I remembered one evening at my own driver’s training classes up in Michigan. After school, myself and two other girls were paired up for a long drive to the city that would teach us how to navigate things like roundabouts and highways, which we didn’t have in my smaller town. The problem was, it had started blizzarding. We’re talking near-whiteout conditions. We had to get this drive in, so we went anyway. It was terrifying, but we could just barely see one of the lines on the road, so it was deemed safe enough.
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Conditions were so poor that we didn’t make it to the highway. I had the first drive, then we swapped out to one of the other drivers. On the way home, we swapped to our final driver.
She was a mess. She was constantly driving into oncoming traffic, mistaking their road lines for hers. When our instructor corrected her, she’d alternate between screaming and bursting into tears before jerking over onto the side of the road. She put us into a spin, at which point she was ejected from the driver’s seat. I had to white-knuckle us the rest of the way home.
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That girl, though, still passed driver’s training, even though she also did poorly on her road sign tests. She then took her road test and got her license—”just barely,” she told us. She wrecked two cars in high school. As far as I know, she’s still driving today.
And she wasn’t the only one who questionably passed. I grew up in a poorer area, and even though we were supposed to take our driving test with the car we planned on driving regularly, test proctors would look the other way if you rented a nice car to bring in because your daily wouldn’t pass the basic inspection that ensured, y’know, your headlights worked. The test proctors were very arbitrary in their evaluations because they weren’t being paid all that much to spend a Saturday being driven around by a teenager. I bombed the parallel parking of my driving test, which was supposed to be an automatic failure, and I passed. I had a friend who aced everything but didn’t look to the right and left obviously enough at stop signs, so he failed. I had friends who just went to different proctors and DMVs until they got a proctor that just didn’t care.
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So I do think Gordon has a point. The driving test, as we know it, doesn’t do a whole lot for guaranteeing driver education or safety, especially if you can shop around for a lenient DMV or can bullshit your way into a license. After all, how many times have you stopped at a four-way intersection without a light and found out firsthand just how little people remember about driving etiquette?
Check out Gordon’s article, then let me know what you think. Are you convinced we should abolish the driving test? Do you have an alternative? Are you in favor of what we have now?
Let’s gather ‘round and pour one out for the semi full of exotics that lost its life on April 1, 2021 in Houston, Texas. I wish it was an April Fool’s Joke. The hauler, carrying a Ferrari SF90 Stradale and a 488 Spyder, was unable to cross a set of railroad tracks in time before it was absolutely creamed by the oncoming train.
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Everyone walked away fine without any fatalities or injuries, but the same can’t be said for the cars in the back of the hauler.
Moe Prince, a local who witnessed the crash, noted that the “the SF90 was fucked up… And I believe a Bentley. It was one of the cars where train struck it right in the middle. They didn’t pull it out,” as per Road & Track.
The investigation is still ongoing, but it appeared that the semi attempted to cross the train tracks and got stuck doing so, local paper The Leader reports. Despite the slow moving freight train, there wasn’t enough time to alert railroad officials to get them to slow it to a stop. The impact jackknifed the rig and pushed it a short distance from the intersection before coming to a halt, but it was enough to do the damage.
Road & Track reported that there were, among other cars, a dark-colored SF90 Stradale, a yellow 488 Spyder, a vintage white Porsche 911, and possibly a Bentley. The full contents of the truck, though, aren’t known. It only seems like the Stradale and the Bentley took the brunt of the hit, since those were likely the two vehicles closest to the point of impact.
Prince told Road & Track that it seemed the driver was unfamiliar with the area, which is what caused the accident. Whatever the case may be, it’s going to be a costly one—an SF90 Stradale alone clocks in at $625,000.
It’s happening too often. Someone spots a Tesla owner sleeping while motoring down the freeway, their car under the control of Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistance system. Next thing you know, it’s all over social media.
You may wonder how Tesla was able to release this product onto public roads. Are there no regulations covering such features? Isn’t this a safety issue? According to a report from the Los Angeles Times, it really breaks down to oversight from the government.
The Trump administration focused its efforts on rolling back fuel economy requirements. Its arguments for doing so was that cars would become both cheaper and safer. That didn’t happen, and it’s a mystery why Trump thought it would. One explanation is he didn’t know shit about cars.
Unfortunately, fuel economy and emissions control rollbacks were just about the only things Trump’s NHTSA did get around to doing. NHTSA’s important regulatory oversight work stalled for four years with no director at the helm. Now, the Biden administration has a backlog of neglected tasks to dig through. As the Times report shows, NHTSA has been pretty much hands-off when it comes to driver-assistance systems, specifically when it comes to Tesla’s misleadingly named Autopilot:
Officially, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration discourages such behavior, running a public awareness campaign last fall with the hashtag #YourCarNeedsYou. But its messaging competes with marketing of Tesla itself, which recently said it will begin selling a software package for “Full Self Driving” — a term it has used since 2016 despite objections from critics and the caveats in the company’s own fine print — on a subscription basis starting this quarter.
That NHTSA has so far declined to confront Tesla directly on the issue is firmly in character for an agency that took a hands-off approach to a wide range of matters under the Trump administration.
”Inactive,” is how Carla Bailo, chief executive of the Center for Automotive Research, summed up NHTSA’s four previous years. “Dormant,” said Jason Levine, executive director at the Center for Auto Safety. “No direction,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a professor and expert in autonomous vehicle law at the University of South Carolina.
The agency went the full Trump term without a Senate-confirmed administrator, leaving deputies in charge. It launched several safety investigations into Tesla and other companies, but left most unfinished. “A massive pile of backlog” awaits the Biden administration,” said Paul Eisenstein, publisher of The Detroit Bureau industry news site.
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While NHTSA has been absent on a number of issues, its lack of oversight on autonomous driving is perhaps the biggest. The Times says Level 2 autonomy is the biggest safety challenge since Ralph Nader’s Unsafe At Any Speed. Silly Nader references aside, the Times does have a point.
How to deal with emerging autonomous driving technologies is a long term issue. But one thing is for sure, the way Tesla uses its customers as beta testers raises alarm bells with experts.
Whoever takes charge must balance the long-term potential for next-generation cars to reduce pollution, traffic and greenhouse gases against the near-term risks of deploying buggy new technologies at scale before they’re fully vetted. In the “move fast and break things” style of Silicon Valley, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk has embraced those risks.
While other driverless car developers — from General Motors’ Cruise, to Ford’s Argo AI, to Amazon’s Zoox, to Alphabet’s Waymo, to independent Aurora and more — all take an incremental, slow rollout approach with professional test drivers at the wheel, Tesla is “beta testing” its driverless technology on public roads using its customers as test drivers.
Musk said last month that Tesla cars will be able to fully drive themselves without human intervention on public roads by late this year. He’s been making similar promises since 2016. No driverless car expert or auto industry leader outside Tesla has said they think that’s possible.
While law professor Smith is impressed by Tesla’s “brilliant” ability to use Tesla drivers to collect millions of miles of sensor data to help refine its software, “that doesn’t excuse the marketing, because this is in no way full self-driving. There are so many things wrong with that term. It’s ludicrous. If we can’t trust a company when they tell us a product is full self-driving, how can we trust them when they tell us a product is safe?”
The Detroit Bureau’s Eisenstein is even harsher. “Can I say this off the record?” he said. “No, let me say it on the record. I’m appalled by Tesla. They’re taking the smartphone approach: Put the tech out there, and find out whether or not it works. It’s one thing to put out a new IOS that caused problems with voice dictation. It’s another thing to have a problem moving 60 miles per hour.”
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A late 2016 NHTSA directive under the Obama administration considered “predictable abuse” as a potential defect in autonomous driving tech deployment. Unfortunately, under Trump NHTSA did nothing. For context, the directive came about a year after the software that enabled Autopilot driver assistance in the Tesla Model S was released.
The inaction of NHTSA drew ire from another federal safety agency, the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB — which is most known for its investigations of plane and train incidents — blamed predictable abuse for a 2018 crash where a Tesla Model X crashed into a concrete divider.
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Part of the issue is the lack of transparency from Musk and Tesla regarding how safe the Autopilot driver-assist system is as well as a lack of data in general. From the Times:
Musk regularly issues statistics purporting to show that Autopilot and Full Self Driving are on balance safer than cars driven by humans alone. That could be, but even if Musk’s analysis is sound — several statisticians have said it is not — the data is proprietary to Tesla, and Tesla has declined to make even anonymized data available to university researchers for independent confirmation. Tesla could not be reached — it disbanded its media relations department last year.
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In 2019, after a series of Tesla battery fires, NHTSA launched a probe of the company’s software and battery management systems. Later, the agency said allegedly defective cooling tubes that could cause leaks were being investigated as well. At the time, the agency did not make public information it held about battery cooling tubes prone to leakage that were installed in early versions of the Model S and Model X.
Since late 2016, many Tesla drivers had been complaining about “whompy wheels” on their cars — a tendency for the suspension system to break apart, which sometimes caused a wheel to collapse or fall off the car. Chinese drivers lodged similar complaints, and last October, China authorities ordered a recall of 30,000 Model S and Model X cars. A Tesla lawyer wrote NHTSA a letter arguing no U.S. recall was necessary and blamed driver “abuse” for the problems in China. NHTSA said in October it is “monitoring the situation closely.”
Four days before Biden’s inauguration, NHTSA announced that defects in Tesla touchscreen hardware can make the car’s rear-view camera go blank, among other problems. Rather than order a recall, NHTSA said it asked Tesla to voluntarily recall approximately 158,000 Model S and Model X cars for repair. On Feb. 2, Tesla agreed to recall 135,000 of those cars.
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Check out the full Los Angeles Times report, it’s well worth the read!
