Thirty-five years after Saigon changed it name, Ho Chi Minh City is a busy, modern metropolis. Rob Whitworth produced this time-lapse video.

Everyone who has visited Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam knows part of the magic (love it or hate it) is in the traffic. Ever since I first set foot in HCMC I have been captivated by the cities energy. Saigon is a city on the move unlike anything I have experienced before which I wanted to capture and share.

The music is “Mondo ’77″ by Looper. -via Arbroath

A year ago, we told you about artist John Morse and his Roadside Haiku project in Atlanta. Now his talents have been commissioned for traffic signs in New York City! The New York City Department of Transportation has installed a collection of curbside signs written in haiku along with graphics designed by John Morse. The seventeen-syllable poetry warns drivers, pedestrians, and bikers to watch for safety hazards. Some also have QR codes. See more of them at core77. Link -via Metafilter

Deputy Ryan Swartz of Huron County, Michigan responded to a call about a car hitting a deer Friday night. The small doe just stood there dazed, like a deer in the headlights… well, not like, because that’s exactly what she was. Swartz got out of his car to shoo the animal off the road before someone hit it again, but the doe still didn’t move. So the deputy did what he had to do. After about 25 minutes, the deer took off into the woods. Link -via Arbroath

Forget traffic cops! The traffic situation in Caracas, Venezuela is so bad that the mayor called in the heavy guns: traffic mimes.

You read that right:

A sort of silent shame has cropped up in South American cities, as officials plead with both drivers and pedestrians to obey traffic laws by using the antics of hired mimes.

And why not? Nearly everyone looks at a mime, especially when dressed in a brightly colored getup while eagerly making fun of people on the side of a busy street. The latest effort has about 120 mimes on the downtown streets of Venezuela's capital, Caracas, making a (silent) scene any time a driver or pedestrian disobeys a traffic rule.

Link (Photo: Ariana Cubillos)

Firstly, the ‘date of offence’ is listed as the 23rd of June 1974 with the time being at or around half past six in the evening. This is of grave concern to me because I was not issued a drivers license until sometime in 1990 and I have no desire to be charged with driving while not legally licensed. I do not have a clear recollection of very much at all before I was three and a half years old, so I rang Mum to see if she remembered what I was doing that day. She said that – coincidentally – I was born that day!!

Mum mentioned that I was born at around five o’clock in the evening on that day in Porirua, which is not far from Wellington. She also said Porirua was a bustling suburb of young, low-income people who were trying to get ahead. Back in the 70′s, people were coming to terms with oil shocks, high-inflation and wage freezes, but that’s not important right now.

There’s more to his entertaining letter. And how did this episode turn out? Find out the final disposition of the case at Letters of Note. Link

How bad is traffic right now across the United States? Thanks to Audi, we now have Road Frustration Index, a real-time map of how frustrated drivers in your city are, at any given moment (all I can say is "calm down, Sacramento, SF & LA!"): Link - via FastCompany

“A slug was certainly the last thing I was expecting to have caused the problem.

“We do not know how long the slug had been there.

Unfortunately, it was dead by the time we found it, so we were unable to question it.

“Sadly, you just can’t legislate for a rogue slug trying to take out Darlington’s traffic system.”

The control box will be sealed to keep other critters out. Link -via Arbroath

Think you've got a bad commute? IBM feels your pain. The tech giant surveyed over 8,000 commuters in 20 cities around the world to find the city with the unenviable title of having the worst commute on Earth:

According to IBM, the cities with the most "commuter pain"--hours spent in traffic, high price of gas, high stress, etc.--include Shenzen, Beijing, and Nairobi. The least painful commutes take place in Chicago, London, and Montreal. Overall, there has been a decrease in traffic since IBM first conducted its survey four years ago, largely because of high fuel prices and weak economies.

Link

Authorities said there is no cause for concern.

“We want to assure all citizens of Flagstaff that there is no problem with rogue pandas,” said Lt. Ken Koch with the Flagstaff Police Department.

He does, however, encourage anybody who spots a member of the endangered species roaming Flagstaff streets to call the police department.

The sign, which had been altered in the middle of the night, was corrected by 11 AM. No suspects have been identified. The good news is that the publicity may cause motorists to read electronic signs more carefully in the future. Link -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Jake Bacon/Arizona Daily Sun)

He told police he’d snapped up the plastic life-size model at a local flea market but strapped it into his front passenger seat because he thought it would be damaged in the boat.

A police spokesman said: ‘It was only when we stopped the car that we realised it was a British right hand drive car – and the skeleton was therefore in the passenger seat.

“We could not make any charges against him as it is not illegal to have a plastic skeleton in your car.”

Link -via Arbroath

When I visit northern Minnesota, I always encounter a road that in midsummer becomes classically “washboard.”  The county sends out a road grader to smooth it and give it a new crown, and a few weeks later it’s a washboard again.

Minnesotastan looked up the physics of why this happens. The explanation includes a video that led to the discussion of the word “widdershins” in the comments. Link

(Image credit: David C. Mays)

It seems like everything you hear on the news is bad, but over on Cracked, you can finally read some good news. While there are seven things listed there, the one that makes me the most excited is the fact that traffic fatalities are the lowest they’ve been since 1949. Go safety!

Link

The animal was thrown over the top of the car, peeling back the bonnet and shattering the windscreen. The car smashed into a pole which caused a power surge to race along the wires into the farmer’s house.

The same surge blew up the cowshed meter board and set it on fire. However, it melted a water line directly above which extinguished the blaze.

The driver was not seriously injured. Link -via Fark

A time-lapse video from a security camera reveals a game in which the goal is to escape a parking lot. Why didn’t they drive through the grass? -via Buzzfeed

One witness said: “As the car drove off, the boat just stayed there and the driver didn’t seem to even notice. The other drivers were pretty shocked, but police caught the guy who’d been towing it and escorted him back so he could tow it away.”

Link -via Arbroath

The camera company, Optotraffic, uses a sensor that detects any vehicle exceeding the speed limit by 12 or more mph, then takes two photos of it for identification purposes. The photos are mailed to violators, along with a $40 ticket.

For each ticket, Mr. Foreman digitally superimposed the two photos – taken 0.363 seconds apart from a stationary point, according to an Optotraffic time stamp – creating a single photo with two images of the vehicle.

Using the vehicle’s length as a frame of reference, Mr. Foreman then measured its distance traveled in the elapsed time, allowing him to calculate the vehicle’s speed. In every case, he said, the vehicle was not traveling fast enough to get a ticket.

So far the judges have agreed.

A representative for the company that installed the cameras (and which receives a portion the fines they generate) said that the vehicles’ speeds are measure before the pictures are taken. Foreman said he doubted the cars slowed that much afterward, since the pictures do not show brakes lights on. Link -via Fark

(Image credit: Rod Lamkey Jr./The Washington Times)

Someone handy with Photoshop subverted an advertisement (photo by: Carlton Reid [Flickr]) for a satnav gadget into a call to ride bikes to work. The downside of that, obviously, is that you’d have to ride in snow (like the photo shows above).

“We contacted other forces with no success and then asked for the ANPR systems to be activated to see if anyone spotted the number plate CF53 BHE, the car in which Mr Bellazrak was known to have been when he left Gatwick for the 70 mile journey home.

“We were surprised to discover that ANPR cameras had recorded him in Bracknell, Wokingham, Burnham and High Wycombe – all presumably attempts at finding his way from Gatwick to Wiltshire.

“The last ANPR ‘hit’ we had showed him at about 6pm on Christmas eve in Hiugh Wycombe but then the trail went cold again,” she added.

On Christmas day, a CCTV camera recorded his license plate number in Oxford, where police were able to flag him down. He was reunited with his family. It is not yet known whether Bellazrak drove around the clock or stopped at night. Link -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Flickr user Jeff Van Campen)

Isle of tune is a music sequencer that’s as visual as it is aural. You build a virtual roadway and line it with objects that make sounds as your cars drive past them. It could be fun to build, but I never got past watching the landscapes that others have built. They can be quite hypnotic! Link -Thanks Jim Hall!

It was during his time as a trooper that Riggs conceived the idea of the “yield” sign, and he began developing it while attending Chicago’s Northwestern Traffic Institute in 1939.

He spent more than a decade experimenting with the sign, according to the Tulsa Police Department’s history book. His goal was a sign that would not only control traffic at an intersection but would also attach liability in a collision if one driver failed to yield.

The sign was a hit, especially among women.

…engineers in Dallas were pleasantly surprised by how grateful women were for the signs, the article said. Some women were apparently afraid to stop at night, so a yield sign helped them feel safe from roadside prowlers.

Until today, the only thing I knew about “yield” signs was that old joke with the punch line, “Of course I yield! I yield and yield, but they kept coming anyway!” Link -Thanks, Michael Mason!

The badger had been run over and killed more than a week earlier but council staff had failed to collect it.
As a result a team of line painters came across the roadkill in the centre of the highway as they daubed double white lines on an S-bend.

Rather than clearing the obstruction they stopped around 1ft short of the creature, walked past it and then continued the lines on the other side.

Link – via Fortean Times

“I knew it was wide enough, I knew it was straight enough. There wasn’t any wires, and I didn’t see many overpasses,” Vogt tells Asylum. He reasoned that since the traffic was still light, there would be enough space between the cars that they could slow down and let him in.

His hastily concocted plan worked perfectly. He even managed to pull his Cessna to the side of the road, although the inevitable rubbernecking — completely justified in this case — still blocked traffic a mile-and-a-half in both directions.

Link with video from CBS (which is also responsible for the photo.)

This past week, drivers in Samoa had to switch from driving on the right side of the road to driving on the wrong, er, left side. Since the switch was relatively sudden, all the buses now open onto the middle of the street! The Samoans say the switch was to end their dependence on American-made vehicles. Mental_floss takes a look at how other nations decided which side of the road to drive on. Some reasons seems silly in retrospect. Link

Two feuding French mayors have taken steps to make their constituent’s commute into Paris extra painful. The mayor of Levallois-Perret made D909 into a one way street to help reduce commuter traffic going through his district.  However, this created more traffic congestion in neighboring Clichy-la-Garenne.

The mayor of Clichy-la-Garenne responded in the obvious neighborly way of also making his district’s portion of the same street one way also -in the opposite direction!

Thousands of commuters travel through the two suburbs each day into Paris, and municipal and national police were called in to redirect traffic away from the gridlock.

Link – via npr

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by OddNumber.

December 15, 2008, South Waterfront neighborhood, Portland, Oregon. Looking from our condo we can see cars attempting, and most failing, to climb up a hill to get out of the neighborhood. I decided to put together a montage of sliding cars. Portland had a recent snowfall and we are expecting more tomorrow.

Might I add kudos for the excellent choice of theme music. -via Bits and Pieces

The idea of traffic engineering has always fascinated me. While this doesn’t explain any of the concepts behind it, I think it shows that there’s a little bit more to traffic than just the chaos and randomness we think there is.

Hit the Link to check it out.