safety

As children, we were taught sharing is caring. Turns out it’s also good for business. Opportunities abound to monetize goods and services through joint use: Share your apartment with strangers through room rental services like Airbnb. Turn your car into a taxi service. Wait in line for people who are willing to pay to avoid queueing themselves.

When the United States started demanding that cars swig less fuel, critics argued that the efficiency standards, because they lower the cars’ weight, would make them more vulnerable in an accident. But a new paper challenges that theory, arguing that efficiency standards are likely saving lives.

Globally, lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death, and recently surpassed heart disease as the leading cause of smoking-related mortality. The National Cancer Institute estimates that this year in the U.S., more than 222,000 men and women will be diagnosed with the disease and 157,300 will die. The high mortality rate is in part a consequence of the difficulty in diagnosing the disease. Using chest X-rays, physicians typically discover lung cancers only at an advanced stage.

The U.S. government regulates many sectors of the economy and American life, from health and the environment to energy and food, and most rules come with tradeoffs. For example, regulations that ensure food safety or clean air — which may prevent future health or other costs — may also raise compliance costs for businesses. As the administrative state and the number of regulations have grown, the proper scope of regulation has been a topic of continuous, and often contentious, debate.

In the United States a frequent source for cycling-infrastructure design is the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials’ Guide for the Development of Bicycle Facilities. In its current form, the guide favors one-way bike lanes separated from vehicular traffic by painted lines; cycle paths at sidewalk level are discouraged and physically separated two-way paths, known as cycle tracks, are not mentioned.

By their very nature, city streets are filled with a broad spectrum of users, from children walking with their parents all the way up to tractor-trailer trucks, which can weigh 80,000 pounds or more. With such an immense disparity in size, those outside motorized vehicles are the ones most likely to suffer in a crash — in 2008, more than 5,000 pedestrians and cyclists were killed by vehicles in the United States, and more than 120,000 were injured.