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More people are walking into downtown Honolulu these days. I’m seeing more bicycles, mopeds, scooters and motorcycles, too.

Seattle has started closing streets to cars, to help protect pedestrians (see Seattle Starts Car-Free Closures).

In most American cities, the car rules supreme, at least until Google reinvents the electric car (see Google Moves to Reinvent Transportation).

In the interest of public safety, we present the following two articles. Read and learn.

Memo To: New pedestrians, In re: Your skills provides a long and handy primer to basic pedestrian and mass transit etiquette and safety with tips like these:

• The crosswalk will not protect you from cars.
• Get a bus pass or have your change ready as your board.
• Try not to bump other people with that big rolling bag or backpack as you…
• Move to the back of the bus. Please, move to the back of the bus.

NY State Sen. Carl Kruger proposes ban on handheld devices addresses a new social problem: the distracted pedestrian.

• Don’t send text messages while you walk.
• Turn down the volume on your iPod so you can hear the traffic. Oh, I said, “TURN DOWN THE…”

Image courtesy of woesis through a Creative Commons license.

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• Honolulu mass transit
• 28 June 2008: Google wants Georgia to get some exercise
• 12 June 2008: Do kids and students need cell phones?
• 19 March 2008: Running around

I attended the University of Georgia, so I know that Georgia has more than a few folks who need some exercise. Google’s Atlanta office is a founding sponsor for Get Outdoors Georgia, a state program that encourages people to get off their seats and exercise in a park. Google is donating a branded YouTube channel, advertising services, maps and other features to support the effort.

If Google ever opens an Oahu office, I hope they will support a similar program for the island. A recent Federal study concluded that 8% of all Americans are diabetic. That’s 24 million people, with another 54 million who are on the verge of looking like the humans in WALL-E. Once someone, especially a child, gets fat, he tends to stay fat. This Motley Fool article, This Drug Market is Booming, discusses how pharmaceutical companies and investors are trying to profit from the diabetes epidemic.

See Get Outdoors with GO Georgia! for more details.

One of my HPU colleagues, Sam Chepkevich, appears in this morning’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin. A photographer got a nice picture of Sam on his morning run around Diamond Head.

The accompanying article discusses the Hawaii Physical Activity and Nutrition Surveillance Report, which was released yesterday. The study’s results are another piece of evidence that many Hawaii residents do not exercise enough, nor do they eat properly.

Children aren’t getting enough exercise, which sets them up for a lifetime of health problems including obesity, hypertension and diabetes. I see plenty of overweight children and young adults every day, as I drive, walk and run around town. I’m surprised that some of these kids can get so heavy, since they cannot seem to sit still for a minute or two. They’d rather fidget and run around, even when they are eating a meal.

Guess who foots the bill for their health care? Everyone else in the state, through increased prices that help cover our mounting health insurance bills. Here’s a picture of a Chinese teenager who is a fine example.

The Honolulu Advertsier reports that after two months and US$50,000 in review expenses, the Honolulu Marathon has posted the 9 December 2007 race results.

Only 1798 Honolulu Marathon runners received accurate times on race day because SAI’s electronic timing system failed. These Advertiser articles from 12 December and 14 December describe the early efforts to identify and resolve the issues, as denial turned to grudging acknowledgment of an unprecedented failure.

A total of 22839 finishers were recorded and confirmed. Organizers used video and image files recorded by third-party vendors, spending an average of four hours to analyze each minute of video.

So when Ryan Lamppa of Running USA, says “They didn’t have to do it, but to their credit, they did,” he’s missing the point. Accurate timing is a key success factor in road races. Every road race that uses electronic timing can report the overall and group winners within a few minutes of their finish. Some participants need their results to qualify for other races, including the Boston Marathon. After running or walking for several hours, most participants want their timing results.

Early in 2007, Honolulu Marathon organizers decided to replace the ChampionChip system that was used for seven years with a paper-based RFID system. Like the Great Aloha Run, the Honolulu Marathon had been renting plastic RFID tags and recording equipment. Dozens of volunteers stoop down and clip the chips from runners shoes after the finish line, so the marathon could get its deposit back.

I’ve been involved in distance running for over 30 years. As far as I know, Hawaii is the only place in the US that uses a comprehensive chip rental system in its races. I’ve got my own ChampionChip, but I’ve never been able to use it in this state because of this rental policy. I stopped running marathons in 2001, but I run shorter, slower races during the year. I’ve obscured the serial number on the top portion of the chip.

Here is a picture of a ChampionChip, courtesy of McBadger. The chip has been opened to reveal a small RFID transmitter. There’s no battery, because the transmitter grabs power when the runner passes over a charged timing mat.

Honolulu Marathon organizers chose SAI’s paper-based RFID system for the 2007 race to save money, time and manpower. Runners could keep their SAI paper tag after the race as a souvenir. No retrieval or rental fees were needed. Additional RFID readers could be deployed on the race course to record split times. A large-scale test of the new timing system before the race would have been a good idea, though.

Ingredients for failure

The Honolulu Marathon failed to test or implement the paper-based system properly, and were unprepared for thousands of finish line questions regarding the results. Some runners found the chip time posted on the bulletin boards in the finish area did not match their own stopwatches. Soon, the bad news spread throughout Kapiolani Park.

1. Poorly trained race volunteers told runners that the RFID tags could be folded or kept on their race number. Turns out the SAI paper tags were so fragile that even one fold may break the tag, and printed instructions were provided on the race number.
2. The tags must be detached from the race number or bib, and placed on the runner’s shoe, so that the RFID sensors on the road can find the tag signal. Many runners left the tags on their number. I wonder if the instructions were printed in English only, and not in Japanese?
3. The electric generators that powered the RFID timing system on the race course flooded and failed in heavy pre-dawn rain. The RFID readers deployed on the race course were not weather-proofed, according to FinalSprint.

Coach Joe English reported last December that other races did not encounter problems with SAI’s paper RFID tags, but the Houston Marathon canceled its 2008 SAI contract when Honolulu’s problems emerged. However, I’ve seen posts on some running web forums that indicate there were SAI-related timing issues in the 2007 Las Vegas and Philadelphia marathons.

Organizers are hoping that Japanese runners, who are a large part of the annual event, will participate in the 2008 race. ChampionChips will be used, and the Honolulu marathon may sue SAI to recover costs. Perhaps all they’ll worry about in the 2008 edition are Race directors usually have other things to worry about headphone bans and baby strollers on the course. But the 2007 Honolulu Marathon will go down in road racing history as a lesson in race mismanagement.

Tech: I wonder how much money Anish Dhingra and Jeffrey Davis contributed to the GOP? The FTC has finally settled with D-Squared and its founders over their marketing practices. D-Squared servers would bombard users with 10 popup windows per second, advertising software that would stop the pop-ups. As part of the settlement, D-Squared will pay no fines and no one will admit any wrongdoing. They just have to take down their web sites and find new crap to sell.

Why did the FTC sue these fine gentlemen in the first place? Because users have always been able to disable the Messenger service in Windows, ever since it was introduced in the late 1980s. D-Squared was practicing extortion, and they got caught. No one ever needed to pay D-Squared for their software.

Black Viper and Steve Gibson both have free solutions available, if you want to fix your system now. Most Windows XP users are running services they don’t need. If you disable some of these services, like the WMI Performance Adapter and Network DDE, you should have more available RAM and your Windows XP computer may run faster.