Today is Halloween and that means you'll need to be extra careful this afternoon and evening when you head home. Neighborhoods will be filled with kids all jazzed up on sugar and they won't be looking for you as they cross the street. Many of them will be wearing costumes with masks that make it very hard for them to see anything but that which is right in front of them.

Later in the evening the adults who have been having their own Halloween parties may decide to get behind the wheel and drive when they shouldn't because they've had too much of that yummy orange punch with the cute miniature skulls floating in it. There are far too many drunk driving related incidents on Halloween.

Be safe; be careful; and have fun.

CANNED MUSIC, NEWS ON SUBWAY A FAILURE

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A couple weeks ago I mentioned an experiment up in Boston involving a subway radio station. “T Radio” was to inform and entertain passengers while they waited for the trains. It would combine music and light news with information like delays and outages on the system. There would also be ten minutes of commercials each hour. The test was to last until Thanksgiving when it would be evaluated whether or not to roll it out beyond the four stations that were part of the trial run.

It didn't make it. T Radio was shut down the other day.

Most of the passengers hated it; they found it to be intrusive and irritating. Many of those who wrote in to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority said they wanted to get away from commercials and that they just wanted some peace and quiet. A few complained that the musical selections were lame and that the silly trivia questions were insulting to their intelligence (this is Boston after all).

Officials at the MBTA say they may retool the idea including a change in the music and may bring it back sometime in the future. I wouldn't hold my breath.

IT’S NOT EASY BEING GREEN

In response to my rhetorical question about the source of electricity needed by all of the new electric vehicles coming onto the market, a zero-emissions scooter for one, Daniel writes: “Most charging would be done at night when we generate a lot of electricity that just gets wasted (coal fired power plants typically take a long time to spin up, so you can't just close them down at night when demand is lower). Second, large scale generation of electricity (even in a coal fired power plant) is so much more efficient than small gas engines that even if you increased day time demand for electricity, the total pollution would probably be less with an electric scooter than a gas scooter. Finally, in the long run, generating electricity without emitting CO2 or other pollutants is a solved problem. Between nuclear, wind and solar, we can generate all the cheap electricity we need without polluting, if we're willing to pay a small premium.”

How 'bout we just skip the middle man and start building nuclear-powered scooters?