Vanderbilt, Tom;
Traffic: why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us)
Alfred A. Knopf / Random House, 2008, 402 pages [gbook]
ISBN 0307264785, 9780307264787
topics: | traffic | urban | sociology | cognitive
A lane is closed ahead - should the traffic merge early, or merge late? Are
"late merger"s behaving unethically, sneaking in ahead of their peers before
zippering in?
Europe: merge at end in zippered manner - throughput is higher and safer
3-lane merges slower than 2-lane merges FN 291-2
15% improvement in flow if everyone late merges (Pennsylvania - signs
saying: use both lanes till merge point, take turns merge now etc.) 48
But similar expt in Minnesota - queue lengths dropped 35% but flow was
less. Due to ingrained anti-late merge bias 49
Traffic: originally referred to movt of goods - and then the dealings among
people - "traffic of our stage" [Romeo & J]; at some point, people and things
became interchangeable
[vehicular traffic - is a movt of people or of things? depends on vehicle -
bicycle - more human; car - more thing] 7
TRAFFIC :: 1505, "trade, commerce," from M.Fr. trafique, from It. traffico, from
trafficare "carry on trade," of uncertain origin, perhaps from a
V.L. *transfricare "to rub across" (from L. trans- "across" + fricare "to
rub"), with the original sense of the It. verb being "touch repeatedly,
handle." Or the second element may be an unexplained alteration of L. facere
Meaning "people and vehicles coming and going" first recorded
1825. The verb is from 1542 (and preserves the original commercial
sense). Traffic jam is 1917, ousting earlier traffic block (1895).
- from the online etymological dictionary
Re: the etymology, The OED says:
It is clear that the verb and n. arose in the commerce of the
Mediterranean, and in the language of one of the nations by or with whom
this was carried on. The earliest uses yet found are trafficare and
traffico in the Pisan Breve dell' ordine del mare, cited above, which show
both vb. and n. in full established use in 1325. Etymologists are generally
agreed in regarding the word as Romanic, and in seeing in the first element
tra the regular It. repr. of L. trans across. Italian scholars also see in
-ficare the derivative form of L. facre to do, make; transficare would thus
be parallel to transigre to transact, or engage in transactions. But there
are difficulties: see Diez, traffico, Körting, transvicare, etc. Some have
suggested for the word an origin in Arabic, referring it to the verb
taraffaqa, which sometimes means ‘to seek profit’.] ADDITIONS SERIES 1993
Traffic is an abstraction, a grouping, of things rather than people. We "beat
the traffic" don't go around "beating people" 7
traffic becomes like weather - passive forces largely outside our control -
though we are part of the traffic
[note: N T S A has a terrorist level scale - now at "4" - also a hint of
being beyond our control. We can measure it, but we can't control it. ]
Blaise Pascal: I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from
a single fact. That they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. 8
POMPEII: rutted streets w tracks of chariot wheels - but only one set of
wheels - and many lanes can accommodate only one set of wheels. Was it then
a one-way st? Or were there priorities [commoner reversing to make way for
imperial legions?] -
right-hand-drive in ancient rome:
American archaeologist Eric Poehler, "Circulation of Traffic in Pompeii's
Regio VI", [J of Roman Archaeology, v.19:53-74, 2005] :
studied wear patterns on curbstones at corners as well as stepping stones for
pedestrians to cross the "rutways" - could discern direction of traffic and
also turns. Pompeii drivers drove on RHS (part of a larger cultural
preference for right-handed activity)
--> NOTE: wonder if it might be LH if the archeeologist was British?
Primarily one-way streets - some streets banned for all traffic - road
construction detours; building of baths caused reversal of Vico di Mercurio 8
[There may have been some kind of Dept of Traffic Engg.
ROME: Caesar was curatores viarum : "director of great roads" - declared
daytime ban on carts and chariots "except for materials for temples or public
works" - Carts could enter only after 3 PM - but continued through the
night:
Juvenal: "only if one has a lot of money can one sleep in Rome.... carts
passing through the curved streets and the flocks that stop and make noise
would prevent... even a devil-fish from sleeping" 9
[Romolo August DStaccioli, The roads of the Romans, (orig It.) 2003]
BRITAIN: Magistrates restricted the entry of "shod carts" into towns, because
they damaged bridges and roads. In one town, horses could not drink at the
river as children were playing nearby.
LONDON: Speeding was a problem.
Liber Albus - rule book of 15th c London : a driver could not "drive his
cart more quickly when it is unloaded than when it is loaded." [40p fine, or
"his body committed to prison at the will of the Mayor."]
[GT Salusbury Jones, Streetlife in Med England 1939]
1720: fatalities from "furiously driven" carts and coaches were the leading
cause of death in London (eclipsing fire and "immoderate quaffing") 9
[Emily Cockayene, Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 2007]
NEW YORK: 1867: horses were killing an avg of four pedestrians a week (a bit
higher than today's rate of traffic fatalities). Spooked runaways trampled
pedestrians underfoot, "reckless drivers" paid little heed to the 5mph
limit.
[Ways of the World: a history of the world's roads ..., 1992 Rutgers]
NYT 1888: drivers seem to be legally justified in ignoring crossings and
causing [pedestrians] to run or dodge over vehicles when they wish to pass
over"
On Dec 23 1879: an "extraordinary and unprecedented blockade of traffic"
lasting five hours - with "single and double teams, double teams w a tandem
leader, four-horse teams, hacks, coupes, trucks, drays, butcher carts,
passenger stages, express wagons, grocers' and hucksters' wagons, two-wheeled
"dog carts", furniture carts and piano trucks, jewelers' and fancy good
dealers' light delivery wagons, and two or three advertising vans, w flimsy
transparent canvas sides to show illumination at night"
The first new form of personal transportation since Caesar's Rome - a
newfangled contrivance that upset the fragile balance of traffic.
Bicycles were too fast. They threatened riders with ailments like
kyphosis bicyclistarum, or "bicycle stoop". They spooked horses and
caused accidents. Fisticuffs were exchanged between bicyclists and
noncyclists. Cities tried to ban them outright. They were restricted from
streets because they were not coaches and from sidewalks because they were
not pedestrians. 10
The bicycle activists of today who argue that cars shouldn't be allowed in
places like Brooklyn's prospect park - preceded over 100 years ago by
"wheelmen" fighting for the right of bicycles to be allowed in the same
park.
Bicycle etiquette q's: Should men yield right-of-way to women?
Sidney H. Aronson, "The sociology of the bicycle", Social Forces v
30(3):305-12, 1952.
[consider the word "pedestrian." If you see someone coming down the hall
toward you in an office, do you think of them as a pedestrian? If you were
hiking in the woods and someone came walking along, would you say, ‘here
comes a pedestrian’? The word pedestrian, Michael Ronkin suggested, only
makes sense in relation to traffic, and I suppose it's a function of our
auto-centric society that to do something we were born to do, indeed evolved
over a long time to do, should be considered a "mode," an "activity," or some
kind of "road user."
ETYM: not just the sense of a walker but from the Latin pedester, meaning
"plain, prosaic." This contrasts with equester, i.e., one who goes by horse,
which is decidedly not equated with the plain or prosaic.
Simply by going out for a walk I’ve become this strange being, studied by
engineers, my rights presumably codified by signs ("Stop for Pedestrians")
The irony, of course, is now that it's driving that's become pedestrian, and
walking which is novel. http://www.howwedrive.com/2009/08/31/pedestrian/
]
When the first electric car debuted in mid-nineteenth-century England, the
speed limit was hastily set at 4 miles per hour--the speed at which a man
carrying a red flag could run ahead of a car entering a town, an event that
was still a quite rare occurrence. That man with the red flag racing the car
was like a metaphor of traffic itself. It was probably also the last time the
automobile existed at anything like human speed or scale. The car was soon to
create a world of its own, a world in which humans, separated from everything
outside the car but still somehow connected, would move at speeds beyond
anything for which their evolutionary history had prepared them.
Deaths by automobile were already, according to the New York Times [1903],
"every-day occurrences" with little "news value" unless they involved persons
of "exceptional social or business prominence."
William Phelps Eno, a "well-known yachtsman, clubman, and Yale graduate" who
would become known as "the first traffic technician of the whole world,":
proposed a series of "radical ordinances" to rein in New York's traffic, a
plan that seems hopelessly quaint now, with its instructions on the "right
way to turn a corner" and its audacious demands that cars go in only one
direction around Columbus Circle. 11
In one town, the blast of a policeman's whistle might mean stop, in another go. A red light indicated one thing here, another thing there. The first stop signs were yellow, even though many people thought they should be red. Early-twentieth-century traffic control: there was a great wave of arrow lenses, purple lenses, lenses with crosses, etc., all giving special instructions to the motorist, who, as a rule, hadn't the faintest idea of what these special indications meant The first traffic lights had two indications, one for stop and one for go. Then someone proposed a third light, today's "amber phase," so cars would have time to clear the intersection. Some engineers resisted this, on the grounds that vehicles were "amber rushing," or trying to beat the light, which actually made things more dangerous. Others wanted the yellow light shown before the signal was changing to red and before it was changing from red back to green (still the practice in Denmark, say) 12 Were red and green even the right colors? In 1923 it was pointed out that approximately one in ten people saw only gray when looking at a traffic signal, because of color blindness. Might not blue and yellow, which almost everyone could see, be better? Or would that create catastrophic confusion among all those who had already learned red and green? 12
Some people think that marked bicycle lanes on streets are the ideal for
cyclists, while others prefer separated lanes; still others suggest that
maybe having no bicycle lanes at all would be best for bike riders. For a
time it was thought that highway traffic would flow better and more safely if
trucks were forced to obey a slower speed limit than cars. But "differential
speed limits" just seemed to swap out one kind of crash risk for another,
with no overall safety benefit, so the "DSLs" were gradually rolled back. 13
Henry Barnes, legendary traffic commissioner of New York City - memoir
The Man with the Red and Green Eyes:
traffic was as much an emotional problem as it was a physical and
mechanical one .... As time goes on the technical problems become more
automatic, while the people problems become more surrealistic." 13
[excerpts from The Man with the Red and Green Eyes, from http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/barnes.cfm ]
Re: "scramble," during which all traffic at an intersection is halted so
pedestrians can cross in any direction, including diagonally. The readers
suggested that Henry A. Barnes, who had been traffic commissioner in Denver,
Baltimore, and New York City, invented the concept, which became known as the
"Barnes Dance."
As things stood now, a downtown shopper needed a four-leaf clover, a
voodoo charm, and a St. Christopher's medal to make it in one piece from
one curbstone to the other. As far as I was concerned--a traffic engineer
with Methodist leanings--I didn't think that the Almighty should be
bothered with problems which we, ourselves, were capable of
solving. Therefore, I was going to aid and abet prayers and benedictions
with a practical scheme: Henceforth, the pedestrian--as far as Denver was
concerned--was going to be blessed with a complete interval in the
traffic signal cycle all his own. First of all, there would be the usual
red and green signals for vehicular traffic. Let the cars have their way,
moving straight through or making right turns. Then a red light for all
vehicles while the pedestrians were given their own signal. In this
interim, the street crossers could move directly or diagonally to their
objectives, having free access to all four corners while all cars waited
for a change of lights. [See pages 108-110]
Barnes noted that "There were a few such installations in Kansas City,
Vancouver, and a couple of other cities. But we would put them throughout the
entire business area." [Page 110]
After predicting doom before the concept was put into effect, the local newspapers had to admit the concept worked well-and it didn't take long for people to get used to it. Barnes added:
There were other stories, too, including a feature article by the City
Hall reporter, John Buchanan. For me, it was very pleasant reading, and
John ended it by saying, "Barnes has made the people so happy they're
dancing in the streets." And that's how the name, "The Barnes Dance,"
came into being." [Page 116]
(see also: The first walk/dont-walk sign - between 1934 and 1937)
---
Relying on mirrors alone leaves one open to blind spots, which engineers say
can exist on any car (indeed, they almost seemed designed to occur at the
most inconvenient and dangerous place, the area just behind and to the left
of the driver). But turning your head means not looking forward, perhaps for
that vital second. "Head checks are one of the most dangerous things you can
do," says the research director of a highway safety agency.
consider the right side-view mirror itself. In the United States, the driver will notice that their passenger side-view mirror is convex; it usually carries a warning such as "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear." The driver's side mirror is not. In Europe, both mirrors are convex. "What you have today is this clearly pretty wrong situation," says Michael Flannagan, a researcher at the University of Michigan who specializes in driver vision. "It's wrong in the sense that Europe does one thing, the U.S. does another. They can't both be optimal. These are both entrenched traditions, neither of which is fully based on rational, explicit argument."
On first glance, it makes statistical sense: You're likely to take more
trips, and spend more time in the car, in your immediate surroundings. But
could there be something deeper at work?
Habits provide a way to reduce the amount of mental energy that must be
expended on routine tasks. Habits also form a mind-set, which gives us cues
on how to behave in certain settings. So when we enter a familiar setting,
like the streets around our house, habitual behavior takes over. On the one
hand, this is efficient: It frees us from having to gather all sorts of new
information, from getting sidetracked. Yet on the other hand, because we are
expending less energy on analyzing what is around us, we may be letting our
mental guard down.
many of us may spend more time in traffic than we do eating
meals with our family, going on vacation, or having sex... 15
USA:
last census: more cars than citizens.
1960: hardly any household had three vehicles, and most had only one. Now
more own three than own one.
- Alan Pisarski, Commuting in America III TRB 06
Even as the size of the average North American family has fallen over the
past several decades, the number of homes with multicar garages has almost
doubled--one in five new homes has a three-car garage. 16
One of the fastest-growing categories in the last "commuting census" in the
United States was that of "extreme commuters," people who spend upward of two
hours a day in traffic (moving or otherwise). Many of these are people pushed
farther out by higher home prices, past the billboards that beckon "If you
lived here, you'd be home by now," in a phenomenon real estate agents call
"drive till you qualify"--in other words, trading miles for mortgage.
2005: Avg American spent thirty-eight hours annually stuck in
traffic. In 1969, nearly half of American children walked or biked to school;
now just 16 percent do. From 1977 to 1995, the number of trips people made on
foot dropped by nearly half.
JOKE: In America, a pedestrian is someone who has just parked their car. 16
Traffic has become a way of life. The expanding car cup holder, which became
fully realized standard equipment only in the 1980s, is now the vital enabler
of dashboard dining, a "food and beverage venue" hosting such products as
Campbell's Soup at Hand and Yoplait's Go-Gurt. In 2001, there were 134 food
products that featured the word go on the label or in ads; by 2004, there
were 504.
Fast-food restaurants now clock as much as 70 percent of their sales at
drive-through windows. (Early in our romance with the car, we used to go to
"drive-in" restaurants, but those now seem relics of a gentler, slower age.)
NOTE: "fast food", "drive through" --> have an automation imagery, the car as
an industrialized object
Traffic has even shaped the food we eat. "One-handed convenience" is the
mantra, with forkless foods like Taco Bell's hexagonal Crunchwrap Supreme,
designed "to handle well in the car." 17
The once tranquil Tibetan capital of Lhasa now has jams and underground
parking garages. In Caracas, Venezuela, traffic is currently ranked "among
the world's worst," thanks in part to an oil-fueled economic boom--and in
part to cheap gas (as low as seven cents a gallon). In São Paulo, the wealthy
shuttle between the city's more than three hundred helipads rather than brave
the legendary traffic. In Jakarta, desperate Indonesians work as "car
jockeys," hitchhikers of a sort who are paid to help drivers meet the
passenger quota for the faster car-pool lanes. 18
Another traffic-related job has emerged outside Shanghai and other Chinese
cities, according to Jian Shou Wang, the head of Kijiji (the eBay of
China). There, one can find a new type of worker: Zhiye dailu, or
professional road guides, who for a small fee will jump into one's car and
provide directions in the unfamiliar city--a human "nav system." But with
opportunity comes cost. In China, the number of people being killed on the
road every year is now greater than the total number of vehicles the country
was manufacturing annually as recently as 1970. By 2020, the World Health
Organization predicts, road fatalities will be the world's third-leading
cause of death.
When I walk, ... I view cars as loud, polluting annoyances driven by out-of-town drunks distracted by their cell phones. When I drive, I find that pedestrians are suddenly the menace, whacked-out iPod drones blithely meandering across the street without looking. When I ride a bike, I get the worst of both worlds, buffeted by speeding cars whose drivers resent my superior health and fuel economy, and hounded by oblivious pedestrians who seem to think it's safe to cross against the light if "only a bike" is coming but are then startled and indignant as I whisk past at twenty-five miles an hour. 20
Think of language, perhaps the defining human characteristic. Being in a car
renders us mostly mute.
Instead of complex vocabularies and subtle shifts in facial expression, the
language of traffic is reduced – necessarily, for reasons of safety and
economy – to a range of basic signals, formal and informal, that convey only
the simplest of meanings.
Signals on the road are often misunderstood - e.g. honk to support a car w
"Green Day" sticker - driver gave him the finger. Novice drivers are
particularly poor at understanding signals. 21
Jack Katz, UCLA sociologist, author of How emotions work (esp ch1):
Communication asymmetry: You can see but you can't be heard. In a very
precise way, you're made dumb." 22
This muteness makes us mad - we are desp to say something.
In one sturdy, in-car researchers pretended to be studying drivers'
perception. They [were deliberately] giving instructions at a stop sign when
an accomplice pulled up behind and honked. More than 3/4ths reacted verbally,
despite the fact that they couldn't be heard by the honker. 22
[FN: Toyota had proposed a vehicle expression operation control system" -
would have anthromorphic headlights w eyebrows and eyes and wagging
antennae. German company - "Flashbox" - lets you signal "apology",
"annoyed", "stop for more?" etc. 297]
Drivers spend much of their time looking at the rear end of other cars, an
activity culturally associated with insubordination. 22
[This may be going a bit over the top...]
Australian road signal: pinkie = deficient male anatomy, after an ad by the
Road & Trafic Authority that suggested that aggressive drivers are
compensating for it... 23
"fundamental attribution error" or attributing the actions of others to who
they are (e.g., that impulsive person just cut me off to make it to the
exit ramp)
"actor-observer effect" or taking into consideration my circumstances/context
in explaining my own behavior (e.g., I had to squeeze into that opening if I
had any chance to make it to the exit ramp safely.");
The tendency to project ourselves onto our car or to experience our car as an
extension of our self (e.g., "We say, ‘Get out of my way,’ not ‘Get out of my
and my car's way’" [p. 24];
The anonymity of driving that leads to the "nose-pick factor" and the
tendency to work through feelings (e.g., "grieving while driving"; p. 26) and
encourages aggression, as when we will likely never see others again, so
there is less reason not to cut them off, etc. Perhaps his later analogy will
help: it's "like being in an online chat room under a pseudonym" [p. 27].’
Australian dialect: little finger = "deficient male anatomy" - after a Road
& Traff auth ad campaign on road rage - that associated aggr driving as
overcompensating for deficient male anatomy. 23
[FN: An Austr male driver fined after he hurled plastic bottle at a female
driver's windshield. The "finger" he claimed, was like a "sexual
asault", a worse insult than the tradl finger. ]
Austr: aggr drivers called "hoons"25
Katz: anger in cars - visible ranting and raving - form of theatrical
storytelling, "constructing moral dramas" in which we are the wronged victim
and the "avenging hero" ... "The angry driver becomes a magician taken in by
his or her own magic." [Katz p48] 23
Greeks: Albanians are terrible drivers Germans: The Dutch are the worst drivers NYers : abt NJ drivers. Car drivers: Bicyclists are reckless anarchists We are happy to see a car from our state, or one that is the same model. COGN Experiment: people act more kindly to someone they find who shares the same birthdate. 24 [Miller Downs Prentice: Minimal Conditions ... Social bond] 1998 --> Jenness : Supporting highway safety by addressing anonymity 2007 Car as an extension of self We become "cyborgs.. You project your body way out in front of a vehicle. You instantly feel you've been cut off, when what happened is that a hundred yards ahead somebody's changed lanes. They haven't touche you physically, but in order to adjust the wheel and accln and braking, you've projected yourself." We say "Get out of my way" [not "my car's way"] 24 [FN: 1930s California city planner: "S Californians have added wheels to their anatomy; see John Urry "Inhabiting the car" lancs.ac.uk] Identity issues bother driver but very rarely the passengers - diff brain regions activated for drivers and pax. [Walter, Vetter, Neural Correlates of driving 2001] Solo drivers drive more aggressively - as if human companion gives them shame. [FN: single drivers also more susc to fatigue] COGN: expt at Calif State College - violent clashes between Black Panthers and police. In a trial, 15 subjects, of varying appearance and type of car, put "Black Panther" stickers on rear bumper. No one had any traff viol in last year. In 2 weeks the group got 33 citations. Drivers desire min commute time of 20 min "me time". Car as fav place to cry [Rosenblatt, Grieving while driving, Death Studies 2004]. 26
COGN: Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram: hooded subj was willing to admin 2x elec
current to others not wearing hoods. Similarly, hooded hostages more likely
to be killed than those w.o hoods.
also why victims blindfolded (or turn backs) before firing squad
[David Grossman 1996, On killing]. 26
[Zimbardo 70: Individuation. "Anonymity, diffused responsib ility,
group activity, altered temporal perspective, emotional arousal, and
sensory overload are some of the input variables that can generate
deindividuated reactions." - Depersonalization, Ency v4 ed Woman 78]
Drivers w hood down were more civil
[Ellison+ Aggressive Driving behaviour, v.10 1995] 27
Jay Phelan, Evol biologist UCLA:
We evolved in a world in which there were about a hundred people in the
group you were in. Every person you saw you had an ongoing relationship
with.
Reciprocal altruism:
Was that person good? Did they return the spear they borrowed last week? 28
"Reciprocal altruism" or the response we have to others who do something kind
to us on the road (e.g., letting us in when we are attempting to
merge). Kindness begets kindness, while nastiness begets nastiness, even when
it puts us in peril.
As we drive around LA, in our ancient brains we are Fred Flintstones,
So when someone does sth nice for you on the road, you're processing it
like, "Wow, I've got an ally now." The brain encodes it as the beginning
of a long-term reciprocal relationship. 28
On the other hand, someone cuts you off, and the world is a dark, nasty
place. In theory neither should matter much - but we seem to react rather
strongly. 29
COGN: FAIRNESS - ultimatum game
One person is given a sum of money and asked to share it with another
person as they see fit. If the 2nd person accepts the offer, both keep
their share; if he or she rejects it, neither gets anything. Researchers
have found that people will routinely reject offers of 50%, even though
this means they walk away w nothing. The cost is less important than
fairness. [One study: people who reject more have higher testosterone levels]
[Khamsi 2007: Hormones affect men's sense of fair play 300]
Strong Reciprocity : willingness to sacrifice resources for rewarding fair and punishing unfair behavior even if this is costly and provides neither present nor future material rewards for the reciprocator. 29 COGN: Expt games - people donate money to communal pot. but indiv players can do best if they contribute nothing skimming off others... eventually cooperation breaks down. When players in game given option of punishing free riders, after a few rounds, people tend to contribute everything they have - willingness to punish helps cooperation [Ernst Fehr, Strong reciprocity, Human cooperation, Human Nature 2002] Herbert Gintis: road rage may be a good thing. Honking and tailgating may not be good for you individually, but good for the species. 30 [Bergstrom 2001: Alarm calls as costly signals of antipredator vigilance: The watchful babbler game. Animal behaviour v61] eye contact: most powerful human force we lose in traffic maybe we are more cooperative in comp w apes because we have more eye contact [Tomasello Hare 2007 "reliance on head vs eyes in the gaze following of great apes and human infants J Human evolution 300] COGN: accomplice drives up on a scooter next to car waiting at light, and stare at driver. Such cars roar through intersection faster. Similarly, a pedestrian comes up and stares at driver - same result. 31 [Ellsworth 72] University coffeeroom - honor system for paying for coffee - some weeks pics of eyes over the coffee, some weeks flowers. Donations soared consistently when eyes. [Bateson+ 2006: Cues of being watched enhance cooperation] cartoon eyes in computer game made people give more money to unseen player 31 infants w follow yr gaze as you look at the ceiling - but not if your eyes are closed. [Tomasello/Hare 2007] BOOK: Robert Wright: Moral animal 1994 p.206: Passing a homeless person - it is much more twinging if there is eye contact and we still are not able to help. [though we won't meet this person again, in ancestral environment, everyone we met was someone we may meet again.]301 Mexican road bumps: Older cars have been known to stall out at a bump's crest and be turned into a roadside food stand. 32 Thomas Schelling: NP economist - game theory BOOK: Choice and consequence, Harvard UP, 1984 "asymmetry in communication" as strategy bordering on brinkmanship - don't make eye contact at intersection - then ignore other car, assuming it has seen you but you haven't seen it. 33 COGN: shown traffic scenario, ask people who wins right of way. huge effect: If eye contact is told, - then legally right person claims it. Otherwise more liely to yield when women were driving. (women viewed as "less competent", or is it chivalry?) 34 COGN: driver at light doesn't move on green. More honks if person is on cell-phone. Less honks when the blocking car was high-status. [Doob: Status of frustrator as an inhibitor of horn-honking responses 1968] Men honk more than women, and women get honked at more by both men and women.
Ian Walker: videos of brightly-dressed bicyclists shown to driving subjects.
Drivers were most cautious when bicyclists looked over their shoulder or gave
no signal; Most often, the drivers made the most serious errors when
bicyclists signaled most clearly - also reaction times were slowest.
Maybe because people perceive cyclists as humans, and gaze lingers on face,
and hence it takes longer to gather info from arm motion etc. 37
Drivers do not look as much at arms [cognitive biases for face]
We seem to be trying to gauge more from them than which direction they'll
go. Maybe looking for signs of hostility or kindness; reciprocal altruism.
[This argument is rather muddled] 37-8
[Ian Walker 2005: Signals are informative but slow down responses ]
[Walker 2005: Road user's perception, Adv in Trasnp Studies]
Ian Walker: cycle w ultrasound distance sensor. Rode w helmet and without;
dressed as man and as woman. results:
The further he rode from the edge of the road, the less space cars gave
him. [validates Indian driver's dictum: this part of road is yours anyhow]
helmet: vehicles tended to pass closer than without
woman: got more space.
[Walker 2007: Drivers overtaking bicyclists ]
COGN: STEREOTYPES
primed w stereotype word - were quicker in judging gender. "Strong John" and
"Gentle Jane" quicker than other way around. 39
"The psychology of queuing" in which we understand why other lanes always seem to move faster than the one we’ve picked (e.g., one leading researcher acknowledges that "unoccupied time feels longer than occupied time" and "unexplained waits are longer than explained waits"; p. 41); If we know how long we are waiting, we devote less attention to thinking it [sic]. New Delhi: "countdown signals" marking number of seconds until light turns green. 41 Unexplained waits are longer than explained waits. People prefer the single queue at Wendy's to the multiple queue at McDonald's though studies show wait time is same. Sense of fairness. 42 [Merchants mull the long and short of lines, WSJ 98] [Redelmeier Tibshirani Nature 99: Why cars in the next lane seem to go faster] illusion that other lane is moving faster. Because though as many events where driver overtakes as the other way around, the total time when the other lane moves is longer. 43 [again, logic seems muddled] Humans register losses more powerfully than gains. [Kahneman: Endowment effect 98] Parking lots: People take longer to vacate a spot when someone is waiting to take the spot. [Though they predict they will not] Space is suddenly more valuable if it is in demand. [Barry Ruback: Territorial defense in Parking lots, applied soc psyc 1997] So much of Starbucks's revenue now comes from drive-through lanes that the company will put stores across the street from each other, sparing drivers "the agony of having to make a left turn during rush hour.") Women suffer more from congestion - high-occupancy toll lanes more used by women even if they aren't wealthy - kids that are kept late at day care would penalize them more 136 Cause: more day care (instead of kids being at home); almost no kids walking to school. People shop at more groc stores incl somewhat distant ones. The "optimistic bias" in which most of us think we are better than the average driver; Traffic as a petri dish: "The road, more than simply a system of regulations and designs, is a place where many millions of us, with only loose parameters for how to behave, are thrown together daily in a kind of massive petri dish in which all kinds of uncharted, little-understood dynamics are at work. There is no other place where so many people from different walks of life — different ages, races, classes, religions, genders, political preferences, lifestyle choices, levels of psychological stability — mingle so freely." The anonymity of drivers: "Unlike the bar in ‘Cheers,’ traffic is a place where no one knows your name. Anonymity in traffic acts as a powerful drug, with several curious side effects. On the one hand, because we feel that no one is watching, or that no one we know will see us, the inside of the car itself becomes a useful place for self-expression. . . . Drivers desire this solitary ‘me time’—to sing, to feel like a teenager again, to be temporarily free from the constricted roles of work and home. . . . The flip side of anonymity, as the classic situationalist psychological studies of Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram have shown, is that it encourages aggression."
* Tom Vanderbilt's traffic blog howwedrive.com * Video from MSNBC Today Show Take a quiz: may be you are less informed than you think Leading cause of accidents is driver distraction - drivers are not looking at the front of the road for the last 3 seconds. Fuel taxes in other countries pay for better road maintenance 90% drivers on survey say they are "better than the avg driver" * video authors@Google: pigeons - evolutionarily competent at high speeds 50mph - would need 75fps to see a series of frames as a movie at high speeds (e.g. train approaching) is hard to judge until they are almost collision range. Large objects seem to be moving slower - e.g. airplanes.
Even the most socially abhorrent driving crimes, like a fatal crash involving
an alcohol-impaired driver, often evoke curiously lenient legal
responses. [Compare] Plaxico Burress, who accidentally shot himself with an
unregistered, concealed gun. ... Result: A painful leg injury (to
himself)—and two years in jail. Now compare that with fellow NFL player
Leonard Little, who in 1998 ran a red light and smashed into a car whose
driver died the next day from her injuries. Little was found to have a BAC of
0.19, more than twice the legal limit... Result? Another person lost her
life. Little's sentence, compared with Burress', was minor: 90 days. He
missed only eight football games and was able to keep his license.
2nd benefit: Fewer fatalities
As the ITE Journal notes, since 2000, France has reduced its road
fatality rate by an incredible 43 percent. Instrumental in that reduction
has been a roll-out of automated speed cameras and a toughening of
penalties. For example, negligent driving resulting in a death, which
often results in little punishment in the United States, carries a
penalty of five years in prison and a 75,000-euro fine.
3d benefit: Greater public safety / less crime:
DDACTS, or Data Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffic Safety - there is
often a geographic link between traffic crashes and
crime. By putting "high-visibility enforcement" in hot spots of both crime
and traffic crashes, cities like Baltimore have seen reductions in both.
The program recalls the "broken windows" theory, made famous by James
Q. Wilson and George Kelling:
Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some
areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are
populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a
signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.
i.e. not enforcing smaller, "quality-of-life" issues encourages larger
transgressions.
Both broken windows and data-driven policing have offered as at least partial
explanations for New York City's declining crime rate
from http://www.howwedrive.com/ - "No Parking — Fire Zone" violations at a shopping mall : women driving SUVs were the leading offenders. - John Trinkaus’ "informal looks" - suggestions that female drivers spent more time searching for the "best" parking spot Claudia C. Wolf and colleagues at Germany's Ruhr University-Bochum have explored the idea of parking ability, in a new paper in Psychological Research titled "Sex differences in parking are affected by biological and social factors." As the authors note, some previous work has found men to have a slight edge on certain cognitive tasks involving spatiality, in particular the "Mental Rotation Test," while women have, in some cases, outperformed men on more language oriented spheres, like the "phonological retrieval in the letter fluency task." But real-world equivalents for things like mental rotation have not been in abundance. Which is why the authors headed to the parking lot. During everyday life — and obviously especially during parking — individuals are required to imagine themselves from different perspectives, which involves mental rotation. A driver who steers towards a parking space must predict the outcome of spatial relationships between objects (including own car, parking space, further cars, and kerb) after changes in viewpoint, which arise from the car’ s — and thus the driver’ s motion. But curiously, they note, "the cognitive mechanisms involved in parking have never been investigated." Of course, it's not just innate spatial ability that's involved; confidence in one's ability to do the task matters as well. This belief is "domain specific," and can socially conditioned by stereotypes, etc. For the test, the authors asked subjects, divided into similar levels of driving experience, to park an Audi A6 in various ways (back in, parallel, etc.) in a closed-off multi-story car park. The result? "The present data revealed a sex difference in parking performance in driving beginners as well as in more experienced drivers." Women took longer to park the car, which might be seen as an offshoot of lesser risk-taking behavior by females in driving, but interestingly, even though men parked more quickly, they also parked more accurately, as measured by distance to neighboring cars. [I]n a recent driving simulator study, it was found that women, whose self-concept was manipulated by confronting them with the stereotype that females are poor drivers, were twice as likely to collide with pedestrians as women who were not reminded of this stereotype. Strangely, just after reading this paper early yesterday, I came across an item in the BBC about new ‘car parks for women’ in China. The women-only car park in Shijiazhuang city is also painted in pink and light purple to appeal to female tastes. Official Wang Zheng told AFP news agency the car park was meant to cater to women's "strong sense of colour and different sense of distance". The parking bays are one metre (3ft) wider than normal spaces, he said.
from http://www.slate.com/id/2226509/ In Praise of Traffic Tickets Tom Vanderbilt What do Timothy McVeigh, Ted Bundy, David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz, and 9/11 ring-leader Mohammed Atta have in common? They're all murderers, yes, but another curious detail uniting them is that they were all also brought to police attention by "routine" traffic violations. While living in Florida, for example, Mohammed Atta ran afoul of traffic law on numerous occasions. An arrest warrant was even issued after he skipped a court appearance (related to not having had a valid driver's license during a traffic stop), which raises the haunting possibility that his fatal path might have been interrupted had these transgressions been linked to other legal violations, such as overstaying a visa. (In fact, at least two of the other 9/11 hijackers had been pulled over for speeding, too.) According to Department of Justice estimates, in 1999 there were 43,800,000 "contacts" between police and the public nationwide, and 52 percent of these were traffic stops. And, however unfair or annoying we make traffic stops out to be, I want to point out their broad social usefulness. Police insist there is no such thing as a "routine traffic stop." For one, there is the hazard of the stop itself. One analysis found that in a 10-year period, 89 officers were killed and more than 600,000 were assaulted by the persons they had pulled over. the first social benefit of the traffic ticket: It is a net for catching bigger fish. One reason simply has to do with the frequency of the traffic stop, particularly in a country like the United States, where the car is the dominant mode of transportation: Most crimes involve driving. But another factor is that people with off-road criminal records have been shown, in a number of studies, to commit more on-road violations. A U.K. study (whose findings have been echoed elsewhere) that looked at a pool of driving records as compared with criminal records found that "2.5% of male drivers committed at least one primary non-motoring offense between 1999 and 2003 but this group accounted for 30.6% of the men who committed at least one 'serious' motoring offense." (Interestingly, the proportion was even more marked for women.)
Glenn C. Altschuler review at http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08202/897680-148.stm Vanderbilt, a writer specializing in design, technology and culture, provides an engaging, informative, psychologically savvy account of the conscious and unconscious assumptions of individual drivers -- and the variations in "car culture" around the world. (The latter includes "the Pittsburgh left," which invites motorists in the Steel City and Beijing to jerk their cars in front of oncoming vehicles the instant the light turns green, if not slightly before.) Traffic, Vanderbilt points out, is "a living laboratory of human interaction, a place thriving with subtle displays of implied power." Unlike the bar in "Cheers," on highways and interstates "no one knows your name." At about 20 mph, drivers lose a great lubricant of human cooperation, the ability to make eye contact with other motorists. This anonymity often breeds aggression, especially if there are no passengers in the car. Motorists, moreover, use an imperfect calculus in deciding what's risky and what's safe. They use hands-free phones but then spend more time talking on them. Fortunately, they also exercise more caution as they feel a greater sense of danger. In snowstorms, for example, the number of fatal crashes goes down. To provide a manifest reminder of mortality and reduce deaths by at least 25 percent, Vanderbilt suggests requiring motorists to wear helmets, which, after all, are cheaper and more reliable than side-impact air bags. Driving remains dangerous because it's an "overlearned" activity engaged in without much conscious thought. Bored and overconfident, drivers exceed the speed limit because others are doing so as well. They listen to the radio, gaze out the window, talk and, in at least one case, work on a laptop. Next to drinking, Vanderbilt concludes, "distraction is the single biggest problem on the road" and "we have little concept of just how distracted we are." Drivers, we learn, overestimate their speed on tree-lined roads. The daily round-trip commute clock, virtually everywhere in the world, is 1.1 hours per day. Since roads and parking-lot spaces in the United States are underused more than 90 percent of the time, the answer to congestion is not more of them, but more efficient use of them. And carpools (or more precisely, family "serve passenger" trips) may be a "good idea gone bad." A delightful book, "Traffic" is not up to speed on grammar. Apparently, Vanderbilt and the Knopf copy editor who worked on these pages do not know [many nuances]. --- http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/books/review/Roach-t.html?_r=1 new york times So much of Starbucks's revenue now comes from drive-through lanes that the company will put stores across the street from each other, sparing drivers "the agony of having to make a left turn during rush hour.") And they’re parking. Or trying to. In a study of one 15-block area near U.C.L.A., cars were logging, on an average day, 3,600 miles in pursuit of a place to park. It's not only the number of parkers on the roads that slows things down. It's the way they drive, crawling along, sitting and waiting and engaging in other irritating examples of what one expert calls "parking foreplay." The answer? Sorry: more expensive street parking to encourage the circling hordes to use pay lots. Traffic does not yield to simple, appealing solutions. Adding lanes or roads is a short-lived fix. Widen one highway, and drivers from another will defect. Soon that road is worse than it was before. The most effective, least popular solution — aside from the currently effective, unpopular solution of $5-a-gallon gasoline — is congestion pricing: charging extra to use roads during rush hours. For unknown reasons, Americans will accept a surcharge for peak-travel-time hotel rooms and airfares but not for roads. Percentage of crashes due to "vehicle factors" as opposed to "driver factors": 2% --- blurb: gets under the hood of the everyday activity of driving to uncover the surprisingly complex web of physical, psychological, and technical factors that explain how traffic works, why we drive the way we do, and what our driving says about us. Vanderbilt examines the perceptual limits and cognitive underpinnings that make us worse drivers than we think we are. He demonstrates why plans to protect pedestrians from cars often lead to more accidents. He shows how roundabouts, which can feel dangerous and chaotic, actually make roads safer--and reduce traffic in the bargain. He uncovers who is more likely to honk at whom, and why. He explains why traffic jams form, outlines the unintended consequences of our quest for safety, and even identifies the most common mistake drivers make in parking lots.--From publisher description.