Traffic

by Tom Vanderbilt

Anonymity in traffic acts as a powerful drug, with several curious side effects.

Take away human identity and human contact and we act inhuman. When the situation changes, we change.

Psychologists have called this the “online disinhibition effect.”

These moments seem like traffic versions of the “ultimatum game,” an experiment used by social scientists that seems to reveal an inherent desire for reciprocal fairness in humans.

This traffic behavior is simply one part of the larger puzzle of why humans—who, unlike ants, are not all brothers and sisters working for the queen—get along (give or take your occasional war), something that scientists are still working to explain.

“two or more individuals have choices to make, preferences regarding the outcomes, and some knowledge of the choices available to each other and of each other’s preferences. The outcome depends on the choices that both of them make, or all of them if there are more than two.”

Men honk more than women (and men and women honk more at women), people in cities honk more than people in small towns,

One study, at a Hong Kong post office, found that the more people there were behind a person waiting in a queue, the less likely they were to “renege,” or quit. The queue might have suddenly seemed more valuable.

Traffic, for reasons I will later explain, tends to act like an accordion: As traffic slows in a jam, it compresses; as congestion eases, the accordion “opens” and cars begin to speed up.

We spend only about 6 percent of our driving time looking in the rearview mirror.

The fact that we spend more time seeing losses than gains while driving in congestion plays perfectly into a well-known psychological theory called “loss aversion.” Any number of experiments have shown that humans register losses more powerfully than gains. Our brains even seem rigged to be more sensitive to loss. In what psychologist Daniel Kahneman has called the “endowment affect,” once people have been given something, they are instantly more hesitant to give it up.

We have not found a way to make drivers merge with the most efficiency and safety on the highway.

Engineers call the moment when we’re too close to the amber light to stop and yet too far to make it through without catching some of the red phase the “dilemma zone.”

Psychologists suggest that narcissism, more than insecurity propelled by low self-esteem, promotes aggressive driving.

Knowing where to look—and remembering what you have seen—is a hallmark of experience and expertise. In the same way that eye-tracking studies have shown reliable differences in the way artists look at paintings versus the way nonartists do (the latter tend to zero in on things like faces, while artists scan the whole picture), researchers studying driver behavior can usually tell by a driver’s glance activity how experienced they are.

Once we feel we have things under control, we begin to act differently.

comes because of our perceptual limitations, and because we cannot pay attention.

“One of the interesting things about learning and attention is that once something becomes automated, it gets executed in a rapid string of events,” he says. “If you try to pay attention, you screw it up.”

This is why, for example, the best hitters in baseball do not necessarily make the best hitting coaches.

After poring over forty-three thousand hours of data and more than two million miles of driving, the study found that almost 80 percent of crashes and 65 percent of the near crashes involved drivers who were not paying attention to traffic for up to three seconds before the event.

They were, by external measures, “paying attention.” But keeping one’s eyes on the road is not necessarily the same thing as keeping one’s mind on the road.

Florida, for example, Gainesville, a college town with the highest cycling rate in the state, is in fact the safest place to be a cyclist. The lesson: When you see more of something, you’re more likely to see that thing.

Even if your eyes had remained on the page, you would have been momentarily sent away in a reverie of thought.

Now picture driving down a street, talking to someone on a mobile phone, and they ask you to retrieve some relatively complicated bit of information: to give them directions or tell them where you left the spare keys. Your

eyes may remain on the road, but wou...

Human attention, in the best of circumstances, is a fluid but fragile entity, prone to glaring gaps, subtle distortions, and unwelcome interruptions.

We make the driving environment as simple as possible, with smooth, wide roads marked by enormous signs and white lines that are purposely placed far apart to trick us into thinking we are not moving as fast as we are. It is a toddler’s view of the world, a landscape of outsized, brightly colored objects and flashing lights, with harnesses and safety barriers that protect us as we exceed our own underdeveloped capabilities.

Things like roadside trees or walls affect the texture as well, which is why drivers overestimate their speed on tree-lined roads, and why traffic tends to slow between noise-barrier “tunnels” on the highway. The finer the texture, the faster your speed will seem.

The new cockpit was twice as high as the old one, meaning that the pilots were getting half the optical flow at the same speed. They were going faster than they thought they were.

Studies have shown that drivers seated at higher eye heights but not shown a speedometer will drive faster than those at lower heights.

But have you ever found yourself listening to the radio at a high volume and then suddenly noticed you were speeding? A variety of studies have shown that when drivers lose auditory cues, they lose track of how fast they’re going.

Large objects often seem to move more slowly than small objects. At airports, small private jets seem to go faster than Boeing 767s, even when they are moving at the same speed.

Virtually since traffic congestion began, plans have been put forward to stagger work schedules so that everyone is not on the roads at the same time, but even today, with telecommuting and flextime, traffic congestion persists because having a shared window of time during which we can easily interact with one another still seems the best way to conduct business.

As other ants continue pushing into the forest, they create a complex series of trails, all leading back to the nest like branches to a tree trunk. Since the ants are virtually blind, they dot the trails with pheromones,

chemicals that function like road signs and white stripes.

No city in the world has more traffic reports or traffic reporters than Los Angeles, and to spend time with them is to see the city, and traffic, in a new way.

The noted Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti has taken this idea one step further and pointed out that throughout history, well before the car, humans have sought to keep their commute at about one hour.

Even prisoners with life sentences, he notes, get an hour “out in the yard.” When walking was our only commuting option, an average walking speed of 5 kilometers per hour meant that the daily commute to and from the cave would allow one to cover an area of roughly 7 square miles (or 20 square kilometers). This, remarks Marchetti, is exactly the mean area of Greek villages to this

A study of Seattle grocery stores found that in 1940, the average store was .46 miles from a person’s house, while in 1990, it was .79 miles. That small change in distance was basically the death knell for any thought of not driving to the store, for a half mile is as long as planners believe the average person is willing to walk.

“You can’t adapt to commuting, because it’s entirely unpredictable. Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.”

Few drivers face as much traffic or are as affected by changes in their commuting schedule. The hassles they endure are legion, from the simpleton car drivers who accuse them—irony of ironies—of “causing” congestion to passengers yelling at them for being late. Despite the size of the buses they drive, they are struck by other vehicles at a higher rate than are passenger cars. And what happens to them? Studies of drivers in various countries have shown they have more stress-related hormones in their system than other people—including themselves before they started driving for a living. The worse the traffic, the higher the hormones. Medical ailments send more than half of them into early retirement.

In other words, cities should set prices on parking meters at a level high enough so that an area’s spots are only 85 percent occupied at any time.

“Something that is free is very misallocated.” This is why people who want to see free Shakespeare in the Park performances in New York City have to begin waiting in line as early as the day before (or hire people to do it for them), why cafés that offer free Internet access soon find themselves having to limit the time patrons can spend at a table, and why it can be so hard to find a parking spot.

When Shoup and his researchers tracked cars looking for parking near UCLA (they rode bikes, so other cars would not think they were looking for parking and throw off the results), they found that on an average day cars in one fifteen-block section drove some 3,600 miles—more than the width of the entire country—searching for a spot.

When engineers have tried to figure out how many cars in traffic are looking for parking, the results have ranged from 8 percent to 74 percent.

one car stopped on a two-lane street creates a bottleneck that cuts traffic capacity in half.

Parking lots are not only the handmaidens of traffic congestion, they’re temperature-boosting heat islands,

They represent a depletion of energy and a shockingly inefficient use of land—in a study of one Indiana county,

The whole parking equation is like a large-scale version of that person at the mall, circling to get a “better” spot to save time and energy, and not realizing how much time and energy they have wasted looking for a better spot.

Density, economists have argued, boosts productivity.