Traffic

by Tom Vanderbilt

Like me, you may have wondered: What could traffic tell us, if someone would just stop to listen?

Be curious

After a couple of false starts, the “bicycle boom” of the late nineteenth century created a social furor. Bicycles were too fast. They threatened their riders with strange ailments, like kyphosis bicyclistarum, or “bicycle stoop.” They spooked horses and caused accidents. Fisticuffs were exchanged between cyclists and noncyclists. Cities tried to ban them outright. They were restricted from streets because they were not coaches, and restricted from sidewalks because they were not pedestrians. The bicycle activists of today who argue that cars should not be allowed in places like Brooklyn’s Prospect Park were preceded, over a hundred years ago, by “wheelmen” fighting for the right for bicycles to be allowed in that same park.

As one traffic engineer summed up 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.”18 The systems we take for granted today required years of evolution, and were often steeped in controversy.

Evolution. Emergence.

This has given rise to a joke: In America, a pedestrian is someone who has just parked their car.

Chapter One Why Does the Other Lane Always Seem Faster? How Traffic Messes with Our Heads

What Disney was identifying, in his brilliantly simple way, was a commonplace but peculiar fact of life: We are how we move. Like Goofy, I, too, suffer from this multiple personality disorder. When I walk, which as a New Yorker I often do, 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.

We are how we move

Let us call it a “modal bias.”

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.

It’s hard to communicate in traffic. Compare this to some of the islands we have been to where a horn can mean many things. Jack Katz, professors, calls these “asymmetries in communication.” His book, How Emotions Work.

This seems an on-road version of what psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error,” a commonly observed way in which we ascribe the actions of others to who they are; in what is known as the “actor-observer effect,”17 meanwhile, we attribute our own actions to how we were forced to act in specific situations. Chances are you have never looked at yourself in the rearview mirror and thought, “Stupid #$%&! driver.”

At least some of this anger seems intended to maintain our sense of identity, another human trait that is lost in traffic. The driver is reduced to a brand of vehicle (a rough stereotype at best) and an anonymous license-plate number. We look for glimpses of meaning in this sea of anonymity: Think of the curious joy you get when you see a car that matches your own, or a license plate from your home state or country when you are in another. (Studies with experimental games have shown that people will act more kindly toward someone they have been told shares their birth date.)

Studies that have examined the brain activity of drivers and passengers as they engaged in simulated driving have shown that different neural regions are activated in drivers and passengers.

Different pov. Different neural activity.

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.

but the results suggest that anonymity increases aggressiveness.

Convertibles vs non.

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.

Researchers have found that people will routinely reject offers that are less than 50 percent, even though this means they walk away with nothing.

This sense of fairness might cause us to do things in traffic like aggressively tailgate someone who has done the same to us.

Tailgating as a manifestation of the ultimatum game.

eye contact may be the most powerful human force we lose in traffic.

David Maister, an expert in “the psychology of queuing,” has come up with a series of propositions about waiting in line.67 Strikingly, they all seem to hold true for traffic.

“The psychology of waiting in line.”

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.”

according to Michael Montemerlo, a researcher at Stanford. “People always ask if Junior will sense other people’s brake lights,” Montemerlo said. “Our answer is, you don’t really have to. Junior has the ability to measure the velocity of another car very precisely. That will tell you a car’s braking. You actually get their velocity instead of this one bit of information saying ‘I’m slowing down.’ That’s much more information than a person gets.”

Physical world > sends all kinds of signals > participants take up, consider, and then act on. Human drivers use break lights as symbols/signals. Computers can use lasers.

How’s My Driving? How the Hell Should I Know? Why Lack of Feedback Fails Us on the Road There are two things no man will admit he cannot do well: drive and make love. —Stirling Moss, champion racer

Maybe driving on flat roads and in good weather is like investing in a bull market in times of peace. Without really being tested, it's hard for someone to know how good they really are.

Psychologists have suggested that the “Lake Wobegon effect”—“where all the children are above average”—is stronger when the skills in question are ambiguous.25 An Olympic pole-vaulter has a pretty clear indication of how good she is compared to everyone else by the height of the bar she must clear. As for a driver who simply makes it home unscathed from work, how was their performance? A 9.1 out of 10?

Most important, we may inflate our own driving abilities simply because we are not actually capable of rendering an accurate judgment. We may lack what is called “metacognition,” which means, as Cornell University psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning put it, that we are “unskilled and unaware of it.”

DriveCam CEO Bruce Moeller

The widespread onset of “How’s My Driving?” phone numbers in the 1980s created the potential for more constant feedback, but it was often late or of debatable quality, says Del Lisk, the company’s vice president. “It’s highly prone to very subjective consumer call-ins,” he said. “Like, ‘I’m mad about my phone bill so I’m going to call in that AT&T guy.’”

Feedback has to be immediate

Without the video, the driver would not have realized the potential consequences of his error. “I get reinforced more positively every day that I don’t hit a kid because I’m not seeing that stuff,” Moeller said. “I’m thinking I’m good, I can do this. I can look down at my BlackBerry, I can dial a phone, I can drink. We all get reinforced the wrong way.”

Moeller quoted

But as a survey of North American car commercials by a group of Canadian researchers showed, it is quite acceptable to show cars being driven, soberly, in ways that a panel of viewers labeled “hazardous.”

We cannot entirely prevent “bad luck” from landing on our doorstep, but the van driver dialing his cell phone, the one who narrowly missed the kids in the DriveCam video, was virtually throwing open his door and inviting it inside.

What are the actions that change the odds. Do more odds enhancing things and fewer odds stacking things.

Driving, for most of us, is what psychologists call an “overlearned” activity.

“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. Coaches need to be able to explain what to do; Charley Lau, the legendary batting coach and author of the classic book The Art of Hitting .300, never actually hit .300 himself.

Quote from Barry Kantowitz

The absolute ease of the activity allows the mind to wander.

As Kantowitz put it, “There’s no free lunch.”

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.

The reason we talk for a long time on our cell phones is related to the reason we all think we are better drivers than we are, and to the thing that also makes us think we are better drivers on our cell phones than we are: lack of feedback.

When psychologists have asked people to walk around a track while memorizing words that were shown to them, walking speeds slowed as the mental task got harder.

Steven Most, a psychologist at the University of Delaware, compares the flow of information and images we get in daily life to a stream passing through our heads. Unless we stop to “scoop up” some of that water—or “capture” it with our attention—it will flow in and out of our minds.

They may be in a sense “looking through” the motorcycle, because it does not fit their mental picture of the things they think they should be seeing. This is why safety campaigns (e.g., “Watch for motorcycles” or the United Kingdom’s “Take longer to look for bikes”) stress the idea of drivers simply being aware that motorcycles are out on the road.

Looking for the things we expect

In other words, as the number of pedestrians or cyclists increases, the fatality rates per capita begin to drop. The reason, as Jacobsen points out, is not that pedestrians begin to act more safely when surrounded by more fellow pedestrians—in fact, in New York City, as a stroll down Fifth Avenue will reveal, the opposite is true. It is the behavior of drivers that changes. They are suddenly seeing pedestrians everywhere. The more they see, typically, the slower they drive;39 and, in a neatly perpetuating cycle, the more slowly they drive, the more pedestrians they effectually see because those pedestrians stay within sight for a longer period.40

Safety in numbers is from expectations

One way is the “variable speed limit” system now being used on any number of roads, from England’s M25 “controlled motorway” to sections of the German autobahn to the Western Ring Road in Melbourne, Australia. These systems link loop detectors in the road to changeable speed-limit signs. When the system notices that traffic has slowed, it sends an alert upstream. The approaching drivers are given a mandatory speed limit (enforced by license-plate cameras) that should, in theory, lessen the effects of a shock wave.

With technology we can be more like ants. What kind of cooperation and optimized system might we have if everyone used something like Waze?

Traffic is what is known as a nonlinear system, meaning most simply a system whose output cannot be reliably predicted from its input.

Remarkably, the simulations show that if just one in ten drivers had ACC, a jam could be made much less worse; with as few as two in ten drivers, the jam could be avoided altogether.