Is this the end for people fumbling for dropped change on the floor of the car?

Reports the WSJ:

This weekend may mark the beginning of the end for toll-booth operators and plastic coin baskets, two institutions long associated with holiday traffic and highway congestion.

On Saturday, an authority that runs the E-470 toll road near Denver is ditching its coin handlers and going entirely cashless.

One curious thing about electronic tolls; they’re more expensive.

It is unclear whether cashless toll roads will have higher toll rates than ones offering a pay-with-cash option, but some theorists say higher rates are likely. Amy Finkelstein, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has analyzed 50 years of data for 123 toll roads. In a paper to be published in the August edition of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Prof. Finkelstein suggests electronic tolling results in rates that are 20% to 40% higher than they otherwise would be.

One reason, she speculates, is that “when tolls become less visible, it’s easier to raise the tolls.” (but is it also that electronic tolls tend to be built on new, more expensive facilities, or ones more prone to congestion?)

Do economists have a word for this phenomenon? Something about transparency? Price elasticity? But it seems a strange anti-thesis to the anchoring effect, with no frames or anchors at all.

“I think that no matter what happened it was an accident,” said Sauve-Milwain, who is a business manager in Windsor. “No matter if someone was talking on their phone, whatever happened, it was tragic. Nobody is to be blamed. Everybody lost somebody. It’s a part of life.”

From the Hamilton Spectator, via Education for the Driving Masses

In a paper you co-authored on evaluating methods for identifying hot spots, you point out the “alarming” practice by safety agencies of using accident rates to rank hot spots. Intuitively, that would seem to be an acceptable method, but it performs very poorly in identifying them. Could you explain?

Another critical aspect of the relationship between safety and exposure is the changing crash severity distribution as VMT increases—this is true on road segments and at intersections. Clearly a fatal crash is more harmful to society than an injury crash which in turn is more harmful than a property damage only [PDO] crash. A research interest of mine is to improve and standardize how we incorporate crash severity into high-risk site identification.

From an interview with Simon Washington, the new head of Berkeley’s TSC. Well worth a read in its entirety.

One should be leery, given historical precedent, of any attempt to make a certain class of people wear markers denoting them as part of some group. From Indonesia, a place that is unsuccessfully trying to build urban transport models around the car, comes this absurdity:

An article in the new Traffic and Road Transportation Law passed by the House stated, “Handicapped pedestrians are obliged to wear special signs that can be easily recognized by other road users.” Lawmakers said the article aimed to protect handicapped pedestrians, but activists have called it discriminatory.

To put it lightly. There’s many other potential problems, like enforcment, or the issue of pedestrians not wearing the signs: Are they to be treated with any less caution?

Rather than scapegoating its most vulnerable residents in the name of “safety,” Jakarta would be better of dealing with its litany of actual traffic problems — ranging from lack of public transportation to police corruption.

I was reading this article about behavioral economics vis a vis the financial crisis and came across this passage:

One group that does not value perceived losses differently than gains are individuals with autism, a disorder characterized by problems with social interaction. When tested, autistics often demonstrate strict logic when balancing gains and losses, but this seeming rationality may itself denote abnormal behavior. “Adhering to logical, rational principles of ideal economic choice may be biologically unnatural,” says Colin F. Camerer, a professor of behavioral economics at Caltech.

Tyler Cowen thinks this should be interpreted differently, but in any case, as any discussion of rational and irrational behavior inevitably leads me back to driving, it brought up something I hadn’t previously thought about: Autism and driving.

The National Autistic Society (based in the U.K.) has considered the issue in some detail. “As autism is a spectrum disorder,” they note, “it is impossible to say that people with autism either should or should not be allowed to drive. Some people with autism may find this skill extremely difficult to grasp, while others will be highly competent drivers.”

The famous cliche here is of Rain Man — which I realize is hardly representative and perhaps outright stereotypical — when the lead character Raymond, when faced with a “Don’t Walk” sign in the middle of an intersection, suddenly freezes.

The NAS notes in this regard: “People with an ASD also tend to be good at following rules, such as those in the Highway Code. However, sometimes other drivers may make mistakes regarding the rules of the road and it is important to try and stay calm in these situations.”

I loved this quote from Marc Segar (who has Asperger syndrome), and think it applies quite broadly:

“Driving is quite a bizarre skill to learn. How fast you pick up driving has nothing to do with your intelligence in other things. Some real dimwits are able to learn to drive in as few as five lessons whereas some really intelligent people can need as many as fifty lessons.”

In Traffic I suggested that optimal foraging models might be a useful way to think about parking. A press release I recently received, reprinted below, takes this to a certain (unscientific) extreme. The biggest takeaway I had from the piece is: Stephen Fry drives a black cab? He has claimed this helps him get around London easier. But how? Perhaps he also enjoys people waving at him at all the time?

Release after the jump…
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From the New York Times, 1925.

I’m slow to post on this, but I was glad to see Car and Driver address the issue of texting while driving. The result was unsurprising to anyone who’s looked into the human factors work on attention and distraction, though I liked the eye-catching pairing with impaired driving.

A few further thoughts:

In some other reports on this experiment, I saw the phrase “real world driving” used. The Car and Drive trial was not real-world driving. It was a real car on real asphalt, but had about as much relevance to the real world of traffic as the traffic-free car ads shot in the desert (on ‘closed courses’) have to the actual experience of driving in America.

Related to this, the stimulus that they were meant to respond to was just that: A single stimulus. In real traffic there could be any number of other hazards to potentially respond to than a simple light in front of you (and these would come with less expectation).

The fact that the younger drivers had better response times says more about the response times of younger people than it does driving safety; we need to balance out the faster response time with the risk taking and decision-making skills of younger drivers, which means, among other things, they’re probably driving faster, less able to scan the full extent of the road for hazards, more likely to be doing more texting, thus increasing exposure, etc. etc.

Similarly, the texting task was quite simple and repetitive, and so doesn’t adequately cover the range of distractions that could be posed — i.e., thinking about the text you’ve read, thinking about how to respond, retrieving some bit of information from short-term memory, etc. etc.

Lastly, I would have enjoyed seeing hands-free and hand-held cell phones thrown in there as well. That issue is not “finished” as the even greater hazard of texting arrives.

I’m sure there’s other factors to think about, and readers please feel free to suggest any.

The authors conclude:

In our test, neither subject had any idea that using his phone would slow down his reaction time so much. Like most folks, they think they’re pretty good drivers. Our results prove otherwise, at both city and highway speeds. The key element to driving safely is keeping your eyes and your mind on the road. Text messaging distracts any driver from that primary task. So the next time you’re tempted to text, tweet, e-mail, or otherwise type while driving, either ignore the urge or pull over. We don’t want you rear-ending us.

The above-average-effect is alive and well…

I’m curious about the phrase that appeared in this story from the 1930s. Was it used to refer to hit-and-run drivers, or pedestrian deaths by automobiles in general?

(via Weekend Stubble)

The FT notes a recent global survey on car colors. I’m surprised that white has the pole position in the U.S.; maybe it’s geographical, but I don’t see that many of them round these parts. I always seem to get a white car (and I’m not happy about it) at a rental agency; maybe that throws off the results? I’ve also often wondered if they favored white cars to show off damage more easily?

I’m also note sure what explains this: “China is the only region where orange is a popular option: 3 per cent of Chinese car buyers chose it.”

In August, the paperback version of Traffic will be released, and roughly a month later, I’ll be hitting the road for a series of events. The schedule is still a bit rough, but there will be stops in Los Angeles on and a bit around the 16th, and the week before that: Boston, Kansas City, Houston. And then after that Washington D.C. And still taking shape are trips to Portland, Oregon and Chicago. This in addition to the evolving list of events posted in the right column.

I will post again when this becomes more fully realized, but if you’re in one of the places and are interested in an interview, an appearance, offering a tour of the local TMC, please get in touch at info@howwedrive.com.

Another item of interest I had come across in Joe Moran’s book was the “Conemaster,” an automated device for laying down traffic cones on the highway. That’s a U.K. product, but there are others, as the video — of a “single operator lane closure system” — above shows. Given the hazards posed by drivers to people working on highways, this is a clearly useful device. A bit of background:

Currently, traffic cones are deployed by a person riding on the exterior of a modified vehicle. This person is typically either standing in a basket at the end of a truck or sitting near ground level between the axles of the customized cone body truck. On the current Caltrans cone truck, two horizontal stacks of cones are fed by conveyor to a worker who then places or retrieves the cones while another person drives the vehicle.

A typical lane configuration uses 80 traffic cones for each 1.5 miles of lane closure. Traffic cones come in various sizes up to 36 inches high. Caltrans uses a 28 inch high cone that weighs 10 pounds. When cones are being carried to and from stacks on the bed of a truck, personnel are restricted from carrying more than 3 cones at one time and this operation of manually transferring the cones is often performed on the roadway.

Now, where have our robotic bollards gone?

Oh, and by the way, it cleans up after itself too.

The name Lord Adonis, were one to see it Brooklyn, conjures a Bed-Stuy middle-weight boxer, or maybe one of the dance-hall reggae performers ones sees on posters cruising along Flatbush.

But for the uninitiated, he’s the U.K.’s new Secretary of Transport and, it turns out, a fan of Traffic, as he notes in a recent talk. (I just hope he didn’t purchase it with taxpayer funds!)

The speech makes a number of worthy points, including the idea of connecting various travel modes.

One key factor is the ease of interchange between cycling and other forms of travel. Let me take the specific issue of the interchange between cycling and rail travel. While some 60 per cent of the population lives within a quarter of an hour cycle ride of a railway station, only two per cent of journeys to and from stations are made by bike. By contrast, in Holland, cycling accounts for roughly a third of all trips to and from rail stations. This massive difference isn’t in the different genes of the British and the Dutch; it has a lot to do with the provision of facilities for cyclists at stations.

I’ve just returned from the Netherlands, and was struck, as always, not just by the cycling numbers but the cycle parking. As it is with car traffic, parking is an often overlooked factor in the whole traffic equation; needless to say, the presence of a safe, convenient space at the end of a trip is of incredible importance to the desirability or even possibility of making that trip (more so than some cultural disposition to mode choice). As I looked at the long rows of bikes outside shops and train stations (where, David Hembrow notes, there is an actual crisis of parking) in Utrecht and Rotterdam, I couldn’t help thinking: What if all these were cars? Well, of course, those tidy, compact, well-populated streets wouldn’t exist. I suspect someone, somewhere, has crunched the numbers on how many bicycles can fit inside an average car parking space, I’d estimate the factor must be something like 15 to 1?

Because even in the deadly serious business of road safety, there is a need for humor. In case you don’t recognize it, it’s Withnail and I, featuring the fantastic Richard Grant.

A traffic hazard you may not have considered — other people trying to be nice to you.

KINSTON - On June 19, a Kinston man was taken to the hospital after the small truck he was driving turned across two lanes of traffic on Vernon Avenue and into the path of a sport utility vehicle, flipping his truck and badly damaging the Toyota Highlander. The driver of the truck, 60-year-old Willie Morris, was treated and released.

Local law enforcement officers said these situations - where drivers try to be courteous but cause hazardous situations - are frequent, problematic and avoidable, especially along roads like Kinston’s four- to five-laned Vernon Avenue.

50,000 Books Per Mile... Photo by A-Wop-Bop-a-Loo-Bop

I’ve been reading, with equal parts pleasure and profit, Joe Moran’s On Roads. It’s expansive, unexpected cultural history and in some ways an ideal companion volume to Traffic; while there are certain convergences, it also covers many things I would have liked to had I more space, including the 1950s conversations on designing aesthetically pleasing motorways, evolving cultural feelings towards highways themselves, among many other things. It’s U.K. oriented, so if the words Ballard, Banham, and Belisha Beacons do not present the frisson of excitement in you that they do I, be warned. It’s loaded with strange and delightful details — things like Bob Geldof working on the M25, or the so-dubbed “Mancunian Way” getting the Concrete Society award in 1968 for “outstanding merit in the use of concrete” (I’d like to thank my agent…) And, by the way, is that the very same Concrete Society that, for a brief time in the 1960s, employed the great Trinidadian writer V.S. Naipaul, a detail I got hung up on in Patrick French’s recent biography? Was Naipaul, as he banged out A House for Mr. Biswas, spending his days writing paeans to motorways?

I’ve got many pages folded over, but there is one page of particular interest for those who write about the road. As Moran notes:

Every year, more than 120,000 new books are published in Britain, creating millions of volumes that will never be opened, let alone read. Many of these unread books are shredded into tiny fibre pellets called bitumen modifier, which can be used to make roads, holding the blacktop in place and doubling as a sound absorber. A mile of motorway consumes about 50,000 books. The M6 Toll Road [as pictured above] used up two-and-a-half million old Mills and Boon novels, romantic dreams crushed daily juggernauts.

Every author lives in vague, free-floating terror of unsold pallets of his books next in line for the pulping process (after dropping through all the other Dantean levels into remainder purgatorio) but after reading the above, I can note, with distinct enthusiasm, the perverse idea that unsold copies of Traffic may some day not be read, but indeed driven upon. It could give speed reading a whole new meaning.

From the BBC:

A Chinese firm’s bid to buy the gas-guzzling Hummer car brand will be blocked on environmental grounds, according to Chinese state radio.

I read this seeming obit for national congestion charging while on a train to Rotterdam yesterday (hence the slow posting lately); ironically, I came across it in the Daily Telegraph, not normally what I’d be reading but it was all the train station newsstand had — in any case it was the Telegraph which had backed a petition against the scheme.

It’s the economy, in a word, that’s killed it; traffic volumes are already down, and it’s a seemingly a political non-starter to ask drivers to pay more — even if it would get them out of congestion (or help reduce other externalities). It’s probably not the end of pricing itself.

Despite ditching national road pricing, the Government is carrying on with a series of technology trials which could pave the way for local pricing schemes.

“If road use continues to grow, some means will have to be found to deal with it. If we are not to have old-fashioned Soviet rationing by queues, sooner or later a Government will have to look at pricing.”

And on another subject, one of the pleasures of an old-fashioned newspaper is that, a few pages later, in the letters section on the opinion page, I stumbled upon one of those random, wonderful quintessences of Englishness: Tips — many, many tips — from readers on how to remove stains from tea-pots.

I’m fascinated by the ways our mental models can influence how we interpret and behave in the world of traffic. A new study by Graham Davies, “Estimating the speed of vehicles: the influence of stereotypes,” in Psychology, Crime and the Law, looks at this is an interesting way.

As described by BPS, Davies “played ten-second video clips of a BMW and a (smaller, less powerful) Volkswagen Polo to 42 undergrads and asked them to estimate how fast the cars were going. Based on past research showing that participants expect BMWs to be driven faster than Volkswagen Polos, Davies thought that the students would overestimate the speed of the BMW. In fact, he found the opposite. Participants tended to overestimate the speed of the Polo, perhaps because it was a noisier car, and smaller vehicles are generally perceived as going faster than larger cars.”

There was a bias here, but it seemed to be a perceptual bias.

“A second experiment pulled out all the stops in an attempt to provoke participants to rely on their driver stereotypes. Participants were told that the BMW was driven by a young male, and the Polo by a 62-year-old; they were shown photos of the drivers; and they were asked to speculate about the drivers’ personalities. But even after all this, the participants’ judgments of the cars’ speeds were still accurate and there was no tendency to overestimate the speed of the BMW. This was true even though participants had earlier made the kind of assumptions about the two drivers that you might expect — for example, that the BMW driver was more aggressive and reckless.”

Interestingly, it wasn’t until the third experiment that any predicted stereotype that BMW drivers drive faster was activated. A day after they viewed the speed clips, subjects were asked unexpectedly to recall the speeds. “In this case, the BMW’s speed was estimated to be significantly faster (56 mph) than the Polo’s (50 mph), even though both cars were actually traveling at the same speed (60 mph).”

I was reminded of work I had somewhere about stereotypes and “priming” — in some cases invoking presumed stereotypes seemed to force subjects to work harder to reject them. But when asked “out of the blue,” with no stereotypical context in mind, and perhaps less time or reason to think about the answer, the subjects here seemed to lean on preconceived notions that BMWs are driven faster. Davies’ experiment was meant as yet another calling into question of the reliability of eyewitness testimony, but as in the first experiment, it also shows the variety of ways the world of traffic is not always as it seems.

Photo by MT Silverstar/Flickr

I was driving in Montana yesterday, down highway 85 (returning home from the excellent Driving Assessment conference), about as psychically far from Brooklyn as you can get (though there was actually plenty of traffic, due to some federal-stimulus-driven construction work-zones), on a stretch that, as a sign informed me, was part of a 26-mile “Accident Reduction Project.”

Montana, as I mention in Traffic, has the highest per-mile-driven fatal crash rate in the country, and it’s not hard to see why: Many high-speed undivided two-lane roads (and every vehicle seemed to be an incredibly large pickup truck), one of the country’s highest drinking-and-driving rates (Montana was one of the last state to pass a no-open-container law), extreme weather conditions (hinted at by the little turn-outs with “Chain Up” signs), dark roads, moose and other animals, long emergency response times — the list goes on. Driving yesterday, I wondered about the actual contribution of the incredible scenery itself (I imagined a highway patrolman coding a crash, ‘Improper Lookout Due to Stunning Natural Rock Formation’) to unsafe driving; more than once, gazing at the nearby rushing rapids, I was brought back to reality by the center-line rumble strips, a feature I haven’t seen (or felt) that much elsewhere.

A prevalent feature of that staggeringly expansive landscape are the white memorial crosses, which I saw often at rather severe curves, but also on quite innocuous stretches of road. Montana is one of the few states that actively permits, indeed encourages (since the program’s inception, in 1953), the placing of these crosses (by local American Legion posts). As this source notes:

The program is intended as a highway safety not a memorial program. Still, many families place wreaths or other decorations on the white crosses, which may be considered a memorial to a loved one lost in an accident. Obstruction of the white marker with these decorations defeats the purpose of the safety program. Attaching them below the cross on the metal pole is acceptable. The white markers serve as a public service message, reminding drivers to “Please Drive Carefully.” They are a sobering reminder of a fatal traffic accident, a place where a human being lost his/her life.

The American Legion’s Fatality Markers can be found within the borders of Montana, along state and federal highways, secondary and forest service roads and even city streets. One white marker is erected for each traffic fatality. The markers are made of 4″ metal and painted white. They are mounted on metal poles painted red. Each white marker is 12″ wide and 16″ long. The white marker is supposed to be 4 to 5 feet above the ground to improve visibility and aid in road maintenance.

I don’t know what effect, if any, the crosses actually have on road safety in the state, or how such a thing could reasonably be measured, but in general it seems better to me to announce the hazard than to not announce it. But I was struck by this note:

Not all highway fatalities are marked. Not all of the 134 American Legion Posts in Montana
currently participate in the program. Some areas of Montana do not have a local American Legion Post. Because of these two reasons many stretches of Montana highways do not have fatality markers where a fatal accident has occurred. Also, when a highway is reconstructed and corrects what may have been the cause of the fatality, all markers are removed.

I was curious about that last bit. Granted, I saw some crosses at high curves that were guard-rail deficient, to say the least. But the given the complexity of crashes, the multiple chains of causation in which environmental factors are often only one determinant, does engineering itself eliminate the future risk of another fatality? I can see doing this in the case where a victim’s family might request its removal, but I wonder if removing the crosses (and I’m not sure where this has been done, or how many times) sends the wrong message — e.g., this curve has been reduced, signed, etc., so we don’t need to worry about the human factors of speed, impairment, etc.