Archive for June 20th, 2008

It's Waterstones by a nose...

I went karting earlier this week in London, at the excellent Docklands Raceway in Greenwich, with the fine folks at Penguin and a number of intrepid, lead-footed souls from the top UK bestsellers (Waterstone’s, WH Smith, Borders, etc.). The kindly track manager told us only afterwards (thankfully), as we sipped Peronis in the bar, that in one instance a kart (they can go 45 mph) had flipped, albeit at a former facility, and the driver had to be air-lifted to the hospital.

The evening wasn’t intended as a study of driving behavior, but it was hard not to notice the gender disparity in the race results: i.e., the top finishers, in total laps, with a few exceptions, were largely male. Whether this has to do with skills per se, risk-taking, or just cultural pressure and expectation is a huge, messy issue that I won’t plunge into here. But studies bear out that males, by just about every objective external measure (speed, following distance, etc.) drive more aggressively. Perhaps some of this is hard-wired. The noted psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, for example, has noted in his controversial book The Essential Difference, that when a group of plastic cars are left for tots to play around with, the boys tend to do things like start ramming into one another, while the girls tend to ride around more carefully — when they can actually get a car (this raises a potential topic for a study: Do societies with higher numbers of women drivers have superior traffic safety records than those more dominated by men?).

And it was certainly the men who were getting into more scrapes at the Docklands (I myself netted what was said to be the evening’s only “black flag,” for having passed another racer under a yellow flag condition; I blamed, weakly, insufficient knowledge of the rules). Whatever this evening proved or disproved about gender and driving, I was reminded of a finding by the U.K. Driving Standards Agency: Males tend to have a higher pass rate on their “practical” driving tests (the in-car portion), suggesting confidence and perhaps higher ability; but ironically, the ones who do best tend to have the highest accident rates. Driving “skill” is a mixed blessing indeed.

Photo by Tom Vanderbilt

Apologies for the lack of new postings, but I’ve finally returned to New York after a week in London and various outposts in the British Midlands. London is a fascinating place, traffic-wise, and I’ve a few lingering thoughts and questions.

That Petrol Emotion. As in the U.S., there was much grumbling over high fuel prices (and Glaswegian transport minister Tom Harris got in a spot of controversy when he suggested Britons were a bit too pessimistic about their economic prospects). What makes gas-grumbling interesting in the U.K. is that fuel prices are three times higher to begin with. Add London’s congestion charges, the U.K.’s higher user and licensing fees, and driving in the U.S., four bucks a gallon or not, looks like a relative bargain (which it is, when one considers the work by Mark DeLucchi that finds U.S. drivers under-paying their way on the road systems by anywhere from 20 to 70 cents per gallon). And speaking of relative bargains, Tim Shallcross, in an interesting piece in the Times of London, makes the simple, if often overlooked, point that gas, as a commodity, varies hugely in price around the world (more so than when compared to, say, beer). “If fuel for transport is so vital for the world economy,” he writes, “wouldn’t it make sense to have some sort of global standard price that we all recognise as fair and sustainable? Then we would all have the same incentives to use it efficiently and wisely.” But, until now at least, there’s been precious little incentive to use fuel efficiently and wisely in the U.S., and even less so in subsidized fuel hotspots like China or Venezuela.

Why Do London Taxi Drivers Hate the Congestion Charge? I spend a fair amount of time in cabs around the world, and I always have questions. Like Koranteng, I often wonder about the “eccentric” braking styles of their drivers. I also often wonder why taxis seem much nicer in countries outside the U.S., even countries with a lower standard of living, as in the Mercedes one sees in Morocco; or why the drivers often seem so much more professional elsewhere (e.g., the white-gloved drivers of Japan). Does our heavier reliance on the private car culturally or economically diminish the taxi market? Do the wages in the U.S. for drivers consign it to being an only entry level sort of job, and is there an ownership issue, in which cabbies here simply rent their rides and have no incentive to fastidiously clean and service them? (Theories welcome!).

But in London, I’m constantly puzzled as to why, when I ask drivers about congestion charging, they invariably seemed opposed. Unless I’m misunderstanding taxi-nomics, I’ve always thought drivers (because of the lucrative initial surchage) made more money the more passengers they carried. The quicker you can get one out, the quicker you can get one one in. Less congestion on streets means faster trips, and more passengers. Faster flower traffic makes taxis themselves more enticing for would-be customers. Less congestion also means drivers themselves spend less on fuel (though London’s black cabs only manage a rather poor 18 mpg). And drivers, who are exposed to higher-than-normal amounts of emissions, would see a personal health benefit from less congestion.

The most common response from drivers is: It’s not working. “London’s still congested,” they say. The obvious problem is the reliability of drivers’ own windshield perspectives, versus the hard data of traffic counts and flows (which do generally show reductions, if not always by envisioned targets). Another issue is the drivers’ antipathy, as a political class, towards ex-Mayor Livingstone, for making them do things like install catalytic converters on their vehicles at a stiff price. Are they going to show him any joy, no matter how much faster their journey? I generally found it fairly easy to get around town, as compared to New York City, and this despite the huge presence of road works that were going on. The photo below shows a typical project (London’s aging pipes are said to lose as much water as people consume). What would congestion levels be like without congestion charging, one wonders? Would these projects have even been possible without inducing a colossal miasma?

Photo by Tom Vanderbilt