Archive for July 24th, 2008

There’s been a lot of news about conservative commentator (e.g., Crossfire) Robert D. Novak’s recent (non-fatal) striking of a pedestrian in Washington, D.C. There’s a lot to mull over there: The victim, for example, was 86, and it’s older people who disproportionately get struck on foot in traffic. The driver is himself 77, and older drivers (drivers over 65 will number 40 million by 2020) are right up there with teens for risk factors on the road (for different reasons).

The fact that Novak claimed not to have known he struck the man would imply he was either distracted by a cell-phone conversation, or perhaps lacks the sufficient situational awareness to even be on the roads.

In either case, Novak walked away with a $50 fine — and it’s unclear if this would have been any different had the man been killed (it often doesn’t matter under “accidental” deaths — some mystery writer once used this in a book as the perfect way to murder someone). One thing that stands out is a story from last year about D.C. Councilwoman Mary Cheh’s attempts, in the wake of a rash of pedestrian fatalities, to raise the penalty for striking a pedestrian to $500 (not that this would have much difference for Novak). Ironically, this was just touched upon again last week, with a plan as well to raise the number of points added to one’s driving record (and please do note the earlier “traffic school” entry).

A lot of write-ups are starting to come in, and these will be listed in a more permanent fashion over at the book site, www.howwedrive.com/traffic, but among some recent notices…

Discover says… “Follow the author on an engrossing (and heavily footnoted) tour through the neuroscience of highway illusions, the psychology of late merging, and other existential driving dilemmas.”

While Best Life opines, “Reading Vanderbilt’s book is a bit like a bump-and-go drive around the world with Malcolm Gladwell as your passenger.”

Over at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the word is: “Delightful… Vanderbilt … 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.”

Meanwhile, here’s a nice write-up from Mary Wisnewski, the transportation reporter for the
Chicago Sun-Times

At Streetsblog, one of my daily must-reads, I posted some off-the-cuff remarks on “motorist sociopathy”…

Metropolis magazine offers: “If politicians want to overcome the complexity of transportation problems, they will need to muster a lot more creativity and flexibility than they have thus far. They will need to look at the example of other countries with an open mind. They will need to think about infrastructure but also about human psychology. Traffic could be their textbook.”

Flagstaff, Arizona, Don't forget Winona, Kingman, Barstow, San Bernandino...

As I put this up a while ago, on the eve of the tour I’ll repost it as there’s been a few small changes. If I’m coming through one of your locales, please don’t hesitate to get in touch (it’s really just a media tour — no readings, but I may be back through at some point). If you’re a journalist or radio/tv producer and would like to set something up, please contact Gabrielle Brooks at Knopf.

Here’s the schedule as it stands so far… and more news to come as it develops:

Monday, July 28 and 29 NEW YORK (Book released)
Wednesday, July 30 BOSTON
Thursday, July 31 WASHINGTON, D.C.
Monday, August 4 NYC/MINNEAPOLIS
Tuesday, August 5 MINNEAPOLIS
Wednesday, August 6 CHICAGO
Thursday, August 7 TORONTO
Friday, August 8 ATLANTA
Tuesday, August 12 SEATTLE
Wednesday, August 13 SEATTLE
Thursday, August 14 SAN FRANCISCO
Friday, August 15 LOS ANGELES
Monday, August 18 LOS ANGELES

Monday, August 25 DUBLIN, IRELAND
Tuesday, August 26 LONDON, ENGLAND
Wednesday, August 27 LONDON, ENGLAND
Thursday, August 28 LONDON, ENGLAND

Photo: JAC/WENN

Unlike Nicole Richie, I’ve never been to traffic school, that strange institution, found particularly in California, where errant drivers go as penance for DUIs (e.g., Richie) and other offenses and, rather bizarrely, to get points and convictions taken off your license (if only there was a “burglary school” for thieves who wanted to remove some blemishes from their criminal record). I don’t know if they’re anything like this skit, but the sense I’ve always gotten from visiting the websites (for “Improv Traffic School” or “Singles Traffic School”) and reading some of the articles , is that they’re light on actual education and filled with bored people merely trying to lower their insurance rates.

The question is: Are people really learning anything in these schools? Are they capable of learning something? In their excellent book Mistakes Were Made, psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson tell an interesting story about a traffic school: “As participants went around the room, reporting the violations that had brought them there, a miraculous coincidence occurred: Not one of them was responsible for breaking the law. They all had justifications for why they were speeding, had ignored a stop sign, ran a red light, or made an illegal U-turn.” People seemed unable to overcome the “cognitive dissonance” between their image of themselves as a good driver and the fact they had done something stupid or illegal.

A new study (via IIHS) by Michael Gebers of the California DMV, titled “A traffic safety evaluation of California’s traffic violator school citation dismissal policy,” updating earlier research, shows that traffic schools seem to have an unintended consequence: They raise a driver’s crash risk.

As IIHS notes, “despite their lower initial crash risk, traffic school drivers had a crash rate about 5 percent higher than that of convicted drivers during the year following the citation.” There are other problems: The policy of removing points and convictions from a driver’s record “reduces the ability to predict, or calibrate, the future accident expectancies” of those drivers by masking their true driving record. By lowering those drivers’ insurance rates, some drivers without convictions may actually end up paying more, subsidizing the would-be Nicole Richies of the world (some 1.2 million drivers’ citations are dismissed this way every year). Strangely, the DMV itself has called for the schools to be “abolished” or greatly restricted (and if “traffic schools” were to exist, shouldn’t the DMV itself be running them?)

The study reminded me of another, in The Lancet, by Donald Redelmeier, Robert Tibsharani, and Leonard Evans, which found that receiving a conviction for a traffic offense was something of a life-saver: “The risk of a fatal crash in the month after a conviction was about 35% lower than in a comparable month with no conviction for the same driver.” (the effect dropped after that).

Convictions, after all, are a form of feedback, however inexact, pointing out a driver’s mistakes, inducing caution. How does knowing these can be rinsed off of one’s record do anyone any good? I’d like to hear from any pro-traffic school people, or indeed stories from any traffic school attendees.