Archive for the ‘Traffic Psychology’ Category

It’s hardly news in the traffic psychology world that people who routinely speed fall under the category of what are called “sensation-seekers.” But it’s always interesting to see just who those people are, and how this behavior correlates with other areas of their life.

A study by Mark Grinblatt, a professor of finance at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Matti Keloharju, a finance professor at the Helsinki School of Economics, titled “Sensation Seeking, Overconfidence and Trading Activity” (available here), gets at that question in an interesting way.

They had access to an interesting data set: A record of investing behavior among Finnish households that had, scattered amongst its sub-categories, the number of speeding tickets those households received. And they found an interesting relationship: “Each additional speeding ticket tends to increase turnover by 11%.” In other words, the people who sped the most, traded the most.

The economists were really looking to find evidence of whether behavioral attributes could explain trading volume, but the finding is just as relevant for driving. Whether it was down to sensation-seeking or, perhaps, overconfidence, the riskiest investors took the most risks on the road. And given that this was Finland, where speeding tickets for violations over 15 kph are related to one’s income, the risks one took could bear a high financial (and personal) cost. Interestingly, those who traded most didn’t see better performance than those who traded less (not to mention all the money they probably lost to speeding tickets). And it will surprise no one that “sports cars,” as a variable, were more linked to the most active traders, though not as much as speeding tickets.

An interesting article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch notes that crashes have increased on I-44 after they were narrowed to 11 feet wide, from 12 feet. They were narrowed to add a fifth lane and increase capacity in the wake of the temporary closure of another road, Highway 40. This is of interest because a key congestion-fighting measure that has emerged for an era of scarce highway funds is increasing the efficiency of existing infrastructure (e.g., by carving out new lanes).

The article notes: “The increase in overall collisions is typical whenever lanes become narrower, according to the Federal Highway Administration. The skinnier the lane, the less room there is for error. It’s why the federal government recommends that lanes on interstates be 12 feet wide.”

But there are some caveats to consider, within the same article:

1.) “Volumes on I-44 have gone up 10 percent to 30 percent during rush hour since the Highway 40 closures, according to the Transportation Department.” If the crash figure is 27 percent higher than the comparison period, it’s hard to know what percentage of crash increase has to do with narrower lanes, and which has to do with increased volume (or some other factor).

2.) Fatal crashes have actually gone down. Does that make the entire facility more or less safe?

3.) The speed limits have been reduced, but driver compliance is an issue. “You look at them and think, ‘OK, there goes another idiot,’” Stremlau said. “It’s that way on any highway. It’s just exacerbated by the narrower lanes.” Safety depends on context, and the real issue seems to be driver speed rather than lane width.

4.) The types of crashes mentioned, multi-car rear-end collisions, have little to do, theoretically, with lane width. “The bulk of them,” a police officer said, “are caused by tailgating.” Tailgating is a speed issue, not an issue of proximity to a neighboring vehicle. The police even came up with a novel suggestion: “Despite more traffic, police say the additional lane can make the interstate feel less congested, thus encouraging drivers to floor it.”

5.) There may be less room for error, but that may make drivers pay more attention, thus canceling out the increased risk.

Ezra Hauer has researched this issue rather extensively, and reports on the complexity of the issue here. Note that some crash types have been found to increase over 11 feet.

Of one study, he writes: “They also note that “narrowing of lanes to 11 feet (or occasionally 10.5 feet) while maintaining shoulders did not change accident rates.” Based on the review of several projects in California the authors note that: “. . . higher accident rates had not materialized several years after lanes were narrowed and left shoulders were removed . . .”

Reading David Brooks’ elegant summation of how behavioral psychology and economics can help explain the dynamics of the financial crisis — to explain, as he puts it, “why so many people could have been so gigantically wrong about the risks they were taking” — I couldn’t help but think of another area rife with questions of risk and decision-making, namely ‘the way we drive.’

Whether from personal on-road experience, or from reading studies, or from examining in-car footage of crashes and near-crashes, I am often struck by how often people seem to put themselves, and others, at great risk. Following closely at high speed on the interstate, or driving fast through a neighborhood street, they act in a way that suggests they believe that nothing could go wrong, or that they would be in control if it did. Over time, this behavior is typically rewarded, perhaps through sheer luck, until the ‘black swan’ event that they never expected actually happens. Then, as is often the case, begins a process of denial, an attempt to assuage the cognitive dissonance that has come between the image of themselves as a good and cautious driver and an event that was ‘beyond their control.’

Some quite literal connections can be drawn between the behavior of traders and the behavior of drivers. For one, both activities are prone to the ‘above-average effect’ — studies have shown how both large groups of traders and drivers define themselves to better than average. What’s also interesting is the gender question; research has also shown men seem to be more susceptible to the above-average effect. As Brad Barber and Terrence Odean showed in their paper Boys Will Be Boys, a study of a large brokerage house found that men made many more trades than women, per account, seemingly indicating a heightened sense of confidence, but that their portfolios on average earned less than women. Given the male dominance in the trading sector, it’s not hard to extrapolate these findings to the larger financial crisis. It also need hardly be pointed out that men are involved in more fatal crashes than women — overconfidence mixed with a greater propensity for risk-taking.

Another connection is the way we act on the information we perceive. “And looking at the financial crisis,” writes Brooks, “it is easy to see dozens of errors of perception. Traders misperceived the possibility of rare events. They got caught in social contagions and reinforced each other’s risk assessments. They failed to perceive how tightly linked global networks can transform small events into big disasters.”

This passage reminded me of a recent conversation I had had with a journalist in Abu Dhabi, who was telling me about the massive, fatal chain-reaction crashes that have occurred on fog-bound highways there. Fog is a classic perception problem: Differences in contrast affect how we perceive speed. Moving through fog, drivers actually feel as if they are moving more slowly than they are. So they continue to drive fast, much faster than they should. They may also drive close to the vehicle in front of them, thinking, falsely, that seeing the taillights of the driver ahead is safer than not seeing anything. All this is fine until the rare event happens, and that ‘tightly linked’ network, full of people reinforcing each other’s risk assessments and acting on what they think is sufficient information (but which may disguise hazards around the bend), find themselves in a calamitous crash.

Behavioral psychology isn’t part of the driver’s ed curriculum, of course, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t be, given that attitudes and behavior are as, if not more, important than driving skills per se. And the simple vision test that’s given is fine for testing the strength of one’s vision, but left unmentioned is the idea what we see of the world does not always represent the world as it is.

Adrian, a psychology grad student in Australia, wrote in with mention of a disturbing episode in Australia, recounted here, of a car driver going after some cyclists in an “Around the Bay Day” event (for charity, mind you).

What one editorialist also found objectionable, however, was the link at the bottom of the page where readers could vote on that day’s opinion question. The question was: Are cyclists responsible road users?

Not really the first question that comes to mind after reading the original article (I’m almost afraid to know what the answer was). As the writer put it, “OK. If those hooligans had bowled over a bunch of grannies going to church, would readers be having their say on whether senior citizens are responsible road users?” A more contextually appropriate question to vote on, in my opinion, would have been: Should drivers who commit what is essentially aggravated assault with a deadly weapon have their driving rights permanently revoked? (uh, yeah)

The writer went on to coin the word “bikeism” to describe the dynamics he thought were at work — tarring an entire class of people with the extreme acts committed by a few (or a stereotypical image of that behavior). “Unfortunately, many motorists who don’t ride bikes and don’t understand cycling seem to think that all cyclists are ego-driven menaces who run red lights.” (more…)

Via the Boston Globe Ideas section. If you believe what college undergraduates have to say on questionnaires extrapolates at all to the real world. And that people still do things like name their car once they graduate.

“YOU BETTER WATCH what you say about my car. She’s real sensitive.” Nevertheless, unless you run across a car named Christine, there’s nothing to worry about, right? Think again. A study by psychologists at Colorado State University found that almost half of the more than 200 drivers surveyed in a college class had assigned a gender to their car (more females than males) and that over a quarter had given their car a name, including ones like Lolita, the Sweat-box of Death, and Jolly Green Giant. Drivers who had assigned a gender to their car - regardless of whether it was male or female - indicated a greater tendency to driving-related aggression and anger. The students were also asked to assess their car’s personality. The personality ascribed to the car was typically somewhat different than the driver’s, and knowing this invented personality improved predictions of the driver’s aggressiveness.

The study is: Benfield, J. et al., “Driver Personality and Anthropomorphic Attributions of Vehicle Personality Relate to Reported Aggressive Driving Tendencies,” Personality and Individual Differences (January 2007).

In Traffic I spend a fair amount of time talking about the “myth of multitasking,” and my basic riff on talking on a phone (doesn’t matter if it’s hands-free or not) and driving is that you’ll be doing one or the other — and perhaps both — less well. By how much depends on the driving and it depends on the conversation.

NPR took a novel approach to demonstrate the mechanics of distraction: Rather than looking at a driver, they asked a professional musician to play piano while being asked to do other things.

To wit:

“For over an hour, we tasked Frasch with playing a range of pieces, some he knew and some he had to sight-read. While he was playing, we asked him to multitask. Sometimes the additional work was simple. For instance, Frasch has no trouble talking about his childhood while playing a Bach minuet. But when the challenges took more brain power, it was tougher for Frasch to answer questions and play the piano at the same time.”

Is it just me or was he actually not even that smooth on this part?

It gets worse:

“So we took it up another notch. We gave Frasch a piece of music he’d never seen before, a fast-tempo number. While he was sight-reading, like a driver navigating an unfamiliar route through a big city, we asked him to do a math problem:

A multitasking driver might have hit something else. Just says the pianist, who was already working hard to follow the music, simply couldn’t handle something else that required real thinking.”

As one of the commenters notes, this guy is a professional, someone who’s practiced for countless hours. Imagine by contrast the “average” driver and the sheer range of novel events that can happen on the road.

(thanks to Peter Warnock)

Photo by Mikael Colville-Andersen

When I was in the U.K. doing radio interviews for Traffic, I would often get asked if wearing cycle helmets actually made things less safe for cyclists. This happened primarily because the book features rather striking research by Ian Walker, a traffic psychologist at the University of Bath, and this was mentioned in the press kit.

To briefly summarize, in his study (published as “Drivers overtaking bicyclists: Objective data on the effects of riding position, helmet use, vehicle type and apparent gender,” in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention), Walker outfitted a bike with a device that measured the distance of passing cars. He found, among other things, that drivers tended to pass more closely when he was wearing a helmet than when not (he was struck by vehicles twice, both while wearing a helmet).

This was a surprising, somewhat controversial finding that generated a lot of news coverage. To my mind, Walker’s findings were more interesting for what they said about interpersonal psychology on the road than safety itself; mostly because I felt, and Walker seems to agree, that the primary question of bicycle safety had less to do with the helmet than other factors. As the above photo suggests, cyclists in places like Copenhagen or Amsterdam very rarely wear helmets, and yet they enjoy a much safer ride than in places (like the U.S.) where helmet-wearing seems more ingrained. The argument is often made that those places have protected cycle lanes and the like — though the photo also shows that is not always the case.

But to return to the radio interviews, I often found myself getting frustrated because the radio journalists seemed to want a handy “takeaway” answer: Well, do helmets make cyclists safer or not? The problem was, I really didn’t know (disclaimer: I do wear one, rather out of habit and without much thought other than a fear of New York City streets).

This was a problem I had in trying to give many answers relating to traffic — there are often an endless series of “on the other hand” qualifiers. As with any kind of epidemiological inquiry, traffic presents such a complex system, with so many interacting variables (e.g., do helmets make drivers act less safe) and “confounding factors” and incomplete data sets, that coming up with easy answers is impossible: and anyone who seems to have easy answers probably doesn’t know what they’re talking about. One favorite example of this for me is the nutmeg you hear drivers say, with deeply held conviction: ‘Well I’ve heard it’s not speed itself that’s the problem, it’s differences in speed.’ This is a statement that is true — except when it isn’t. It lacks context, it lacks explanatory power. We would do as well, if not better, to note that every traffic fatality/injury involves speed: If the car wasn’t moving, no one would have died/been injured.

But I was curious as to how Ian Walker, after putting his research into the world and subsequently being asked these sorts of questions, undergoing these sorts of debates, ultimately felt himself about what his findings (at least on several stretches on English roads) had revealed.

Over to you, Dr. Walker:

“The apparently simple query ‘Do bicycle helmets work?’ turns out to be the most complex question I have ever encountered. Since I published my own small contribution to the nightmarish tangle of helmet research a couple of years ago, I have read and answered hundreds of emails on the subject from interested – in both senses of the word – people. I am grateful to Tom for giving me this chance to summarize a few of my disjointed thoughts on the matter.

(more…)

Traffic is mentioned in an elegant paean to commuting in the Guardian by Joe Moran, author of the delightful Queuing for Beginners.

After first describing examining some of the hoary cultural critiques of commuting (”dragged out of sleep at six every morning, jolted about in suburban trains” and “tossed out at the end of the day into the entrance halls of railway stations, those cathedrals of departure for the hell of weekdays,” went one 1968 screed), Moran then goes on to wonder about the psychic value of the daily grind:

“The academic Eva Illouz invented the phrase “cold intimacies” to describe this culture in which emotional literacy is prized, pop psychology defines our identities, and our workplaces stress the importance of empathy and consensus.

We live in a world, Illouz writes, that is “Rousseauian with a vengeance”, in which our “emotions have become entities to be evaluated, inspected, discussed, bargained, quantified, and commodified”. Perhaps, then, we have learnt to welcome the commute as a neutral space where we can escape this obligation to be permanently available to others, and where an informal public life can flourish, without the emotional demands of work or home.”

Further, he notes, there is something to be marveled at in the sheer logistics of it all:

“Amid all the justified moaning about jams and delays, it is worth remembering that this rush-hour movement of 36 million Britons each day is really a miracle of controlled chaos. The National Travel Survey found that more than half of commuters, both in cars and public transport, have no problems with their daily journey. And even the large minority that do have problems generally arrive at work on time and in one piece, without murdering each other.”

He concludes with a curious detail:

“One of my students told me that in Second Life, that virtual world online, no one uses the roads or railways because they can simply teleport to their destinations. Nothing comes between the cyber-citizens and their real estate; commuting has been abolished. And part of me thought: what sort of life is that?”

Do you remember how, in the early days of the personal computer, you would constantly hear of all the amazing things you could do with it, such wondrous tasks as “balancing your checkbook”? In other words, you were being asked to spend a significant sum to do something that would more easily and efficiently be done on the cheapest calculator.

I get something of that vibe — I’ll call it “egregious technology” — from a new Audi project called “Travolution” (thanks Jalopnik), which the company describes as such:

“Communications modules built into each traffic light are able to send messages to cars in the vicinity, alerting them to the time remaining until their next green phase. The car’s onboard system is then able to calculate the speed which the driver must maintain in order to pass through the light during this green phase, and displays this via the Multi Media Interface display.”

In other words, the traffic lights send a signal to the approaching Audi, which then gives the driver an approach speed that will allow them to fluidly sail through the intersection, avoiding fuel-wasting stops and starts.

I’m skeptical of this for a few reasons. The first is that my 2001 Volvo already happens to have this technology. What’s more, it cost me nothing to add it.

What’s the wonder device? My brain. Partially because I like to drive in a way that maximizes fuel efficiency, and partially because I don’t get much of a kick at idling at traffic lights, I tend to slow down ahead of time if I see I’m approaching an intersection whose traffic signal is red (conversely, and who doesn’t do this, if I see the green is “fading,” based on flashing ped signals, I will speed up, within reason).

I’m constantly astounded how often, in New York City, drivers — particularly taxi drivers — often blaze past me, only to find themselves lingering at the light (maybe it’s because we’re wired to focus on short-term gains). Then, even though I was going slower to begin with, but because I haven’t had to make a complete stop, I typically drive right past them.

Avoiding unnecessary stopping and acceleration is one of the main precepts of “eco-driving” or “hyper-miling,” but it’s really just a function of being an alert, thinking driver (and some studies have noted the connection between fuel efficient driving and safe driving).

This leads me to my second big complaint with Audi’s system. Not only is it asking the driver to take their eyes off the road to look at a gauge to get information they could more or less discern by looking ahead, at the road, it presumably wouldn’t know things like the length of the queue of vehicles waiting at the light (unless, perhaps, they were all Audis) — so any stated approach speed might be completely inappropriate given the necessary start-up and clearance time of all the other vehicles. The simple fact of being given an approach speed for the intersection might induce some kind of “automatic” thinking, in which a driver may focus on maintaining the correct speed as their key task rather scanning the intersection (where close to half of all crashes occur) — in the way drivers can focus too much on the light itself rather than, say, vehicles that haven’t cleared the intersection for some reason.

Of course, being given the correct approach speed for hitting the green isn’t much help if you’re asked to approach at five miles an hour because the light is backed up with traffic. That’s why I suspect the money (not sure what Audi’s communicative lights would cost) would be better spent on lights that could talk to each other. Which we already have, of course, in some places — but even these need human help once in a while.

Photo by Jase Mueller/Flickr

Have you ever felt particularly menaced (or amused) by an approaching car as you crossed in a crosswalk, or as you looked up to see it in the rear-view mirror of your own car? Did you ever think it might be because it felt, strangely, as if an angry (or happy) face was looking at you? Would this alter the way you behaved toward the vehicle?

In a new paper by Sonja Windhager, et al., “Face to Face: The Perception of Automotive Design,” published in the latest issue of Human Nature, the authors, working from the idea that evolution has primed us to be extremely sensitive to the human face (drawing key inferences after a mere 100 ms), wonder if we might not draw similar information from inanimate objects — like cars — that just happen to have seemingly facial features.
(more…)

From The Age newspaper in Australia, via Drive.com.au, comes this surprising, sobering “anatomy of a crash,” the car in question being the 5-star Ford Falcon (the one made in Australia, not the one your father had when he was young).

The article leads by noting: “Survivors of serious car crashes often say time appears to slow down in the moments around the impact and that they can recall the event in extraordinary detail.” (and somehow the images we always see of crash-test dummies in slow motion tends to reinforce that).

But an actual reconstruction of the events shows the sort of reshuffling of the deck the brain is playing with memory:

“This is a reconstruction of a crash involving a stationary Ford Falcon XT sedan being struck in the driver’s door by another vehicle travelling at 50 km/h.

One millisecond equals 1/1000th of a second.
0 milliseconds - An external object touches the driver’s door.
1 ms - The car’s door pressure sensor detects a pressure wave.
2 ms - An acceleration sensor in the C-pillar behind the rear door also detects a crash event.
2.5 ms - A sensor in the car’s centre detects crash vibrations.
5 ms - Car’s crash computer checks for insignificant crash events, such as a shopping trolley impact or incidental contact. It is still working out the severity of the crash. Door intrusion structure begins to absorb energy.
6.5 ms - Door pressure sensor registers peak pressures.
7 ms - Crash computer confirms a serious crash and calculates its actions.
8 ms - Computer sends a “fire” signal to side airbag. Meanwhile, B-pillar begins to crumple inwards and energy begins to transfer into cross-car load path beneath the occupant.
8.5 ms - Side airbag system fires.
15 ms - Roof begins to absorb part of the impact. Airbag bursts through seat foam and begins to fill.
17 ms - Cross-car load path and structure under rear seat reach maximum load.
Airbag covers occupant’s chest and begins to push the shoulder away from impact zone.
20 ms - Door and B-pillar begin to push on front seat. Airbag begins to push occupant’s chest away from the impact.
27 ms - Impact velocity has halved from 50 km/h to 23.5 km/h. A “pusher block” in the seat moves occupant’s pelvis away from impact zone. Airbag starts controlled deflation.
30 ms - The Falcon has absorbed all crash energy. Airbag remains in place. For a brief moment, occupant experiences maximum force equal to 12 times the force of gravity.
45 ms - Occupant and airbag move together with deforming side structure.
50 ms - Crash computer unlocks car’s doors. Passenger safety cell begins to rebound, pushing doors away from occupant.
70 ms - Airbag continues to deflate. Occupant moves back towards middle of car.
Engineers classify crash as “complete”.
150-300 ms - Occupant becomes aware of collision.”

What’s fascinating about all this is not simply the rapid fire technology at work (I’m still trying to deal with that computer deciding whether it was a shopping trolley or another car that has struck), but how much has gone on before we even register it — and this at 50 km (31 mph), so you can imagine what’s happening at higher speeds — even though in our subsequent reconstruction of events we may have imagined that time actually slowed down the during the event.

I couldn’t help but think of the work of David Eagleman, of the Baylor College of Medicine, in this regard. In his paper “Does Time Really Slow During a Frightening Event?”, Eagleman, through some clever techniques involving a (somewhat paradoxical) “controlled free-fall system,” found that rather than time actually slowing, a la the fight scenes in The Matrix, what seems to be going on, the researchers speculated, is “that the involvement of the amygdala in emotional memory may lead to dilated duration judgments retrospectively, due to a richer, and perhaps secondary encoding of the memories. Upon later readout, such highly salient events may be erroneously interpreted to have spanned a greater period of time.”

In other words, because of the nature of the event, people may have had, essentially, more of a memory of it, so when they later thought of it, it took longer to “replay.” But in the case of the Falcon, the event was essentially over before the driver would have realized what was happening.

An alert reader sends along some more coverage, this time by Isabelle de Pommereau in the Christian Science Monitor, of Bohmte, a German village that has become another waypoint in the evolving “Shared Space” movement (I was in the town a few years ago, for a Shared Space conference, but haven’t been back since things were changed). The town, like many, felt overwhelmed by the 13,000 vehicles per day coursing through its small center.

Readers of the book and blog by now may well know the drill:

“But this summer the town reworked its downtown thoroughfare, not only scrapping the traffic lights but also tearing down the curbs and erasing marked crosswalks. The busiest part of the main street turned into a “naked” square shared equally by bikes, pedestrians, cars, and trucks. Now, there is only one rule: Always give way to the person on the right.”

Bohmte is providing yet another surprising example of the types of environments in which this sort of thing can be done: “What’s revolutionary about Bohmte is that it took off its signs on a state highway with a lot of traffic,” says Heiner Monheim, a traffic management expert at the University of Trier, speaking at a recent European conference on sign-free towns convened here. Beyond that, Monheim says, the model’s real legacy is to have brought people closer to “rediscovering and appreciating cities not only as traffic places but also as human, social places.”

But I was also struck in particular by this passage:

“Two months into the experiment, ‘Instead of thinking, ‘It’s going to be red, I need to give gas, people have to slow down, to look to the right and the left, to be considerate,’ says Ms. Rubcic… The bonus? Town people recognize they have become a bit closer to one another. ‘The whole village has become more human. We look at each other, we greet each other,’ she says.”

"LA Interchange," by Luther Thie

I was intrigued by the conceptual art piece pictured above, Luther Thie’s LA Interchange, which I read about recently via BldgBlog.

The piece, which would sit at the intersection of the Santa Monica and Harbor Freeways, “uses real-time automobile accident information culled from the California Highway Patrol Incident Report website and would activate the enormous water fountain at the intersection of the freeways. Visitors on location at the park would also see a digital display streaming from the CHP website (location/region, date, time, accident type and status). This real-time data display system creates a real-time memorial to California highway accident victims. Highway activity can be viewed as a kind of “life-pulse” of the State transportation system. The fountain is, in a sense, the heart of the roadway system, reacting to the endless accident events on the highways. When a fatality occurs, the fountain rises to its highest possible point and blue lights illuminate the water feature, evoking a sublime moment of reflection for the spectators.”

This idea put me in mind of several things. First, the fountains at the laweiplein in Drachten, in the Netherlands, home of the famous un-signed “squareabout” pictured below. These water levels rise with congestion, however, not fatalities.

More directly, however, it reminded me of something I had seen in Hanoi, Vietnam, in the busy intersection near the Daewoo Hotel off of Kim Ma Street: A giant billboard (pictured below), sort of Fenway Park meets Socialist Realism, one section of which reported ongoing road fatalities (and thanks to Greig Craft at the nearby Asia Injury Prevention Foundation for pointing this out to me). It’s not quite visible in this shot, but there are categories like “traffic fatalities this year,” “today,” etc. — as well as time and temperature.

Photo by Tom Vanderbilt

It’s an interesting idea, and one that I’ve not seen replicated anywhere else. It recalls the sort of factory-floor safety campaign signs one sees (”X days since accident”), depicting information that we generally don’t have access to as we drive — feedback if you will (and apparently this has been tried at least one other place, as the photo below shows). I’m not sure to what extent this would change behavior, or what people would draw from the information, but as it now stands the only way we are reminded of the danger of the road is the impromptu roadside memorials (or “ghost bikes”) that are erected (and typically removed by highway departments). But I’ve often wondered if leaving those memorials up would be more effective than other traditional warning signs, in terms of influencing behavior.

Photo By Annene von Durchgerockt/Flickr

My favorite letter in response to the New York Times Magazine Cynthia Gorney merging piece (in which I’m mentioned) was this one, from Mike Adamsky in Mendham, N.J.:

“Oh, my goodness, if Gorney’s article isn’t a perfect political allegory, I don’t know what is. Gorney is the classic Democrat, fretting about power balances and whether or not someone is getting ahead “unfairly.” She rails against the sidezoomers, even though experts have told her that utilization of all lanes is the most efficient mode. She’s probably also on the side of repealing the so-called “Bush tax cuts” even though some analysts say that these “cuts” resulted in a greater proportion of overall taxes being paid from the high-income group.

Fortunately, Gorney does show us how it’s supposed to work: we all just have to learn to behave like ants — productive little creatures who don’t brood or waste energy pounding dashboards.”

Given my own conversion to late merging, I wondered what this said about my own politics. Creeping Republicanism? Well, actually, the system I advocate is the one tried by engineers in which merging instructions are carefully and precisely laid out (thus allaying feelings of wronged social justice), perhaps even backed by enforcement. So I suppose this makes me a sort of Scandinavian Social Democrat, vis a vis using “big,” rational government planning to engineer effective (yet fair) social outcomes.

One is tempted to pursue the potential implications of the politics of merging. Would there be, say, a communist merging scheme? (wealthier cars are sent back to the end of the line in favor of rusty Ladas) A fundamentalist Right stratagem? (whatever lane you are in is God’s will) Anarcho-syndacalist merging, anyone?

From today’s New York Times, about growing inventories of used SUVs on car lots. I’m not quite sure what psychologists would call this — perhaps a focusing effect?

“Given how much the automakers and dealers are willing to knock off an S.U.V.’s price, this is not a bad time to buy one, said Jesse Toprak, the director of industry analysis at Edmunds. Yet so many consumers are eager to avoid weekly $100 fill-ups that they are more focused on saving money at the gas pump than at the dealership.

“When you trade in a large S.U.V. for a compact car, you’re selling low and buying high,” Mr. Toprak said. “For a lot of people that’s not really logical, but they’re not really running the numbers.”

The story after the jump… (more…)

Flickr/Scarequotes

Often when I’m driving, I find myself entering a difficult situation — a tricky lane-change, an unfamiliar turn — and I’ll actually ask my passenger (typically my wife) to essentially stop talking for a moment (or they will voluntarily do so) as the situation resolves itself. This, of course, is one of the major problems with talking on a cell phone versus talking with a passenger: Not only are they providing another set of helping eyes, but they can sense when would be good for them to modulate their conversation in some way, whereas the person on the other end of the cell-phone will seemingly keep droning on, taking away from the driver’s workload.

This point, fairly well established by now, is made again in a new study (PDF here) by Samuel G. Charlton, University of Waikato, Hamilton, for Land Transport New Zealand. The study, as others have, found that drivers on cell phones had slower reaction times — yet drove at higher average speeds — than drivers with passengers as they went through a number of hazards in a driving simulator. Interestingly, this study also featured a person on a cell-phone who was not present in the car yet had access to the driver’s view, so they have a passenger-like view of the road.

The key to performance seemed to be what the paper calls “conversation suppression,” i.e., knowing when to shut up: “Passengers talking to drivers made shorter utterances, had more frequent pauses and were more likely to be talking about the upcoming hazard than cellphone conversors. Drivers and their cellphone conversors tended to make longer utterances than the other participants, were less likely to mention the hazards, had the poorest recall of the hazards, and had the highest crash rate.” Even when the remote cell phone conversor had access to the driving scene, they didn’t tend to adjust their conversation as much as the passenger did — maybe there’s just something ineluctable in actually being there.

The study includes one other interesting, but to my mind a bit strange, finding. Drivers did a bit better on the cell phone when an automated hazard alert message “beeped through” their call, alerting them to some upcoming traffic hazard. This gave the driver the necessary cue to break off the conversation a bit. These alerts would presumably be triggered by some sort of beacons in the road infrastructure, particularly at hazardous points. But, of course, the thing about driving is one never knows when it’s going to become hazardous, and it certainly isn’t always at the accident “black spots” (which are often just statistical aberrations in any case). There are innumerable issues here, from a driver’s over-reliance on the hazard warning system, to the idea that they may be brought back “into the loop” with not enough time to react and not enough knowledge of the situation.

Mergers and Disquisitions

I recently met a kindred spirit, on the other coast, who had been stewing over a type of problem similar to that which had launched my own multi-year investigation into the strange social dynamics of traffic: Merging.

Cynthia Gorney, who teaches at the University of California-Berkeley journalism school and writes for National Geographic and many other places (this after an award-winning career at the Washington Post), kept stumbling upon a daily drama at the Caldecott Tunnel, in Northern California (pictured above). There were people who would dutifully line up on the narrow approach the tunnel entrance, and then people who would “sidezoom” along a frontage road, veering back into the active lane at the last moment. The whole thing is described in her insightful, and very funny New York Times Magazine article today, titled “The Urge to Merge.”

Her merging problem is a distinct problem from the “early” and “late” merge I describe in my book, which in the specific case I was discussing only relates to construction work zone merges in which two lanes are dropping to one, and signage warns something like “merge right, one mile.” Caldecott, as far as I can surmise, as I haven’t experienced it myself, is a strange situation; one, because unlike a temporary construction zone situation, the same thing repeats itself every day at Caldecott — the dilemma is built into the very landscape — and much of the traffic on it is presumably daily commuters (and indeed, an “evolutionary stable strategy” appears to have taken hold by which, according to Gorney’s reckoning, two-thirds of people line up and one-third side zoom). Two, the lane that the side-zoomers are using isn’t technically, as in my situation, a lane that was going to become inactive (and thus the people using it as a sort of merging reservoir weren’t holding up traffic going elsewhere). It is spare capacity to the extent the frontage road is not used very often, but then one wonders if it should just be turned into a de facto merging bay, and marked accordingly. Rather than stigmatizing “cheaters” and upsetting the prevailing order, this would institutionalize the practice, thus, presumably, easing the social tensions.

But the fact that the geometries and psychologies of Gorney’s own merge problem could yield a long article, full of interesting traffic tidbits and theories, speaks to the complexities of traffic. Merging prescriptions, it seems to me, are like medicine: Use only where directed (and watch out for side effects). The people in New York who use an active lane to drive to the front of the queue on the FDR to jump onto the onramp for the Brooklyn Bridge (dangerously stopping for a moment in the middle of that active lane, forcing everyone in their lane to then merge left, at relatively high speeds) should receive a good old-fashioned Singaporean caning, IMHO.

And of course it’s really just more than merging at stake here. These sorts of tensions strike right to the heart of American culture. Gorney found herself musing at the merge point, “this is the problem with modern American capitalism, really, this anti-aristocratic all-men-are-created-equal narrative we pretend to cherish while simultaneously celebrating the individual’s right to do whatever advances his own interests without technically breaking the law.” I think something similar may underlie the left-lane-is-for-faster-traffic dynamic on U.S. roads: It’s a good idea in practice, but someone’s always going to want to go faster, and that person’s rights are going to mash up against the guy who’s already going pretty damn fast, is exiting on the left soon anyway, and thinks he also has a right to be in the lane he’s in.

I later emailed Gorney a fragment I had come across in Robert Axelrod’s classic The Evolution of Cooperation, talking about experimental war games and strategy: “When the players will never meet again, the strategy of defection is the only stable strategy.” Isn’t this really the heart of traffic — there’s little incentive for doing the right thing when your good deed won’t be recorded in future rounds by your fellow game players. Perhaps, as the WOPR computer put it in that classic of 80s geekdom War Games, “the only winning move is not to play.”

In any case, I recommend the article highly, and not just because it contains the words “Vanderbilt’s book is terrific…” Follow the link or check out the text after the jump, and Happy merging!
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Amidst all the talk of ABS, ESC, and smart headlights that follow curving roads comes a reminder of a simpler in-car safety device: Passengers.

As Chris Lee and Mohamed Abdel-Aty, in the civil engineering departments of the University of Windsor and the University of Central Florida, respectively, report in a paper forthcoming in Accident Analysis & Prevention, drivers who had passengers in their cars were less likely to be involved in a crash.

They reached this conclusion after studying five years’ worth of crash data, linked to inductive loop readings, for a stretch of Interstate 4 in Orlando, Florida, picking out random involved drivers from crashes. Among 2817 crashes, 62% drove alone and 38% carried passengers (I know you’re thinking that more people drive alone so why wouldn’t there more be crashes by single drivers, but as a way to estimate exposure they used the sample of non-cited drivers). There’s all sorts of interesting observations here (drivers who were alcohol-impaired tended not to have passengers), drivers who had passengers seemed to wear seat-belts more often, and also that crashes tended to be less severe among cars having passengers (which may indicate a heightened sense of caution due to the responsibility of having other people in the car; they do caution they’re unable to state the speed of other crash-involved vehicles not chosen in sampling).

The argument has been raised that passengers serve as a distraction for drivers, but these findings add further evidence to the pro-passenger side: Passengers not only act as a second set of eyes, they help keep us awake, provide feedback to potential safety gaps in our own driving (what you might call a ‘backseat driver’), and may increase our sense of responsibility on the road. All these seemingly balance out or overcome the potential distractions they may cause.

The big exception here, of course, is teens, whose crash risk tends to increase with each passenger of a similar age.

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 dro