From Jan Gehl’s new report on New York City (via Streetsblog), this graph nicely depicts the typical (mis)allocation of New York City’s public space. We need hardly point out the glaring gap in negative externalities as well.

The article, “Trial Implementation of a Leading Pedestrian Interval: Lessons Learned,” by Sarah M.L. Hubbard, Darcy M. Bullock, and John H. Thai, describes the installation of an LPI (that’s where pedestrians get the “Walk Man” a bit before drivers get the green, so that “peds” can establish their presence in the crosswalk, and also be more visible) in Anaheim, California, near Disneyland.

While LPIs, at least in urban environments, have been found to be beneficial to pedestrians, at this location, the authors found, “the incidence of pedestrian compromise on the curb was found to be higher with the LPI signal timing than with concurrent signal timing for both low right-turn demand and high right-turn demand conditions.” In other words, things got worse for pedestrians with the LPI.

The culprit, they found, seemed to be the ability for drivers to make a right turn on red (yes, the only cultural advantage of California). “Drivers waiting to turn right at the red light are often watching for a gap in the oncoming traffic and may be unaware that the adjacent pedestrians have a WALK indication.” (One could get rid of the ROTR, of course, but that would, as the authors note, may cut right-turn capacity and could “actually reduce the service for pedestrians if drivers tend to accept smaller gaps between pedestrians and drive more aggressively as the v/c ratio for the right-turn movement increases” — in other words, the idiot factor may go up).

What goes unsaid here, but what I think is a more general underlying factor, is the sort of larger modal blindness that seems to occur in more suburbanized areas, like the one in which the trial was conducted. Judging by the photos in the article, the major flow street has at least four lanes in each direction, and presumably some rather high speeds. The overwhelming feel of such environments is that they are made for cars; and indeed are filled with cars, to the extent that drivers become rather programmed to looking out for the things that are important to them as drivers — lights, stripes, other cars. Pedestrians waiting to cross at a major intersections may be the victims of a kind of blindness by the drivers — either an actual kind of “attentional blindness” (they’re not looking for pedestrians so they don’t see pedestrians), or a kind of cultural blindness by which pedestrians are marginalized, and lose the rights that have been extended to them (though the number of “crosswalk” stings going across in urban areas across the U.S. should reveal this is by no means a suburban problem). I’ve noticed in Manhattan that some of the worst places to navigate on foot are near any of the bridge or tunnel entrances — either vehicles are still used to being in less pedestrian heavy environments, or their proximity to “escaping from New York” leads to a kind of animalistic imperative in which the only consideration becomes getting that many inches closer to the tunnel — woe to the person who has to cross on foot in one of these situations.

It also notes:

“The cause of the delays on highways that lead into the Big Dig is, perhaps not surprising: more cars and trucks. On I-93 north of the city, for example, 202,000 motor vehicles drive past Roosevelt Circle in Medford, 38,000 more than in 1987, a 23 percent increase, according to state data.”

The data was derived thusly:

“Quality Planning said it analyzed 12 months’ of 2007 policyholder information for U.S. drivers, comparing the number of moving and nonmoving violations for both men and women. Overall, the data shows that men are much more likely to receive a traffic citation than women, and that this difference in driving behavior is consistent across all age groups.”

Men do drive more miles, of course, and I’m not sure if this was corrected for in some way (women may drive recklessly but their exposure is lower, so less chance of being caught; or maybe male traffic cops really are less likely to issue tickets to women — after all, as this study by Michael Makowsky and Thomas Strattman found, “ceteris parabis, young females have the lowest probability of receiving a speeding ticket”), but the gender difference seems much larger in any case than any mileage discrepancy.

Two other points worth noting:

“The resulting accidents caused by men lead to more expensive claims than those caused by women.”

“Women drivers were also about 27 percent less likely than men to be found at fault (1-49 percent negligent) when involved in an accident, according to the company.”

(Tap of the horn to UC-Berkeley’s Traffic Safety Center)

SIR – It may be of interest to your readers to know that it was actually economists who first figured out that an individual’s selfish behaviour when selecting an optimal travel route would yield different traffic flows and times than if one were to assign flows in a centralised manner to try and minimise the cost to society (“Queuing conundrums”, September 13th). Arthur Pigou wrote “The Economics of Welfare” in 1920, by which time he was well aware of the distinction between different traffic behaviours.

Anna Nagurney
Director
Virtual Centre for Supernetworks
Isenberg School of Management
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, Massachusetts”

The last time I was in Berlin, Brian Ladd’s Ghosts of Berlin was my invaluable key to the contested city’s palimpsestual history. I’ve reviewed his new book, Autophobia, in this weekend’s New York Times, and I’ll no doubt be referring to it again here. Review here or after the jump.

November 16, 2008
Bumpy Ride
By TOM VANDERBILT
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AUTOPHOBIA

Love and Hate in the Automotive Age

By Brian Ladd

Illustrated. 227 pp. The University of Chicago Press. $22.50

“We can’t build our way out of congestion.” For years this has been the rallying cry against the continuing accommodation — either in the federal budget or the local landscape — to the exigencies of the car. Typically, it is brandished by mass-transit partisans or stubborn slow-growthers and routinely rejected by the road lobby (pave, baby, pave!), right-tilting think tanks and, if you pose the question at rush hour, at least, the average driver.

The quotation above was recently uttered, however, by a spokesman for a state department of transportation, typically among the most eager layers of asphalt. The state in question? Michigan, home of the American car industry — for which roads are as essential as pastures to ranchers. If this reads like an apostasy, it also looks like part of a larger withering of faith. Detroit is having a cataclysmic year while bus and train riderships exceed capacities, the once unsurpassed American road network is in vast disrepair and in countries from Japan to England, fewer people are undergoing the adolescent ritual of getting a driver’s license. With unpredictable gas prices and soul-­deadening traffic, the car has certainly lost some of its luster, lending credence to the words of an English observer: “From being the plaything of society,” the car “has come to dominate society. It is now our tyrant, so that at last we have turned in revolt against it, and begun to protest against its arrogant ways.”

The only problem with this incipient revolt is that these words actually date to 1911, the shaky toddler years of American motorization. That they could have been uttered in 1973, or perhaps yesterday, is what animates Brian Ladd’s “Autophobia.” People have been predicting the death, or at least severe retrenchment, of the car virtually since its invention. But while the literature may be filled with books like “Dead End,” “Car Trouble” and “Autokind vs. Mankind” — among many others — the roads are filled with ever more traffic. The car, since it began, has seemingly been driven by Beckett: It can’t go on, it goes on.

This raises the question of what, a century on, there is to say about motorization and its discontents that hasn’t been said before. But for Ladd, author of the masterly study “The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape,” the work of “Autophobia” is precisely about looking again at what has been said, by whom and for what reason, and why none of the voluminous critiques of the car — by any number of estimable figures — seem to have much mattered. He does this with equanimity and scholarly aplomb (particularly on the European response to motorization), and for a slender volume, this book has a lot under the hood.

Early on, Ladd notes, the fault lines were clear. A wealthy few had cars, and they drove them ruthlessly, generally haranguing and disrupting the people in their paths. Other automobiles were less a risk than were local farmers’ guns. And in one astonishing case in Germany, a couple was beheaded as they drove upon a wire stretched across a road in protest. There were “two strands of rural complaint,” Ladd writes, “both with a conservative tinge: the poor peasant’s resentment of the highhanded rich motorist, and the outraged good taste of educated people who enjoyed their quiet sojourns in the countryside.”

As the automobile and its charms began tempting the masses, boundaries began to blur. Woodrow Wilson’s famous warning that the car would instill “socialistic feeling” in the United States yielded to the fomentations of Adolf Hitler: “The automobile” must “be stripped of its class-specific and therefore divisive character. It must cease to be a luxury and become a practical device!” Cars, Ladd astutely points out, were politically unsettling: “The automotive metropolis offered liberation from old constraints, yet the car’s defenders were increasingly those who called themselves conservatives. Its critics were the ones demanding both the conservation of natural resources and the defense of the traditional city.”

Throughout the car’s life, Ladd argues, its critics have often “failed to appreciate the depth of the automobile’s hold on ordinary people,” reaching for conspiracies to help explain the ubiquity of car culture when the answers seem far simpler. The car, beyond any symbolic power, is usually the fastest — if far from the healthiest — way to get around. But this itself contains a point that the car’s boosters, Ladd argues, often ignore — a so-called path dependence. Once you started to make room for the car in the landscape — doing things that made the car “an easy, convenient, even necessary, but not always wise choice” — it was hard to turn back.

“Autophobia,” Ladd observes, is “an obscure psychiatric diagnosis of ‘fear of oneself,’ ” rather than a fear of cars, though today there may be no distinction. Cars are a good thing — which is why critics have failed to stem the tide — but we have had no easy way, or much will, to treat the problems of having too much of a good thing (which continues to give critics grist). “The democratization of driving has meant that we can all aspire to be petty tyrants of the road,” Ladd writes. “In the end, the driver’s sense of sovereign mastery and the bystander’s perception of inhuman arrogance are two sides of the same coin.” Like the preacher in “The Night of the Hunter,” we may have the words “love” and “hate” tattooed on our hands, but those hands seem firmly on the steering wheel.

Tom Vanderbilt is the author of “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us).”

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.

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 . . .”