Traffic

by Tom Vanderbilt

  How’s My Driving? How the Hell Should I Know? Why Lack of Feedback Fails Us on the Road

  There are two things no man will admit he cannot do well: drive and make love.

  —Stirling Moss, champion racer

  A splashy television advertising campaign for the online auction site eBay came with the simple tagline “People Are Good.” Interestingly, a number of the images it showed involved traffic: In one spot, people joined to help push a car stuck in the snow; in another, a driver slowed to let another driver in, with a wave of the hand. By tapping into these moments of reciprocal altruism, eBay was hoping to underscore the idea that you can buy something from somebody you have never met, halfway around the globe, and feel confident that the product will actually show up. This “everyday trust,” as an eBay spokesperson described it, which “blossoms into millions of strangers transacting with each other and overwhelmingly comes off without a hitch,” roughly describes what happens in traffic.

  And yet people are not always good. Each month seems to bring some new form of scam to eBay, which the company duly investigates. Sophisticated software, for one thing, sniffs out suspicious bidding patterns. What keeps the site running, however, is not the prowess of its fraud squad—which would hardly have time to monitor more than a fraction of the many millions of daily auctions—but a more simple mechanism: feedback. The desire to get positive feedback and avoid negative feedback is, as anyone who has bought or sold on the site knows, a crucial part of the experience. This probably has less to do with people wanting to feel good than the fact that sellers with good reputations can, as one study found, make 8 percent more in revenue. Either way, feedback (provided it’s authentic) is the social glue that holds eBay together.

  What if there was an eBay-like system of “reputation management” for traffic? This idea was raised in a provocative paper by Lior J. Strahilevitz, a law professor at the University of Chicago. “A modern, urban freeway is a lot like eBay, without reputation scores,” he wrote. “Most drivers on the freeway are reasonably skilled and willing to cooperate conditionally with fellow drivers, but there is a sizeable minority that imposes substantial costs on other drivers, in the form of accidents, delays, stress, incivility, and rising insurance premiums.”

  Inspired by the HOW’S MY DRIVING stickers used by commercial fleets, the idea is that drivers, when witnessing an act of dangerous or illegal driving, could phone a call center and lodge a complaint, using mandatory identification numbers posted on every driver’s bumper or license plate. Calls could also be made to reward good drivers. An account would be kept and, at the end of each month, drivers would receive a “bill” tallying the positive or negative comments called in. Drivers exceeding a certain threshold could be punished in some way, such as by higher insurance premiums or a suspension of their license. Strahilevitz argues that this system would be more effective than sporadic law enforcement, which can monitor only a fraction of the traffic stream. The police are usually limited to issuing tickets based on obvious violations (like speeding) and are essentially powerless to do anything about the more subtle rude and dangerous moments we encounter—how often have you wished in vain for a police car to be there to catch someone doing something dangerous, like tailgating or texting on their BlackBerry? It would help insurance companies more effectively set rates, not to mention giving frustrated drivers a safer and more useful outlet to express their disapproval, and gain a sense of justice—than by responding in kind with acts of aggressive driving.

  But what about false or biased feedback? What if your next-door neighbor who’s mad at you for your barking dog phones in a report saying you were acting crazy on the turnpike? As Strahilevitz points out, eBay-style software can sniff out suspicious activity—“outliers” like one negative comment among many positives, or repeated negative comments from the same person. What about privacy concerns? Well, that’s exactly the point: People are free to terrorize others on the road because their identity is largely protected. The road is not a private place, and speeding is not a private act. As Strahilevitz argues, “We should protect privacy if, and only if, doing so promotes social welfare.”

  Less ambitious and official versions of this have been tried. The Web site Platewire.com, which was begun, in the words of its founder, “to make people more accountable for their actions on the roadways in one forum or another,” gives drivers a place to lodge complaints about bad drivers, along with the offenders’ license plate numbers; posts chastise “Too Busy Brushing Her Hair” in California and “Audi A-hole” in New Jersey. Much less frequently, users give kudos to good drivers.

  However noble the effort, the shortcomings of such sites are obvious. For one, Platewire, at the time of this writing, has a bit over sixty thousand members, representing only a minuscule fraction of the driving public. Platewire complaints are falling on few ears. For another, given the sheer randomness of driving, the chances are remote that I would ever come across the owner of New Jersey license plate VR347N—more remote even than the chance that they’re reading this book—and, moreover, I’m unlikely to remember that they were the one a Platewire member had tagged for “reading the newspaper” while driving! Lastly, Platewire lacks real consequences beyond the anonymous shame of a small, disparate number of readers.

  The call-center idea is aimed at countering the feeling of pervasive anonymity in traffic, and all the bad behavior it encourages. But it could also help correct another problem in traffic: the lack of feedback. As discussed earlier, the very mechanics of driving enable us to play spectator to countless acts of subpar driving, while being less aware of our own. Not surprisingly, if we were to ask ourselves “How’s my driving?,” research has shown that the answer would probably be a big thumbs-up—regardless of one’s actual driving record.

  In study after study, from the United States to France to New Zealand, when groups of drivers were asked to compare themselves to the “average driver,” a majority inevitably respond that they were “better.” This is, of course, statistically quite improbable and seems like a sketch from Monty Python: “We Are All Above Average!” Psychologists have called this phenomenon “optimistic bias” (or the “above-average effect”), and it is still something of a mystery why we do it. It might be that we want to make ourselves out to be better than others in a kind of downward comparison, the way the people in line in the first chapter assessed their own well-being by turning around to look at those lesser beings at the back of the queue. Or it might be the psychic crutch we need to more confidently face driving, the most dangerous thing most of us will ever do.

  Whatever the reason, the evidence is strong that we self-enhance in all areas of life, often at our peril. Investors routinely claim they are better than the average investor at picking stocks, but at least one study of brokerage accounts showed that the most active traders (presumably among the most confident) generated the smallest returns. Driving may be particularly susceptible to the above-average effect. For one, psychologists have found that the optimistic bias seems stronger in situations we can control; one study found drivers were more optimistic than passengers when asked to rate their chances of being involved in a car accident.

  The above-average effect helps explain resistance (in the early stages, at least) to new traffic safety measures, from seat belts to cell phone restrictions. Polls have shown, for example, that most drivers would like to see text messaging while driving banned; those same polls also show that most people have done it. We overestimate the risks to society and underestimate our own risk. It is the other person’s behavior that needs to be controlled, not mine; this reasoning helps contribute to the longstanding gap, concerning evolving technology, between social mores and traffic laws. We think stricter laws are a good idea for the people who need them.

  Another problem with our view of ourselves is that we tend to rank ourselves higher, studies have shown, when the activity in question is thought to be relatively easy, like driving, and not relatively complex, like j
uggling many objects at once. Psychologists have suggested that the “Lake Wobegon effect”—“where all the children are above average”—is stronger when the skills in question are ambiguous. An Olympic pole-vaulter has a pretty clear indication of how good she is compared to everyone else by the height of the bar she must clear. As for a driver who simply makes it home unscathed from work, how was their performance? A 9.1 out of 10?

  Most important, we may inflate our own driving abilities simply because we are not actually capable of rendering an accurate judgment. We may lack what is called “metacognition,” which means, as Cornell University psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning put it, that we are “unskilled and unaware of it.” In the same way a person less versed in the proper rules of English grammar will be less able to judge the correctness of grammar (to use Kruger and Dunning’s example), a driver who is not fully aware of the risks of tailgating or the rules of traffic is hardly in a good position to evaluate their own relative risk or driving performance compared to everyone else’s. One study showed that drivers who did poorly on their driving exam or had been involved in crashes were not as good at estimating their results on a simple reaction test as the statistically “better” (i.e., safer) drivers. And yet, as mentioned earlier, people seem easily able to disregard their own driving record in judging the quality of their own driving.

  So whether we’re cocky, compensating for feeling fearful, or just plain clueless, the roads are filled with a majority of above-average drivers (particularly men), each of whom seems intent on maintaining their sense of above-averageness. My own unscientific theory is that this may help explain—in America, at least—why drivers polled in surveys seem to find the roads less civil with each passing year. In an 1982 survey, a majority of drivers found that the majority of other people were “courteous” on the road. When the same survey was repeated in 1998, the rude drivers outnumbered the courteous.

  How does this tie into pumped-up egos? Psychologists suggest that narcissism, more than insecurity propelled by low self-esteem, promotes aggressive driving. Rather like the survey data that show a mathematical disconnect between the number of sexual partners men and women claim to have had, polls of aggressive driving behavior find more people seeing it than doing it. Someone is self-enhancing. And so narcissism, like road nastiness, seems to be on the rise. Psychologists who examined a survey called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, which has for the past few decades gauged narcissistic indicators in society (measuring reactions to statements like “If I ruled the world, it would be a better place”), found that in 2006, two-thirds of survey respondents scored higher than in 1982. More people than ever, it seems, have a “positive and inflated view of the self.” And over the same period that narcissism was growing, the road, if surveys can be believed, was becoming a less pleasant environment. Traffic, a system that requires conformity and cooperation to function best, was filling with people sharing a common thought: “If I ruled the road, it would be a better place.”

  When negative feedback does come our way on the road, we tend to find ways to explain it away, or we quickly forget it. A ticket is a rare event that one grumblingly attributes to police officers having to “make a quota” a honk from another driver is a cause for anger, not shame or remorse; a crash might be seen as pure bad luck. But usually, for most people, there is no negative feedback. There is little feedback at all. We drive largely without incident every day, and every day we become just a little bit more above average. As John Lee, head of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at the University of Iowa, explained, “As an average driver you can get away with a lot before it catches up to you. That’s one of the problems. The feedback loops are not there. You can be a bad driver for years and never really realize it, because you don’t get that demonstrated to you. You could drive for years with a cell phone and say, ‘How can cell phones be dangerous, because I do it every day for two hours and nothing’s happened?’ Well, that’s because you’ve been lucky.”

  Even the moments when we almost crash become testaments to our skill, notches on our seat belts. But as psychologist James Reason wrote in Human Error, “In accident avoidance, experience is a mixed blessing.” The problem is that we learn how to avoid accidents precisely by avoiding accidents, not by being in accidents. But a near miss, as Reason described it, involves an initial error as well as a process of error recovery. This raises several questions: Are our near misses teaching us how to avoid accidents or how to prevent the errors that got us into the tight spot to begin with? Does avoiding a minor accident just set us up for having to get out of much bigger accidents? How, and what, do we learn from our mistakes?

  What do we learn from mistakes? This last question was also raised by the technology of a company called DriveCam, located in an office park in suburban San Diego, where I spent a day watching video footage of crashes, near crashes, and spectacularly careless acts of driving. The premise is simple: A small camera, located around the rearview mirror, is constantly buffering images (the way TiVo does for your television shows) of the exterior view and the driver. Sensors monitor the various forces the vehicle is experiencing. When a driver brakes hard or makes a sudden turn, the camera records ten seconds before and after the event, for context. The clip is then sent to DriveCam analysts, who file a report and, if necessary, apply “coaching.”

  DriveCam, whose motto is “Taking the risk out of driving,” has its cameras installed in everything from Time Warner Cable vans to Las Vegas taxicabs to rental-car shuttle buses at airports. Companies that have installed DriveCam have seen their drivers’ crash rates drop by 30 to 50 percent. The company contends that it has several advantages over the traditional methods of trying to improve the safety records of commercial fleets. One earlier approach, as DriveCam CEO Bruce Moeller told me, was giving drivers spot safety drills. “They’d come in for the training. You’re all hopped up, ‘I’m going to do right.’ But then over time, you start pushing the envelope. You didn’t hit anybody and nobody yelled at you. So that’s fine, you get away with it, and pretty soon you start lapsing back to your old ways.” The widespread onset of “How’s My Driving?” phone numbers in the 1980s created the potential for more constant feedback, but it was often late or of debatable quality, says Del Lisk, the company’s vice president. “It’s highly prone to very subjective consumer call-ins,” he said. “Like, ‘I’m mad about my phone bill so I’m going to call in that AT&T guy.’”

  Given that the company car is the most statistically hazardous environment for workers, it seems appropriate that the thinking behind DriveCam is inspired by the work of H. W. Heinrich, an insurance investigator for the Travelers Insurance Company and the author of a seminal 1931 book, Industrial Accident Prevention: A Scientific Approach. After investigating tens of thousands of industrial injuries, he estimated that for every one fatality or major injury in the workplace, there were 29 minor injuries and 300 “near-miss” incidents that led to no injury. He arranged these in the so-called Heinrich’s triangle and argued that the key to avoiding the one event at the top of the triangle lay in tackling the many small events at the bottom.

  When I’d met Moeller, the first thing he’d told me, after introductory pleasantries, was: “If we were to put a DriveCam in your car, not knowing you at all, I guarantee you that you’ve got driving habits you’re not even aware of that are an accident waiting to happen.” He pointed to the Heinrich triangle he had drawn on a whiteboard. “You know about the twenty-nine and the one”—the crashes and the fatality—“because there’s hard evidence that somebody got killed or somebody crashed,” he said. “What we show you with the DriveCam monitoring this thing twenty-four/seven is that all the very same unsafe behaviors that are going on down here”—he pointed to the bottom of the triangle—“can result, or will result, in accidents, except for pure luck.”

  The key to reducing what DriveCam calls “preventable accidents,” as Lisk sees it, lies at the bottom of the triangle, in all those hidden and
forgotten near misses. “Most people would look at that triangle and use the top two tiers as their way of estimating how good a driver they are. The truth is, it’s really the bottom tier that is the real evaluator.” In other words, a driver thinks of their own performance in terms of crashes and traffic tickets. People riding along with a driver look at it differently. “All of us, as passengers,” Lisk said, “will ride along and evaluate drivers from the bottom of the pyramid, squeezing the armrest and pushing our feet into the floorboards.”

  As I played virtual passenger on a number of DriveCam moments, a disturbing realization came to my attention. There is much careless driving, to be sure. In one clip, a man takes his hands off the steering wheel to jab at a boxer’s speed bag suspended from the rearview mirror. In any number of clips, drivers struggle to keep their eyes open and their bobbing heads erect. “We’ve got one where a guy’s driving a tanker truck full of gas for eight full seconds as he’s asleep,” Moeller said. (A dip on a Los Angeles freeway had triggered the camera.)

  But what is most unsettling in a number of clips is not the event itself as much as what else was visible in the camera, just outside the frame. In one bit of footage, a man looks down to dial a cell phone as he drives down a residential street. His eyes are off the road for much of the nine seconds of the recorded event, and his van begins to drift off the road. Startled by the vibration of the roadside, he swerves back onto the road. He grimaces in a strange mixture of shock and relief. Examining the image closely, however, one sees a child on a bicycle and the child’s friend, standing just off the road, less than a dozen feet away from the triggered event. “Do you think he ever even saw the bike rider and other person?” Lisk asked. “It’s just luck. It’s that pyramid.”