Not only was the driver unaware of the real hazards he was subjecting himself and others to in the way he was driving, he was not even aware that he was unaware. “This guy’s probably a great guy, good family man, good employee,” Lisk said. “He doesn’t even know this is happening. If we told him it happened, with a black box or something, he wouldn’t even believe it.” Without the video, the driver would not have realized the potential consequences of his error. “I get reinforced more positively every day that I don’t hit a kid because I’m not seeing that stuff,” Moeller said. “I’m thinking I’m good, I can do this. I can look down at my BlackBerry, I can dial a phone, I can drink. We all get reinforced the wrong way.”
Until the moment when we do not, of course, and something goes wrong. We commonly refer to these moments as “accidents,” meaning that they were unintended or unforeseen events. Accident is a good word for describing such events as an otherwise vigilant driver being unable to avoid a tree that suddenly fell across the road. But consider the case of St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Josh Hancock, who was tragically killed in 2007 when his rented SUV slammed into the back of a tow truck that was stopped on the highway, lights flashing, at the scene of a previous crash. Investigators learned that Hancock (who days before had crashed his own SUV) had a blood alcohol concentration nearly twice the legal limit, was speeding, was not wearing a seat belt, and was on a cell phone at the time of the fatal crash.
Despite the fact that all these well-established risky behaviors were present, simultaneously, the event was still routinely referred to in the press as an “accident.” The same thing happened with South Dakota congressman Bill Janklow. A notorious speeder who racked up more than a dozen tickets in the span of four years and had a poster of himself boasting that he liked to live in the “fast lane,” in 2003 Janklow blazed through a stop sign and killed a motorcyclist. The press repeatedly called it an “accident.”
The problem with this word, as the British Medical Journal pointed out in 2001 when it announced that it would no longer use it, is that accidents are “often understood to be unpredictable,” and thus unpreventable. Were the Hancock and Janklow crashes really unpredictable or unpreventable? They were certainly unintentional, but are “some crashes more unintentional than others”? Did they “just happen” or were there things that could have been done to prevent them, or at least greatly reduce the chances of their happening? Humans are humans, things will go wrong, there are instances of truly bad luck. And psychologists have argued that humans tend to exaggerate, in retrospect, just how predictable things were (the “hindsight bias”). The word accident, however, has been sent skittering down a slippery slope, to the point where it seems to provide protective cover for the worst and most negligent driving behaviors. This in turn suggests that so much of the everyday carnage on the road is mysteriously out of our hands and can be stopped or lessened only by adding more air bags (pedestrians, unfortunately, lack this safety feature).
Most crashes involve a violation of traffic laws, whether intentional or not. But even the notion of “unintentional” versus “intentional” has been blurred. In 2006, a Chicago driver reaching for a cell phone while driving lost control of his SUV, killing a passenger in another car. The victim’s family declared, “If he didn’t drink or use drugs, then it’s an accident.” As absurd as that statement may sound, given that the driver intentionally broke the law, the law essentially agreed: The driver was fined $200. Similarly strange distinctions are found with “sober speeders.” There is a huge gulf in legal recrimination between a person who boosts his blood alcohol concentration way over the limit and kills someone and a driver who boosts his speedometer way over the limit and kills someone.
A similar bias creeps into news reports, which are often quick to note, when reporting fatal crashes, that “no drugs or alcohol were involved,” subtly absolving the driver from full responsibility—even if the driver was flagrantly exceeding the speed limit. Car companies would rightly be castigated if they advertised the joys of drinking and driving. But as a survey of North American car commercials by a group of Canadian researchers showed, it is quite acceptable to show cars being driven, soberly, in ways that a panel of viewers labeled “hazardous.” Nearly half of the more than two hundred ads screened (always carrying careful, if duplicitous, disclaimers) were considered by the majority of the panel to contain an “unsafe driving sequence,” usually marked by high speeds. Ads for SUVs were the most frequent offenders, and across all commercials, when drivers were shown, the majority were men.
What the video footage at DriveCam showed, more often than not, is not that unforeseen things happen on the road for no good reason but that people routinely do things to make crashes “unpreventable.” If the van driver had struck the child by the side of the road, it would have been reasonably “accidental” only in the sense that he did not intend to do it. Would this have just been “bad luck”? The psychologist Richard Wiseman has demonstrated in experiments that people are also capable of making their own “luck.” For example, people who know lots of people are more likely to have seemingly lucky “small-world” encounters than those who do not (and those who did not have many such chance meetings more often viewed themselves as “unlucky”).
We cannot entirely prevent “bad luck” from landing on our doorstep, but the van driver dialing his cell phone, the one who narrowly missed the kids in the DriveCam video, was virtually throwing open his door and inviting it inside. DriveCam’s hindsight does make it glaringly easy to see all the things drivers were doing wrong. The question is, Why didn’t they? Why do people act in ways that put themselves and others at unnecessary risk? Are they being negligent, ignorant, overconfident, just plain dumb—or are they just being human? Can we actually learn from our mistakes before they have real consequences?
Psychologists have demonstrated that our memory, as you might expect, is tilted in favor of more recent things. We also tend to emphasize the ends of things—as, for example, when told a series of facts and later asked to recall the entire series. Studies have confirmed that people are less likely to remember traffic accidents the further back in time they happened. In this same way, a near crash or a crash might loom more vividly than the things that led up to it. “Almost rear-ending someone will stick in your mind, but that freezing it and remembering it comes at the cost of losing the precipitating events,” Rusty Weiss, director of DriveCam’s consumer division, explained. Time also takes its toll. A study led by Peter Chapman and Geoff Underwood at the University of Nottingham in England found that drivers forgot about 80 percent more of their near crashes if they were first asked about them two weeks later than if they were asked at the end of their trip. This is exactly the point with DriveCam: It does not let you forget the precariousness of your existence on the road.
Weiss, who came to DriveCam after setting up a program to put the camera in the cars of teenage drivers in a trial in Minnesota, theorizes that this amnesia for what helped lead up to a crash, something we are all subject to, troubles beginning drivers in particular. They are the ones, ironically, who are constantly finding themselves moving in and out of risky situations. “These kids should be learning rapidly,” he says. “There’s lots of learning opportunities, yet they continue making mistakes. At the moment they say it wasn’t their fault, but then they see the video and go, ‘Oh my God.’ It’s like video feedback for your golf swing. It makes you aware of things you’re not aware of when you’re there in the moment.”
The problem may be that they are simply forgetting the moments they should be learning from. Another study by Chapman and Underwood found that when drivers were shown videos of hazardous driving situations, novice drivers were less likely to remember details from the event than were more experienced drivers.
One reason may have been that they were not looking in the right places. Researchers have long known that inexperienced drivers have much different “visual search” patterns than more experienced drivers. They tend t
o look overwhelmingly near the front of the car and at the edge markings of the road. They tend not to look at the external mirrors very often, even while doing things like changing lanes. Knowing where to look—and remembering what you have seen—is a hallmark of experience and expertise. In the same way that eye-tracking studies have shown reliable differences in the way artists look at paintings versus the way nonartists do (the latter tend to zero in on things like faces, while artists scan the whole picture), researchers studying driver behavior can usually tell by a driver’s glance activity how experienced they are.
Teenage drivers were, in many ways, the perfect next step for DriveCam. Like the drivers of commercial vehicles, teens are often driving someone else’s car, and they are driving under the supervision of a higher authority—in this case, Mom and Dad. A trial in Iowa put DriveCams in the cars of twenty-five high school students for eighteen weeks. Triggered events were sent to parents, and the scores (using an anonymous ID) were posted so the drivers could judge exactly where they stood in relation to their peers. According to Daniel McGehee, the trial’s head and director of the Human Factors and Vehicle Safety Research Program at the University of Iowa’s Public Policy Center, teenagers in Iowa, because of its agricultural character, can begin driving to school at fourteen. “That crash rate is absolutely out of sight,” he said. Teenagers in Iowa also drive a lot: In thirteen months of driving, the twenty-five drivers put over 360,000 miles on the odometer, many of them on the statistically most dangerous roads: rural two-lane highways.
The early clips he showed were indeed troubling: drivers sailing heedlessly through red lights, or singing and looking around absentmindedly before flying off a curve into a cornfield. Admittedly, I felt a bit uneasy peering into this little cocoon of privacy during these moments of raw, unfiltered emotion. Apparently the teens, in this age of reality television, were not so shy. The DriveCam contains a button that drivers can press to add a comment about a triggered event. Some teens used it to record diary entries, a sort of dashboard confessional about events in their lives outside the car. Driving also provided a rather unique window on to the social lives of teens, McGehee told me. “We could tell when someone got a new girlfriend or boyfriend. They would drive more aggressively to show off.”
But it was the safety effects, not the video confessions or dating habits, that interested the researchers. When I spoke to McGehee later, he was in the sixteenth week of the trial. “The riskiest drivers dropped their safety-relevant behaviors by seventy-six percent,” he said. “The farther we get into this, the risky behaviors are just drying up.” Whereas before, the riskiest drivers had been triggering the device up to ten times a day, McGehee said, they were now triggering it only once or twice a week. “Even the magnitude of those triggers is pretty benign relative to their early days,” he noted. “They still might be taking a corner a little too fast but it might be right above the threshold.”
What was really happening to the teens? Were they afraid of getting in trouble with their parents? Were they just seeing their own mistakes for the first time? Or were they simply gaming the system, trying to crack the code like they do with their SATs? “I think what you see is that drivers in this pure behavioral psychology loop are becoming sensors themselves,” McGehee said. “This little accelerometer in there—they start to sense over time what the limit is.” As DriveCam’s Weiss put it, “One kid said, ‘I figured out how to beat the system. I just look way ahead and anticipate traffic and slow down for corners, and I haven’t set it off in a month.’” He was, whether he realized it or not, acting like a good driver.
But what happens when the DriveCam is gone? “I don’t pretend to represent DriveCam as anything but an extrinsic motivation system,” Moeller had said. He admits that in the early days of a DriveCam trial, the mere presence of the camera is enough to get drivers to act more cautiously, in a version of the famous “Hawthorne effect,” which says that people in an experiment change their behavior simply because they know they are in an experiment. But without any follow-up coaching, without “closing the feedback loop,” results begin to erode. “The driver starts to think, ‘The camera’s not intrusive at all. Nothing’s ever going to happen—this is just there so in case I get in a crash this will record who was at fault,’” Moeller said. “When you inject coaching in, then he realizes there is an immediate and certain consequence for his risky driving behavior. That twenty-second loss of privacy is enough for most people.”
The things that DriveCam finds itself coaching drivers on most often do not involve actual driving skills per se—like cornering ability or obstacle avoidance—but mistakes that are born from overconfidence. The most striking example of this came in a trial that Weiss, then with the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, did with an ambulance company that was trying to improve the “ride experience” for patients. One might think the DriveCam would have been triggered quite regularly in emergency situations, when the drivers, with lights and sirens, were speeding their patients to the hospital, careening around corners, and slaloming through red lights. That was not the case. “It’s actually smoother when you have the red lights and siren on, is how it turned out,” Weiss explained. “We triggered more events—we had harder cornering and more erratic driving—when they were just doing their own thing.” Weiss, himself a former ambulance driver and paramedic, suspected he knew why. “The big difference between running lights and a siren and your normal driving is that you’re focused. They’re seeing the hazards that are out there and they’re slowing sooner when someone can’t see them. Smoother is quicker when you’re running lights and a siren.”
Since most of us don’t have sirens and lights, our driving is of the everyday variety. As the sense of routine begins to take over, we begin to ratchet up our sense of the possible—how close we can follow, how fast we can take curves—and become conditioned to each new plateau. We forget those things that the Stanford researchers were learning as they tried to teach their robot to drive: It is not as easy as it appears. Lisk, who had that morning reviewed a sheaf of collision reports, said that “the large majority were just people who didn’t have enough space, or were not attentive enough. A lack of good old-fashioned basic driving skills was a huge part of it.”
He showed one clip, of a driver moving rather quickly down an open lane toward a tollbooth, flanked on either side by queues of cars. “The driver’s thinking it’s wide open. It’s a football mentality—I’ve got all my blockers and I can go,” Lisk said. It’s as if the driver has already imagined himself to have passed through the lines of cars and past the open tollbooth. There is just one problem: All those other drivers are eagerly salivating over that same space. “Because they’re boxed in they’ve got to come in a pretty abrupt angle and at low speed,” Lisk said. “We see a lot of collisions where the driver hasn’t slowed down enough when they’re approaching that high-risk, open-lane situation.”
This may help explain why EZ Pass–style automated payment lanes at tollbooths, which should theoretically help reduce crashes at these statistically risky areas—drivers no longer have to fumble for change—have been shown to increase crash rates. Drivers approach at a higher speed, with nothing to stop them from zooming through the toll plaza, while other cars, finding themselves in the “wrong” lanes, dart out and jockey among lanes more than they would have under the old system, in which there was less chance of finding a shorter queue.
Each month, DriveCam receives more than fifty thousand of these triggered clips, making it, Moeller said, the world’s largest “repository of risky driving behavior.” The technology of the camera is allowing glimpses into what has been, for most of the automobile’s existence, a kind of closed world: the inner life of the driver.
“Driver behavior” has previously been teased out through things like driving simulators, test tracks, or actually having a researcher sit in the car, clipboard in hand—none of which is quite like real-world driving. Cars could be watched from the outside, via cameras or
lab assistants on highway overpasses, but that did not give any glimpse into what the driver was doing. The study of crashes was based largely on police investigations and witness reports, which are both prone to distortion—the latter particularly so.
People are more likely to assign blame to one person or another when a crash is severe, research has shown, than when it is minor. In another study, a group of people were shown films of car crashes. When the subjects were asked, a week later, to gauge the speed of various cars in the films, they estimated higher speeds when the questions used the word “smash,” versus words like “hit” or “contacted.” More subjects remembered seeing broken glass when the word “smash” was used, even though no glass was broken. A driver’s own memory of events is usually clouded by a desire to lessen their own responsibility for an event (perhaps so as to not conflict with their enhanced self-image or to avoid legal liability). “Baker’s law,” named after crash reconstructionist J. Stannard Baker, notes that drivers “tend to explain their traffic accidents by reporting circumstances of lowest culpability compatible with credibility”—that is, the most believable story they can get away with.
Most elusive of all, before Drivecam-style devices, were the crashes that almost happened. There was no way to determine why and how they nearly occurred (or did not), nor how often these near misses took place. If the top of the triangle was murky, the bottom of the triangle was as vast a mystery as the deepest ocean floor.
That has now changed, and large-scale studies, using technology like DriveCam’s, are providing new clues into how drivers behave and, most important, new insight into just why we encounter trouble on the road. The answer is not so much all the things that the road signs warn us about—the high winds on bridges or the deer crossing the highway. Nor is it mostly tire blowouts, faulty brakes, or the mechanical flaws that prompt car makers to issue recalls (“human factors” are said to account for 90 percent of all crashes). Nor does it seem to be “driver proficiency” or our ability to understand traffic signals.
Traffic Page 9