Traffic

by Tom Vanderbilt

  drive-through window: Carole Paquette, “Drive-Throughs Move Beyond Banks and Fast Food,” New York Times, April 8, 2001.

  Audio Publishers Association: Information on audiobooks comes from documents provided by the Audio Publishers Association.

  to bear in L.A. traffic: Idan Ivri, “Gridlock: How Traffic Has Rerouted Jewish Life,” Jewish Journal, July 9, 2004. The political scientist Robert Putnam suggests that every ten minutes of commute time “cuts involvement in community affairs by 10 percent” (Putnam’s italics); from Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), p. 213.

  on their left sides: Based on research by Scott Fosko, Saint Louis University School of Medicine. Article retrieved from: http://www.aad.org/aad/Newsroom/Driving+An+Automobile.htm.

  “toward the same horizon”: From Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (repr.; London: Penguin, 2003), p. 328.

  double since 1990: Elizabeth Rosenthal, “Car Boom Puts Europe on Road to a Smoggy Future,” New York Times, January 7, 2007.

  underground parking garages: “Car Ownership Boom Means Traffic Jams in Once-Tranquil Tibet,” International Herald Tribune, November 7, 2007.

  Caracas: Rory Carroll, “Carbon Leaves Caracas in One Big Jam,” Guardian, November 23, 2006. The “seven cents” gas figure comes from Simon Romero, “Venezuela Hands Narrow Defeat to Chavez Plans,” New York Times, October 30, 2007.

  the legendary traffic: In a 2004 estimate, São Paulo was said to have just under four miles of freeways to accommodate more than five million vehicles. Los Angeles, by contrast, had nine hundred miles to handle about seven million vehicles. See Henry Chu, “São Paulo Seeks Road Map to Life Without Traffic Jams,” Los Angeles Times, November 9, 2004. In 2007, a rising number of fatal helicopter crashes was prompting calls to limit the growing airborne traffic. See Cristina Christiano, “SP quer limitar tráfego de helicópteros,” O Globo, September 24, 2007.

  faster car-pool lanes: Matthew Moore, “Car Jockeys Often in for Rough Ride from Traffic Police,” Sydney Morning Herald, December 26, 2002.

  human “nav system”: This information came via an e-mail correspondence with Jian Shou Wang.

  cause of death: World Health Organization. Retrived from: http://www.who.int/world-health-day/2004/infomaterials/en/brochure_jan04_en.pdf.

  Chapter One: Why Does the Other Lane Always Seem Faster?

  “modal bias”: This term was suggested to me in a conversation with Aaron Naparstek.

  “change of mode”: Hélène Fontaine and Yves Gourlet, “Fatal Pedestrian Accidents in France: A Typological Analysis,” Accident Analysis and Prevention, vol. 39, no. 3 (1997), pp. 303–12.

  “drives as he lives”: W. A. Tillman and G. E. Hobbs, “The Accident-Prone Automobile Driver: A Study of the Psychiatric and Social Background,” American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 106 (November 1949), pp. 321–31. Many of us may think of “road rage” as a rather new concept, like “air rage” or “surfing rage,” but it is really as old as the automobile itself. The year 1968, for example, might have been marked by violent social upheaval in metropolises from Paris to Mexico City, but there was another form of violence in the air: That year, Mayer H. Parry published Aggression on the Road, while the New York Times reported on government testimony about “uncontrollable violent behavior” on the nation’s roads. (Three years later, F. A. Whitlock followed up with his book Death on the Road: A Study in Social Violence.) See John D. Morris, “Driver Violence Tied to Crashes,” New York Times, March 2, 1968.

  risks on the road: For a discussion, see Patrick L. Brockett and Linda L. Golden, “Biological and Psychobehavioral Correlates of Credit Scores and Automobile Insurance Losses: Toward an Explication of Why Credit Scoring Works,” Journal of Risk and Insurance, vol. 1, no. 74 (March 2007), pp. 23–63.

  typically involve questionnaires: See, for example, David L. Van Rooy, James Rotton, and Tina M. Burns, “Convergent, Discriminant, and Predictive Validity of Aggressive Driving Inventories: They Drive as They Live,” Aggressive Behavior, vol. 3, no. 2 (February 2006), pp. 89–98.

  more aggressive manner: This is a virtual consensus in the field, as demonstrated by a survey of the scholarly literature in B. A. Jonah, “Sensation Seeking and Risky Driving: A Review and Synthesis of the Literature,” Accident Analysis and Prevention, vol. 29, no. 5 (1997), pp. 651–65.

  “Traffic tantrums”: Thanks to Ian Walker for this phrase.

  especially by novice drivers: Kazumi Renge, “Effect of Driving Experience on Drivers’ Decoding Process of Roadway Interpersonal Communication,” Ergonomics, vol. 43, no. 1 (1 January 2000), pp. 27–39.

  Green Day bumper sticker: This brings up the point of whether there should really be any nonessential communication in traffic at all. As the German sociologist Norbert Schmidt-Relenberg has observed, “It could be said that cooperation in traffic is not a means to attain something positive, but to avoid something negative: every participant in the system attempts to attain his destination without friction. Hence traffic is a system all its own; the less its participants come into contact with each other and are compelled to interaction, the better it works: a system defined and approved in the reality by a principle of minimized contact.” In other words, not only should we not honk at people with Green Day stickers, we should not put the sticker there in the first place. Norbert Schmidt-Relenberg, “On the Sociology of Car Traffic in Towns,” in Transport Sociology: Social Aspects of Transport Planning, ed. Enne de Boer (Oxford, New York: Pergamon Press, 1986), p. 122.

  violated traffic laws: María Cristina Caballero, “Academic Turns City into a Social Experiment,” Harvard University Gazette, March 11, 2004.

  associated with subordination: Katz suggests this may be why we so often call other drivers “assholes” and give the “up yours” finger.

  by the honker: Andrew R. McGarva and Michelle Steiner, “Provoked Driver Aggression and Status: A Field Study,” Transportation Research F: Psychology and Behavior, vol. 167 (2000), pp. 167–179.

  anything but rude or hostile: What if our signals were more meaningful? A few years ago, before the Tokyo Motor Show, Simon Humphries, a designer for Lexus in Japan, told me in an e-mail exchange that the Toyota Motor Company had proposed a car—nicknamed POD—that would contain a “vehicle expression operation control system.” Accompanying the usual lights and arrows would be a new range of signals. The headlights would be “anthropomorphized” with “eyes” and “eyebrows,” the antenna would “wag,” and different colors would be used to show emotion. “As traffic grows heavier and vehicle use increases,” reads the U.S. patent application, “vehicles having expression functions, such as crying or laughing, like people and other animals do, could create a joyful, organic atmosphere rather than the simple comings and goings of inorganic vehicles.” Indeed, a German company even released an aftermarket version of this system, called Flashbox, that uses a series of blinks to signify things like “apology,” “annoyed,” and “stop for more?” Adding signals, however, creates many new problems. Everyone has to learn the new signals. More information in traffic means more time to process. The receiver of a “smile,” moreover, may not understand why they have received it any more so than a honk. And flashing “angry” signals may provoke rather than defuse violence.

  deficient male anatomy: One male Australian driver was actually fined because when a woman wagged her pinkie at him, he responded by hurling a plastic bottle at her windshield. The man claimed that the gesture was akin to a “sexual assault,” a worse insult than the traditional finger. “The ‘finger,’ it’s so common now, that we’re over it, but this finger is a whole new thing and it’s been promoted so much everybody knows it and you just get offended,” he said. David Brouithwaite, “Driver Points to Ad Campaign for His Digitally Enhanced Road Rage,” The Sydney Morning Herald, November 1, 2007.

  “constructing moral dramas”: For a more detailed discussion of Katz’s investigation of anger in
traffic, see Jack Katz, How Emotions Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), in particular the first chapter, “Pissed Off in L.A.”

  “the angry driver”: Jack Katz, How Emotions Work, p. 48.

  “actor-observer effect”: See L. D. Ross, “The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 10, ed. L. Berkowitz (New York: Random House, 1977), pp. 173–220.

  feel more in control: As Thomas Britt and Michael Garrity write, “individuals will probably err in the direction of assuming an internal locus of causality for the offending driver’s behavior in order to feel some sense of control over events when driving.” “Attributions and Personality as Predictors of the Road Rage Response,” British Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 45 (2006), pp. 127–47.

  required by the circumstances: This was the finding arrived at when a group of researchers for England’s Transport Research Laboratory conducted a series of interviews with drivers, part of which included assessments of cyclist and driver behavior in traffic scenarios. They concluded, “The underlying unpredictability of cyclists’ behavior was seen by drivers as stemming from the attitudes and limited competence of the cyclists themselves, rather than from the difficulty of the situations that cyclists are often forced to face on the road (i.e., drivers made a dispositional rather than a situational attribution). Despite their own evident difficulties in knowing how to respond, drivers never attributed these difficulties to their own attitudes or competencies, nor did they do so in relation to other drivers (i.e. they made a situational attribution about their own and other drivers’ behavior). This pattern of assignment of responsibility is characteristic of how people perceive the behavior of those they consider to be part of the same social group as themselves, versus those seen as part of a different social group.” L. Basford, D. Davies, J. A. Thomson, and A. K. Tolmie, “Drivers’ Perception of Cyclists,” in TRL Report 549: Phase I—a Qualitative Study (Crowthorne: Transport Research Laboratory, 2002).

  shares their birth date: See D. T. Miller, J. S. Downs, and D. A. Prentice, “Minimal Conditions for the Creation of a Unit Relationship: The Social Bond Between Birthday Mates,” European Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 28 (1998), pp. 475–81. This idea was raised in an interesting paper by James W. Jenness, “Supporting Highway Safety Culture by Addressing Anonymity,” AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, 2007.

  Katz says, cyborgs: This point was made as early as 1930, by a city planner in California who suggested that “Southern Californians have added wheels to their anatomy.” The quote comes from J. Flink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1988), p. 143, via an excellent article by John Urry, a sociologist at Lancaster University. See John Urry, “Inhabiting the Car,” published by the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom, available at http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Urry-Inhabiting-the-Car.pdf.

  different people: See Henrik Walter, Sandra C. Vetter, Jo Grothe, Arthur P. Wunderlich, Stefan Hahn, and Manfred Spitzer, “The Neural Correlates of Driving,” Brain Imaging, vol. 12, no. 8 (June 13, 2001), pp. 1763–67.

  and following distance: See David Shinar and Richard Compton, “Aggressive Driving: An Observational Study of Driver, Vehicle and Situational Variables,” Accident Analysis & Prevention, vol. 36 (2004), pp. 429–37.

  give themselves over to the car: Research also suggests that single drivers are more susceptible to fatigue and being involved in crashes, and it is not difficult to speculate why. Passengers provide another “set of eyes” to warn of potential hazards and can aid in keeping the driver engaged. For the increased risk factors to single drivers see, for example, Vicki L. Neale, Thomas A. Dingus, Jeremy Sudweeks, and Michael Goodman, “An Overview of the 100-Car Naturalistic Study and Findings.” National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Paper Number 05-0400.

  thirty-three citations: See F. K. Heussenstamm, “Bumper Stickers and the Cops,” Trans-Action (Society), vol. 8 (February 1971), pp. 32 and 33. The author acknowledged that the subjects’ driving may have been affected by the experiment itself but argued that “it is statistically unlikely that this number of previously ‘safe’ drivers could amass such a collection of tickets without assuming real bias by police against drivers with Black Panther bumper stickers.” The information about specially designated license plates comes from “New ‘Scarlet Letter’ for Predators in Ohio,” Associated Press, March 1, 2007. The license plates raise, ironically, a problem similar to “Children at Play” signs: They signify that a car without such plates is somehow safe for children to approach, just as the “Children at Play” signs suggest that drivers can act less cautiously in areas without the signs.

  aggressive driving on her part: Women driving SUVs, as at least one set of very limited observational studies found, drove faster in 20-mile-per-hour school zones, parked more often in restricted shopping mall fire zones, came to a stop less frequently at stop signs, and were slower to move through an intersection when the light turned green, as compared to other drivers in other types of vehicles. As the author himself admits, the sample sizes were small, and the higher rates of women SUV drivers may simply have reflected the fact that the study took place in a setting where there happened to be a higher than average number of women driving SUVs. See John Trinkaus, “Shopping Center Fire Zone Parking Violators: An Informal Look,” Perceptual and Motor Skills, vol. 95 (2002), pp. 1215–16; John Trinkaus, “School Zone Speed Limit Dissenters: An Informal Look,” Perceptual and Motor Skills, vol. 88 (1999), pp. 1057–58.

  at greater risk: See, for example, Devon E. Lefler and Hampton C. Gabler, “The Fatality and Injury Risk of Light Truck Impacts with Pedestrians in the United States,” Accident Analysis & Prevention, vol. 36 (2004), pp. 295–304.

  “grieving while driving”: Paul C. Rosenblatt, “Grieving While Driving,” Death Studies, vol. 28, (2004), pp. 679–86.

  including nasal probing: Thanks to Daniel McGehee for this story.

  not wearing hoods: Philip Zimbardo. “The Human Choice: Individuation, Reason, and Order vs. Deindividuation, Impulse, and Chaos.” In Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, ed. W. J. Arnold and D. Levine (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970). Zimbardo’s description of the conditions that contribute to the sense of “deindividuation” are worth noting in light of traffic. He writes: “Anonymity, diffused responsibility, group activity, altered temporal perspective, emotional arousal, and sensory overload are some of the input variables that can generate deindividuated reactions.” Arguably, all of Zimbardo’s “input variables” can routinely be found in traffic situations. The quote comes from Zimbardo’s “Depersonalization” entry in International Encyclopedia of Psychiatry, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Neurology, vol. 4, ed. B. B. Wolman (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1978), p. 52.

  to the executioners: The hostage and firing squad information comes from David Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1996), p. 128.

  with the tops up: Patricia A. Ellison, John M. Govern, Herbert L. Petri, Michael H. Figler, “Anonymity and Aggressive Driving Behavior: A Field Study,” Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, vol. 10, no. 1 (1995), pp. 265–72.

  “online disinhibition effect”: See J. Suler, “The Online Disinhibation Effect,” CyberPsychology and Behavior, vol. 7 (2004), pp. 321–26.

  relatively large social networks: See, for example, R. I. M. Dunbar, “Neocortical Size as a Constraint on Group Size in Primates,” Journal of Human Evolution, vol. 22 (1993), pp. 469–93.

  higher testosterone levels: Roxanne Khamsi, “Hormones Affect Men’s Sense of Fair Play,” New Scientist, July 4, 2007.

  “strong reciprocity”: See Ernst Fehr, Urs Fischbacher, and Simon Gächter, “Strong Reciprocity, Human Cooperation and the Enforcement of Social Norms,” Human Nature, vol. 13 (2002), pp. 1–25.

  altruistic all the same: The comments on road
rage from Herbert Gintis come from an interview posted at www.innoarticles.com. The example of the bird signaling a predator’s approach comes from Olivia Judson, “The Selfish Gene,” Atlantic Monthly, October 2007, p. 92. It has also been speculated that animals raising an alarm against a predator are actually sending a signal to the predator that it has been spotted. For an interesting theoretical discussion, see C. T. Bergstrom and M. Lachmann, “Alarm Calls as Costly Signals of Antipredator Vigilance: The Watchful Babbler Game,” Animal Behaviour, vol. 61 (2001), pp. 535–43.

  around 20 miles per hour: Ben Hamilton-Baillie, “Improving Traffic Behaviour and Safety Through Urban Design,” Civil Engineering, vol. 158 (May 2005), pp. 39–47.

  result was the same: P. C. Ellsworth, J. M. Carlsmith, and A. Henson, “The Stare as a Stimulus to Flight in Human Subjects: A Series of Field Experiments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 21 (1972), pp. 302–11.

  were not present: Kevin J. Haley and Daniel M. T. Fessler, “Nobody’s Watching? Subtle Cues Affect Generosity in an Anonymous Economic Game,” Evolution and Human Behavior, vol. 26 (2005), pp. 245–56.

  university break room: See Melissa Bateson, Daniel Nettle, and Gilbert Roberts, “Cues of Being Watched Enhance Cooperation in a Real-World Setting,” Biology Letters, June 2, 2006.

  cooperation in humans: Michael Tomasello, Brian Hare, Hagen Lehmann, and Josep Call, “Reliance on Head Versus Eyes in the Gaze Following of Great Apes and Human Infants: The Cooperative Eye Hypothesis,” Journal of Human Evolution, vol. 52 (2007), pp. 314–20.

  direction of one’s gaze: Smiling might help as well, at least if you’re female and the person you’re smiling at is male, a French study showed. The study had male and female subjects try to hitch rides by smiling or not smiling at passing drivers. More women received rides when they smiled, but for men, alas, this did not work. Also, every driver that stopped was male. Nicolas Guegue and Jacques Fischer-Lokou, “Hitchhikers’ Smiles and Receipt of Help,” Psychological Reports, vol. 94, (2004), pp. 756–60.