Traffic
Page 48
“roadside conditions”: Richard F. Weingroff, “President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Federal Role in Highway Safety” (Washington, D. C.: Federal Highway Administration, 2003), retrieved at http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/safety.htm.
they felt it was safer: N. J. Ward and G. J. S. Wilde, “Driver Approach Behaviour at an Unprotected Railway Crossing Before and After Enhancement of Lateral Sight Distances: An Experimental Investigation of a Risk Perception and Behavioural Compensation Hypothesis,” Safety Science, vol. 22 (1996), pp. 63–75.
raise property values: See, for example, S. E. Maco and E. G. McPherson, “A Practical Approach to Assessing Structure, Function, and Value of Street Tree Populations in Small Communities,” Journal of Arboriculture, vol. 29, no. 2 (March 2003).
from roadsides for decades: In a 1941 Chicago planning study titled Subdivision Regulation, for example, the author, Harold Lautner, wrote: “While it has been customary in the past to plant street trees between the street curb and the pedestrian walk, an alternate procedure is now recommended as preferable in some cases. Trees planted along the street curb increase the severity of motor accidents and in turn are easily subjected to traffic injury…and except on very wide streets, curb planted trees crowd in upon the traveled way. To plant street trees on the property side of pedestrian walks, away from the pavement and traffic, seems more desirable, particularly on residential streets” (emphasis in original). This would, of course, not only increase the speed of passing traffic, posing more of a risk to pedestrians, but would also remove a potential barrier to a car striking a pedestrian. From Southworth and Ben-Joseph, Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities, op. cit., p. 88.
Chapter Eight: How Traffic Explains the World
same space as New York City: This figure is taken from Richard L. Forstall, Richard P. Green, and James B. Pick, “Which Are the Largest: Why Published Populations for Major Urban Areas Vary So Greatly.” Accessed from the University of Illinois–Chicago “City Futures” conference Web site, http://www.uic.edu/cuppa/cityfutures/.
same lane as the cyclists: Dinesh Mohan, The Road Ahead: Traffic Injuries and Fatalities in India (New Delhi: Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme, Indian Institute of Technology; 2004), pp. 1–30.
but before: Lu Huapu, Shi Qixin, and Masato Iwasaki, “A Study on Traffic Characteristics at Signalized Intersections in Beijing and Tokyo,” Tsinghua University, Proceedings of EASTS (The 2nd Conference of the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies).
would mean “stop”: This story is discussed in Keesing’s Research Report, The Cultural Revolution in China (New York: Scribner, 1967), p. 18.
“can he actually overtake”: Kenneth Tynan, The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan (New York: Bloomsbury, 2002), p. 101.
the entire street: The journalist Jan Wong, writing about Beijing in the 1980s, reported that “even state-owned cars were so rare that most Beijing intersections lacked traffic lights. Stop signs were non-existent. At night, cars were required to douse headlights to avoid blinding cyclists. With only a handful of vehicles on the road, no one worried about one car smashing into another in the dark.” See Jan Wong’s China (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1999), p. 212.
as a social good?: For a good discussion of Mao’s “lawlessness” concept, see Chapter 10 of Zhengyuan Fu, Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
public morality and civic culture: See, for example, Wen-shun Chi, Ideological Conflicts in Modern China: Democracy and Authoritarianism (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1986), p. 56.
“superior to them”: This quote comes from “Moral Embarrassment,” Shanghai Star, August 11, 2001.
“rights by litigation”: Albert H. Y. Chen, “Toward a Legal Enlightenment: Discussions in Contemporary China on the Rule of Law,” UCLA Pacific Basin Law Journal, vol. 17 (2000).
drive on the right: The information about which side of the road different countries drive on was obtained from Peter Kincaid’s exhaustive treatise The Rule of the Road: An International Guide to History and Practice (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986).
violation of the standard: The flashing of headlights in Europe also seems to be bluntly effective at getting people to move over. As a study of Austrian highway behavior showed, while demographic factors explained which drivers tended to drive faster and tailgate more aggressively (men driving expensive cars, as you might expect), there was also what the author called an “instrumental function”—the urge to “dominate” other drivers seemed to be the most effective way to encourage them to move over. “It was found that drivers who approach to under ten meters behind the camera car were more likely to displace the driver ahead,” the authors wrote. “Furthermore, drivers who approached faster displaced others more effectively.” Klaus Atzwanger and B. Ruso, in Vision in Vehicles VI (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science B.V., 1999), p. 197.
confusing array of laws: See, for example, the Web site maintained by John Carr, http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.htm.
rights have been violated: George McDowell, an economist at Virginia Tech, has offered the fascinating theory that a country’s traffic behavior is reflected in its economic system. In the United States, the supposed “free market” is, he argues, instead an “open market,” in which “rules, both formal and informal, govern behavior. Opportunistic behavior is expected and even encouraged but within a strict set of parameters.” In China, however, he argues, the system is better described as a “free market,” where “the only rule is caveat emptor.” The Chinese system of what he calls “advantage” means that horns are used less as a means to signal “road rage” but more to “notify other vehicles that you are there and will not give way.” Advantage “is gained,” he writes, “exploited by the person who gained it, and accepted by the person bested.” In the United States this acceptance is less likely to occur. See George R. McDowell, “The Market as Traffic: An Economic Metaphor,” Journal of Economic Issues, vol. 38 (2004), pp. 270–74.
acts more personally: American roads are also more crowded than the expensive Italian autostrada. This brings up the issue that it may be more difficult for drivers to “get over” and meet the demands of the driver to the rear; there is also the larger issue that giving up an entire lane to a few people wishing to go fast, with all the lane changing that entails, can be poor use of the traffic network.
fairness and equality: According to the political scientist Robert Putnam, this dynamic is more prevalent in the southern regions of Italy. These, he argued, have historically lacked a strong civic culture, being dominated instead by feudalistic patronage relationships and an “amoral familism”—worry about yourself and trust that everyone will look after themselves. Instead of “horizontal” networks of reciprocal relations and trust among the community, Putnam argues, the south has been dominated by more vertical, patron-client-style relationships. From Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
jaywalking: The historian Peter Norton, in an exemplary article, traces the etymology of the word to at least 1909, well before the 1917 Boston usage registered by the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1989. Norton traces the rise of the word in the popular imagination as pedestrians saw gradually eroded their longstanding right to a shared use of city streets, in favor of a historically unprecedented edict, as described by one writer, upon the arrival of the automobile: “The streets are for vehicle traffic, the sidewalks for pedestrians.” Jaywalking, in essence, marginalized and even criminalized what had been standard urban behavior. This was done ostensibly in the name of safety, but as Norton notes, its real aim was to clear urban streets for the increased circulation of vehicular traffic (other, potentially more effective, safety measures like speed “governors” for cars were overridden by motoring interests). Peter D. Norton, “Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street,” Technology and Culture, vol. 48 (April 2007),
pp. 331–59.
in which he was raised: Aksel Sandemose, A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936).
rules of grammar: Sanford W. Gregory Jr. compared traffic behavior in Egypt to a “verdant grammar,” one not “yet ripened by centuries of social-interactive maturation.” The arrival of mass driving in Egypt, he suggests, happened too quickly for Western traffic patterns to be institutionalized, so instead a kind of pidgin or creole language was formed, with distinct rules, as is often the case “when mature speakers of diverse dominant language groups meet.” Without time to create a formal order of its own, Egypt’s drivers invented a brutally effective slang of sorts. Gregory commented that this seemed based more on eye contact and informal signals than in the West. See Gregory, “Auto Traffic in Egypt as a Verdant Grammar,” Social Psychology Quarterly, vol. 48, No. 4 (December 1985), pp. 337–48.
each side of the street: This story is mentioned in William Muray, City of the Soul: A Walk in Rome (New York: Crown, 2003), p. 26.
Mythological status: H. V. Morton, in his 1957 travelogue A Traveler in Rome, observed, while riding in a taxi: “The cars around us, which were traveling just as fast as we were, swerved aside by one of those instinctive Italian motoring movements not unlike birds in formation who part and form again” (1957; repr., New York: Da Capo, 2002), p. 135.
one-fifth of the traffic: Michele Faberi, Marco Martuzzi, and Franco Pirrami, Assessing the Health Impact and Social Costs of Mopeds: Feasibility Study in Rome (Rome: World Health Organization, 2004), p. xvii.
fewer riders wear helmets: The helmet-use rates come from F. Servadei, C. Begliomini, E. Gardini, M. Giustini, F. Taggi, and J. Kraus, “Effect of Italy’s Motorcycle Helmet Law on Traumatic Brain Injuries,” Injury Prevention, vol. 9, no. 3 (2003), pp. 257–60.
collisions with cars: Giuseppe Latorre, Giuliano Bertazzoni, Donato Zotta, Edward Van Beeck, and Gualtiero Ricciardi, “Epidemiology of Accidents Among Users of Two-Wheeled Motor Vehicles: A Surveillance Study in Two Italian Cities,” European Journal of Public Health, vol. 12, no. 2 (2002), pp. 99–103.
(and getting away with it): R. B. Cialdini, L. J. Demaine, B. J. Sagarin, D. W. Barrett, K. Rhoads, and P. L. Winter, “Managing Social Norms for Persuasive Impact,” Social Influence, vol. 1 (2006), pp. 3–15.
behavior either way: There have been several studies of jaywalking and model behavior. See, for instance, Monroe Lefkowitz, Robert R. Blake, and Jane Srygley Mouton, “Status Factors in Pedestrian Violation of Traffic Signals,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 51 (1955), pp. 704–06, and Brian Mullen, Carolyn Copper, and James E. Driskell, “Jaywalking as a Function of Model Behavior,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 16, no. 2 (1990), pp. 320–30.
are famously orderly: Joe Moran makes the point that people in England have been “complaining about the disintegration of queue discipline for almost as long as they have been lauding the queue as the essence of British decency—perhaps because this myth carries such symbolic weight that it cannot be sustained by the necessarily messier reality.” From Joe Moran, Queuing for Beginners (London: Profile Books, 2007), p. 92.
more in theory than reality: Liu Shinan argues that Chinese do queue up when queuing itself is the norm: “We queue where we are accustomed to queue, for example, at a cinema booking office or at the cashier’s counter in a supermarket. In many places where we are not accustomed to queue, however, we do not queue—for example, in front of an elevator or subway door.” Liu Shinan, “Behavior of Tourists Has No Quick Fix,” China Daily, November 10, 2006.
to be slight: One study found the correlation between “service quality” and tipping to be just 0.07 percent. See Michael Conlin, Ted O’Donohue, and Michael Lynn, “The Norm of Restaurant Tipping,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, vol. 52 (2003), pp. 297–321. For an excellent overview of the quite extensive academic literature on tipping, I recommend the work of Ofer Azar, an economist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, particularly “The Social Norm of Tipping: A Review,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology, vol. 37, no. 2 (2007), pp. 380–402.
“obeying the law”: See Amir Licht, “Social Norms and the Law: Why People Obey the Law,” a working paper available at http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/licht/papers.htm.
to nearly 84,000: Sheng-Yong Wang, Gui-Bo Chi, Chun-Xia Jing, Xiao-Mei Dong, Chi-Peng Wu, and Li-Ping Li, “Trends in Road Traffic Crashes and Associated Injury and Fatality in the People’s Republic of China, 1951–1999,” Injury Control and Safety Promotion, vol. 10, nos. 1–2 (2003), pp. 83–87.
roughly 49 million: New York Times, July 22, 1951.
Smeed’s law: R. J. Smeed, “Some Statistical Aspects of Road Safety Research,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (General), vol. 112, no. 1 (1949), pp. 1–34.
as low as 10 percent: Vinand M. Nantulya and Michael R. Reich, “The Neglected Epidemic: Road Traffic Injuries in Developing Countries,” British Medical Journal, May 2002, pp. 1139–41.
a staggering 80 percent: Mohan, The Road Ahead, op. cit. pp. 1–30.
onto the same thoroughfare: In a discussion paper for the World Bank, Christopher Willoughby notes that “the current problems of motorization seem not generally to result from its occurring at lower per capita income levels, or more rapidly, than in the countries which coped with it reasonably satisfactorily in earlier years; it also grew very fast there for prolonged periods, especially in France (and Germany). The problems tend to be connected rather with the higher concentration of national population, economic activity and motorization itself in one or a very few major cities, at times when those cities are also increasing in size and population much more rapidly than was the case in Europe or Japan.” From Christopher Willoughby, “Managing Motorization,” Discussion Paper TWU-42, World Bank; available at: http://www.world-bank.org/transport/publicat/twu_42.pdf.
nearly 100 percent: For a fascinating discussion of history of automobile insurance in China and recent reforms, see J. Tim Query and Daqing Huang, “Designing a New Automobile Insurance Pricing System in China: Actuarial and Social Considerations,” Casualty Actuarial Society Forum, Winter 2007.
to West Germany’s 130: Flaura K. Winston, Craig Rineer, Rajiv Menon, and Susan P. Baker, “The Carnage Wrought by Major Economic Change: Ecological Study of Traffic Related Mortality and the Reunification of Germany,” British Medical Journal, vol. 318 (June 19, 1999), pp. 1647–50.
begin to accelerate: See Richard Dahl, “Heavy Traffic Ahead: Car Culture Accelerates,” Environmental Health Perspectives, April 2005.
Maureen Cropper shows: Elizabeth Kopits and Maureen Cropper, “Traffic Fatalities and Economic Growth,” Accident Analysis & Prevention, vol. 37 (2005), pp. 169–78.
terms of traffic safety: Based on statistics from the International Traffic Safety Data and Analysis Group; retrieved on January 13, 2007, from http://cemt.org/IRTAD/IRTADPUBLIC/we2.htm.
some 160 deaths per 10,000 vehicles: World Report on Road Traffic Injury Prevention (Geneva: World Health Organization and World Bank, April 4, 2004).
“to use the buses”: BBC, February 28, 2001. Accessed from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1186572.stm.
slightly higher in Belgium): Pocket World in Figures 2007 (London: Economist, 2007).
risk of traffic fatalities: See Theodore E. Keeler, “Highway Safety, Economic Behavior, and Driving Environment,” American Economic Review, vol. 84, no. 3 (1994), pp. 684–93, and Reid Ewing, Richard A. Schieber, and Charles V. Zegeer, “Urban Sprawl as a Risk Factor in Motor Vehicle Occupant and Pedestrian Fatalities,” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 93, no. 9 (2003), pp. 1541–45.
Belgium had 522: World Report on Road Traffic Injury Prevention, op. cit., p. 198.
fairness of the process: Tom R. Tyler, Why People Obey the Law (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).
The information on Belgium’s traffic enforcement comes from Lode Vereeck and Lieber Deben, “An International
Comparison of the Effectiveness of Traffic Safety Enforcement Policies,” unpublished paper, Limburg University, Belgium, 2003.
lowest crash rates in the world: Retrieved from the International Road Traffic and Accident Database (IRTAD), at http://cemt.org/IRTAD/IRTADPUBLIC/we2.htm.
after-tax income: Before 1999, fines were based on pretax income, says Heikki Summala of the Traffic Research Unit at the University of Helsinki. This means fines have dropped between 20 and 60 percent, but at the same time minimum fines were raised, so revenue has in fact increased. E-mail correspondence with Heikki Summala, November 9, 2007.
Jaakko Rytsölä: The Finnish speeding ticket information comes from Steve Stecklow, “Finnish Drivers Don’t Mind Sliding Scale, but Instant Calculation Gets Low Marks,” Wall Street Journal, January 2, 2001.
return to shortly: A Finnish public-opinion poll in 2001 found that 66 percent of male drivers and 73 percent of male nondrivers felt the fine system was fair, while 77 percent of female drivers and 78 percent of female nondrivers thought it fair. The data comes from a study (in Finnish): T. Lappi-Seppälä, “Public Opinion and the 1999 Reform of the Day-Fine System,” National Research Institute of Legal Policy, Publication No. 195, Helsinki, 2002. Thanks to Heikki Summala for providing the numbers.
rather stagnant: In 2003, for example, according to Eurostat, it grew just .50 percent. Data obtained from http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu. Had the GDP risen, there may have been an increase in fatalities, reflecting the higher amounts of driving due to economic vitality—but it certainly would not have been by enough to offset the huge reductions in fatalities.