Traffic
Page 52
cars and cyclists: Based on a conversation with city manager Judie Zimomra and police department records specialist Bob Conklin. Zimomra noted that there were traffic fatalities in the 1990s, but subsequent enforcement and engineering efforts have proven successful. The lesson: Speed is important, but hardly the only issue.
lowers crash risks: C. N. Kloeden, A. J. McClean, and G. Glonek, “Reanalysis of Travelling Speed and Risk of Crash Involvement in Adelaide, South Australia,” Australian Transport Safety Bureau Report CR 207, April 2002.
Adams calls “hypermobility”: See John Adams, “Hypermobility: Too Much of a Good Thing?,” Royal Society for the Arts Lecture, November 21, 2001. Retrieved at http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/~jadams/publish.htm.
roughly half the crashes: See Cherian Varghese and Umesh Shankar, “Restraint Use Patterns Among Fatally Injured Passenger Vehicle Occupants,” DOT HS 810 595, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, May 2006.
slow level of 35 miles per hour: From a report prepared by Michael Paine, based on data taken from the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 1993 to 1997; retrieved from http://users.tpg.au/users/mpaine/speed/html.
(among other things): An observational study of a random sample of drivers in New York City found that those talking on a hands-free device were more likely to engage in other distracting activities (e.g., smoking, eating, grooming) than those speaking on a handheld cell phone. As the researchers observed, the drivers “may be trading one automobile-related risk for another.” See “Driving Distractions in New York City,” Hunter College, November 2007.
Epilogue: Driving Lessons
to pass the front: For an excellent discussion of the physics of oversteering and understeering, as well as driving in general, see Barry Parker, The Isaac Newton School of Driving: Physics and Your Car (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
to maintain our course?: W. O. Readinger, A. Chatziastros, D. W. Cunningham, J. E. Cutting, and H. H. Bülthoff, “Gaze-Direction Effects on Drivers’ Abilities to Steer a Straight Course,” TWK Beiträge zur 4. Tübinger Wahrnehmungskonferenz, ed. H. H. Bülthoff, K. R. Gegenfurtner, H. A. Mallot, R. Ulrich. Knirsch, Kirchentellinsfurt, 149 (2001). Available at http://www.kyb.mpg.de/publication.htm?publ=67.
“doing so at all”: See W. O. Readinger, A. Chatziastros, D. W. Cunningham, H. H. Bülthoff, and J. E. Cutting, “Gaze-Eccentricity Effects on Road Position and Steering,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, vol. 8, no. 4 (2002), pp. 247–58.
“might be your English teacher”: Actually, the traditional model of high school driver’s ed—usually classroom instruction plus on-road time—has been largely discredited. The reasons have less to do with the worth or validity of learning the rules of the road than with the fact that such programs, rather than helping to produce safer drivers, just seem to put more unsafe drivers on the road at a younger age. A number of studies have come to this conclusion, but see, in particular, J. Vernick, G. Li, S. Ogaitis, E. MacKenzie, S. Baker, and A. Gielen, “Effects of High School Driver Education on Motor Vehicle Crashes, Violations, and Licensure,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine, vol. 16, no. 1 (1999), pp. 40–46; M. F. Smith, “Research Agenda for an Improved Novice Driver Education Program: Report to Congress, May 31, 1994,” DOT HS 808 161, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, retrieved from www.nhtsa.dot.gov/people/injury/research/pub/drive-ed.pdf; and I. Roberts and L. Kwan, “School Based Driver Education for the Prevention of Traffic Crashes,” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, no. 2 (2006).
skills needed to drive: Thanks to Leonard Evans for this reference.
stock-car drivers: A. F. Williams and B. O’Neill, “On-the-Road Driving Records of Licensed Race Drivers,” Accident Analysis & Prevention, vol. 6 (1974), pp. 263–70.
“not going fast enough”: Thanks to Leonard Evans for Andretti Quote.
to go next: Vision researchers studied the eye and head movements of Formula 3 racer Tomas Scheckter as he drove on the Mallory Park circuit in Leceistershire, England. They suggested that Scheckter, because he had learned the layout of the track, actually moved his head in the direction in which he wanted to go before he adjusted his steering. See Michael F. Land and Benjamin W. Tatler, “Steering with the Head: The Visual Strategy of a Racing Driver,” Current Biology, vol. 11 (2001), pp. 1215–20.
to avoid a crash: For an excellent summary of the research, see Lisa D. Adams, “Review of the Literature on Obstacle Avoidance Maneuvers: Braking Versus steering,” Report No. UMTRI-94-19, University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, Ann Arbor, August 1994.
the only thing to do: Jeffrey Muttart raises the idea of “operant conditioning” in “Factors That Influence Drivers’ Response Choice Decisions in Video Recorded Crashes,” Society of Automotive Engineers Journal, 2005.
to their full power: See Rodger J. Koppa and Gordon G. Hayes, “Driver Inputs During Emergency or Extreme Vehicle Maneuvers,” Human Factors, vol. 18, no. 4 (1976), pp. 361–70.
the obstacle is moving: D. Fleury, F. Fernandez, C. Lepesant, and D. Lechner, “Analyse typologique des manoeuvres d’urgence en intersection,” Rapport de recherche INRETS, no. 62 (1988), quoted in Lisa D. Adams, 1994.
to the point where we do nothing: Michael A. Dilich, Dror Kopernik, and John M. Goebelbecker, “Evaluating Driver Response to a Sudden Emergency: Issues of Expectancy, Emotional Arousal, and Uncertainty,” Safety Brief, vol. 20, no. 4 (June 2002). A frequent occurrence in driving simulator studies that seek to evaluate how drivers respond to unexpected obstacles or hazards is that a small number of subjects often have “no response.” A French study, for example, in which drivers on a test track had to react to an inflatable “dummy car,” found that 4 percent of subjects did nothing, simply “freezing.” See Christian Collett, Claire Petit, Alain Priez, and Andre Dittmar, “Stroop Color-Word Test, Arousal, Electrodermal Activity and Performance in a Critical Driving Situation,” Biological Psychology, vol. 69 (2005), pp. 195–203.
car was going to do: D. Lechner and G. Maleterre, “Emergency Maneuver Experimentation Using a Driving Simulator,” Society of Automotive Engineers Technical Paper No. 910016, 1991; referenced in Dilich, Kopernik and Goebelbecker, op. cit.
“living room on wheels”: Micheline Maynard, “At Chrysler, Home Depot Still Lingers,” New York Times, October 30, 2007.
warnings he or she might disregard: See, for example, M. P. Manser, N. J. Ward, N. Kuge, and E. R. Boer, “Influence of a Driver Support System on Situation Awareness and Information Processing in Response to Lead Vehicle Braking,” Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Forty-eighth Annual Meeting (New Orleans, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 2004), pp. 2359–63, and “Crash Warning System Interfaces,” DOT HS 810 697, January 2007.
be able to react accordingly: This is one of the problems that plague automation. Barry Kantowitz at the University of Michigan notes that automation “works fine up to a certain point, and then it fails utterly and completely.” He uses the example of a plane crash in which the autopilot, in attempting to correct for an imbalance in fuel, tipped the plane to the point where the autopilot couldn’t control it any longer. “So essentially it did the equivalent of ringing a bell and telling the pilot, ‘Okay, you take over now,’” he says. “You have a pilot who’s unaware there’s a problem. He’s ‘out of the loop.’ He has to very quickly figure out what the hell happened.” But when people fail, they have what he calls a “graceful degradation. They fail slowly instead of abruptly. They can cope with it a little better.” Design theorist Donald Norman gives a driving example in his book The Design of Future Things: A friend was driving with adaptive cruise control. This is the device that measures the distance away in time, in speed, of the vehicle in front, and keeps the car automatically at a safe distance. But, Norman notes, his friend suddenly moved to exit the freeway, forgetting the ACC was on. The car, thinking it suddenly had clear road ahead, chose to accelerate at the very moment it shoul
d have been decelerating. Automation is supposed to relieve the driver of having to pay attention, but in this case, if the driver hadn’t been paying attention there would have likely been a severe crash. Norman argues that while full automation would be safer than human manual driving, the “difficulty lies in the transition towards full automation, when different vehicles will have different capabilities, when only some things will be automated, and when even the automation that is installed will be limited in capability.” See Donald Norman, The Design of Future Things (New York: Basic Books, 2007), p. 116.
memory playing tricks): A group of psychologists at the University of Nottingham showed subjects a series of eight-second film clips of “dangerous” and “safer” situations that had been digitally manipulated to play at a range of faster or slower speeds (but always for eight seconds). Subjects were more likely to have judged the “dangerous” films as having been sped up. “If real dangerous events are remembered as if time slowed down,” the authors write, “this will create an expectation that videos of such events should run slowly…. Becausethe actual speed of the video does not slow down, viewers will judge films of dangerous events as having been sped up.” See Peter Chapman, Georgina Cox, and Clara Kirwan, “Distortion of Drivers’ Speed and Time Estimates in Dangerous Situations,” in Behavioral Research in Road Safety (London: Transport for London, 2005), pp. 164–74.
A Note About the Author
Tom Vanderbilt writes on design, technology, science, and culture, among other subjects, for many publications, including Wired, Slate, the London Review of Books, Gourmet, the Wall Street Journal, Artforum, Travel & Leisure, Rolling Stone, the New York Times Magazine, Cabinet, Metropolis, and Popular Science. He is contributing editor to the award-winning design magazines I.D. and Print, and contributing writer for the popular blog Design Observer. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and drives a 2001 Volvo V40.
ALSO BY TOM VANDERBILT
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vanderbilt, Tom.
Traffic: why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us) / by Tom Vanderbilt.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Automobile driving—Psychological aspects. 2. Traffic congestion. I. Title.
TL152.5.V36 2008
629.28'3—dc22 2008011507
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Vanderbilt, Tom.
Traffic: why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us) / by Tom Vanderbilt.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Automobile driving—Psychological aspects. 2. Traffic congestion. I. Title.
TL152.5.V36 2008
629.28'3—dc22 2008011507
eISBN: 978-0-307-27054-2
v3.0