Summary:
With the growth of cities, people spend a lot of time in traffic and this book delves into why people drive the way they do, across the world. It is a fascinating look at how complicated humans behind the wheel are. The book provides deep insights into why traffic jams happen and how they can be alleviated. It provides a historical overview of how our current traffic infrastructure came to be and how much effort went into standardizing what we now take to be self evident answers (As an example, Green for Go, Red for Stop was arrived at after years of experimentation and behavioral modification of drivers but it is still a hazard for 10 percent of people who are color blind as they only see gray for Red and Green). The one consistent theme about Westerners' (and some Indians as well) perception of Indian traffic is its frightening lack of order. This book provides some context to the madness of Indian (and Chinese) traffic and goes into a discussion of how the pervasive corruption in Indian (and Chinese) society is partly to blame for the present condition. It also puts the behavior of Indian drivers in context with some studies that show that the craziness of Indian drivers is a response to the traffic they see (as opposed to chalking it up to an inborn characteristic of the nation as a whole). It also provides a multitude of reasons why investments in more roads to cater to cars is bad for the drivers and bad for the environment. The book provides a driver centric view into theories of behavioral psychology. Reading the book provides well developed insights into why an average driver responds the way they do in traffic but, attesting from personal experience, that improved awareness does not lead to better driving outcomes.
Analysis:
Watching traffic anywhere in the world (with the exception of a few countries) would provide sufficient evidence to Douglas Adams claim about human condition in Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy - 'Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans'. As much as drivers consider cars as a step up from when humans were roaming the forests in prehistoric times, human brains evolve much more slowly. Cars and trucks provide a multitude of benefits to the drivers but they also are the cause of a host of ills (physical and mental) that befall the general population (drivers and pedestrians alike).
From archaeological evidence, it has been known that Ancient Romans traveled one way on Pompeii's roads on their chariots (or at least people who could afford one). When horse drawn carriages became the travel mode of choice in 18th century, it became the leading cause of death on London's roads. In 19th century, horse drawn carriages killed an average of 4 pedestrians per week in New York City. When bicycles came onto the scene in late 19th century, traffic once again went through a metamorphosis. Every time a new mode of travel became popular, other vehicles on the road had to learn to share the road space and this was true of chariots, horse drawn carriages, bicycles and cars. However, the increased speed of cars has forced people to learn to communicate much faster compared to the earlier eras.
Driving in a car removes the verbal communication between the driver and the outside world. It forces them to communicate using signals (which is one reason why traffic in India is noisy since Indian drivers are trained to hit the horn to convey their presence to other drivers). Because of that lack of communication, drivers, as a rule, make gross generalizations about other drivers - women drivers are bad etc.,. Some of these generalizations are tempered by any commonality a driver can find in a fellow driver on the road - for example, when a driver sees another driver driving a car of similar make and model, they think more positively of them. Bumper stickers that US drivers use on their cars are a way of advertising the values of the driver however whimsical ('Re-unite Gondwanaland'). Other drivers do not stop to think if the driver in a car with a sticker (offensive or funny) owns the car and has placed that sticker themselves - for all they know the driver could be in a borrowed car. Drivers also suffer from above average effect - everyone considers themselves to be an above average driver even if their driving record says otherwise. The lack of real time feedback on driving skills and lack of communication on the road combine to provide a positive feedback (at best) and neutral feedback (at worst) to the driver. Traffic engineers try to provide negative feedback to a driver by instituting speed displays on the side of the road at driver's eye level. When the driver is provided negative feedback (example, ticketed by a cop), they attribute it to cops having to meet their monthly quota than any serious fault on the part of the driver.
Solo drivers in a car are more aggressive because of a lack of communication combined with anonymity that a car provides. When a passenger is present, they operate as a feedback mechanism (backseat driving) that operates as a check on the driver's aggressive impulses. While a driver's identity is bound with the car, the passenger is a passive observer whose identity is not bound with the driver (which is a possible reason why drivers become defensive when passengers engage in backseat driving - drivers take it as the passenger challenging their identity). With no passengers in a car, the solo driver behaves very similar to someone in an online chat room under a pseudonym - there is no facial feedback for an action in an online chatroom so people are more rude and puff themselves up (even if they justify it as 'being themselves'). Because of reciprocal altruism, in a prehistoric group, performing a good deed increased the chances that the recipient of the good deed would reciprocate (either immediately or at a later date). Drivers engage in a form of reciprocal altruism when another driver does something good to them even though the chances of either of them interacting with each other again is slim. Because processing capabilities of human brains become progressively impaired once the speed of vehicles crosses 20 mph, it is possible that the expectation of reciprocal altruism is higher at at lower speeds than at higher speeds.
When drivers are stuck in a lane, the other lanes always seem to move faster. A multi lane highway operates like a queue where anyone can jump their position in the queue as long as they are not a danger to fellow drivers (even though some try even when it is dangerous). Research has shown that multiple queues (like the one in McDonald's) make people more frustrated with their position than in a single queue. This is due to the concept of loss aversion according to which people place more value on their losses than their gains. In a single lane (or queue), people look to their front and back more often. The act of acknowledging the number of people behind them (in a lane or a queue) seems to make the drivers value their current position in their queue much more (as Kannadasan said - 'Unakkum keezhae ullavar kodi, ninaiththu paarththu nimmadhi naadu'). In a multiple queue (or a multi lane highway), people monitor the other queues on their left and right and do not focus as much on people behind them. As a result, the value (and confidence) they place on their current position in the queue is much lesser.
Work zones on roads usually require drivers to merge onto open lanes. The warnings are usually posted well ahead of the actual work zone. Some drivers merge onto the other lanes as soon as they see the warnings (Early mergers). Others drive on the (to be closed) lane and merge onto open lanes at the last possible moment (Late Mergers). While Early Mergers consider themselves to be following the rules as laid down by the traffic authorities, Late Mergers point to their method as a better utilization of the available lanes. Research has shown that the scenario where everyone stays in their lane right until the work zone and merge onto other lanes is the best way to achieve maximum traffic throughput in a work zone.
Drivers also fall for recency bias - If the driver takes the same route to office everyday, they tend to remember the end more than other parts of the commute. If the driver happens to be in an accident that is caused by driver making a wrong choice earlier in their commute, they generally tend to forget it when they review the events leading up to an accident. Furthermore, when accidents actually happen, drivers' memory of events leading up to the accident tends as much as possible to reduce their culpability. There is even a law named for this - Baker's law - 'Drivers tend to explain their traffic accidents by reporting circumstances of lowest culpability compatible with credibility'. Drivers who have the same commute every day become bored or worse, tired with the commute. On the other hand, people who focus on every new challenge in their commute get stressed out. When drivers get bored with their commute, they try to keep themselves occupied by multi tasking while driving (reading books, putting on make up, shaving, to name a few). Research has shown that humans are terrible at multi tasking (irrespective of what people actually claim). Drivers who do a secondary activity (talking on the phone, eating etc.,.) do worse in both the activities - primary activity of driving and the secondary activity. Multi tasking allows people to check off the boxes in terms of activities rather than provide their full attention to each of their activities. When people get into accidents, it is usually because of the 2 second rule - the forward attention of drivers has shifted away from the road for at least 2 seconds. When they shift their attention back to the road, they expect the ground reality to be the same as the snapshot they had before they shifted their forward attention even though at least 2 seconds have elapsed. With increased speeds of cars, it then becomes difficult for the driver to adjust to the new reality. Talking on the cell phone is at least as dangerous as dialing the cell phone while driving. While dialing on the cell phone while driving takes away the driver's forward attention, talking on the cell phone is far more insidious because the driver has their eyes on the road but their mind is splitting the available cognitive resources between registering road feedback and listening to the conversation. Research has shown that humans tend to move their eyes up when asked a question that requires them to pay attention. That would result in the driver taking their eyes off the road even though they still have control of the wheel (as opposed to dialing the phone where one hand will be busy dialing the phone).
Humans suffer from inattentional blindness - researchers showed a video of a circle of people, with half the people wearing white and the other half wearing black, passing a basketball around. Test subjects were asked to count the passes. When they were asked if they saw a person wearing a gorilla suit pass through the middle of the circle, more than half of the test subjects did not notice it. A related concept is Stroop effect - Drivers are slow to respond to an unexpected event if it is outside the realm of their expectations. Researchers showed people a list of color names - Some of the words were printed in the same color they represented (word black written in black ink) while others were in colors different from what they represented (example, the word black written in red ink). It took longer for people in the latter scenario to identify the word (because they were expecting the word black to be in black ink).
Eyes are complex organs that make assumptions about the world they are navigating. At elevated speeds, the world constructed by the mind and eye (which was very useful in evaluating survival risks to humans in prehistoric times) can lead the drivers astray. In wagon wheel effect, rotating wheel of a car looks like it is spinning backward because our eyes cannot keep up with the speed of the rotation of the wheel and as such it confuses the speed of the wheel with its position in the previous frame. As anyone who has sat in a car knows, motion parallax makes the nearer objects move slower while farther objects move faster. Objects that are really far off like mountains seem to move in the same direction as us - Because when we look at an object out of the window of the car, our eyes must move in the opposite direction of the car's motion. Wherever we are looking at the things before the object, they are moving across our retina opposite to the direction we are moving while things after the object we are looking at are moving across our retina in the same direction as our travel.
The behavior of a mass of drivers in rush hour traffic has its analogies in insect world. The author takes a look at 3 insects that operate as a swarm and tries to understand lessons for drivers in rush hour traffic. Mormon crickets engage in extreme competition with each other in their rush to get nutrients. The best way to get the needed nutrients is to eat their neighbors (cannibalism) or any other organism that comes their way. As a result, the move in a tight swarm, with each cricket focusing on eating their neighbor while taking care not to be eaten by others around it. Researchers have found that crickets who are separated from this culture of extreme competition become easy prey for predators so the tight swarm provides its benefits even if it full of danger. This is similar to drivers in states that have a light regulatory touch. Drivers reach their destinations but they also have to make sure they do not get knocked off the road while getting to their destination. Desert locusts have Jekyll and Hyde personalities - when they are alone (Jekyll), they are harmless. When they are looking for food (typically after a drought), they become extremely aggressive. This is similar to drivers who are very calm and cooperative until someone cuts them off and their road rage comes out, causing them to behave in an extremely aggressive manner. While these 2 insects provide an analogy to how traffic operates currently, the New World army ant provides a way where the traffic system works to the benefit of everyone - the ant swarms follow rules during their trips to garner food - ants that are leaving the nest to bring food take the outer lanes while ants returning with food (and as such slower) take the inner lanes. Using pheromones, the 3 lanes operate seamlessly to gather food for the ant colony. An analogous approach to human driving would be for drivers to stay in their lanes and only merge at the last moment (as ants do).
The author also provides examples of alternatives that are not optimal for the driver (making them wait, slowing them down etc) that end up being optimal for the system as a whole(libertarians will not like this). One of them is ramp meters - these are lights at the entrance to the freeway that meter the number of cars that can enter the freeway and is usually used during rush hour. Highway traffic flows smoothly as long as the amount of cars on the road is below a critical mass - very similar to the analogy with locusts - a critical mass of locusts triggers extreme competition among them). When the rush hour begins, traffic on the highway slowly builds up to a heavy but steadily moving pace. Drivers entering the freeway where ramp meters are deployed might complain why they are being forced to wait for the green light when they can see the there is space on the highway for more cars. However, as more cars enter the freeway (when there is no ramp meter during rush hour), critical mass is achieved that results in the merge lane (rightmost lane in case of US) slowing down first. Drivers bail out of that lane and move onto other lanes progressively slowing those lanes down as well. By using ramp meters, traffic engineers try to maintain the amount of cars on the highway below the critical mass. When congestion occurs (either because of someone talking on their cell phone or hitting their brakes indiscriminately), traffic engineers can hold up some part of the traffic at the entrance ramp using the ramp meter that allows the congestion to dissipate.
As a country's GDP increases, the affluence of its population grows. When GDP per capita grows beyond $5000, it leads to an explosion in car purchases which then results in traffic congestion. Historically, people across the world have used 1 hour as the time for their ideal commute to and from their jobs. As speeds and amount of cars has increased, people have ended up with 2 or 3 hours commutes. With the growth of nuclear family across the world, there is far more driving being done by both parents - men predominantly drive to and from work (researchers have found that men's commutes provide no indicator to their family status) while women have the burden of taking their kids to activities. In earlier times, kids would have played in their neighborhood with light adult supervision. With that era gone, parents have been forced to provide activities for kids to keep them engaged. That also means more trips being undertaken by mothers as the activities might not all be in the same area. The desire of parents to micromanage their kids time shows up in the traffic backups during rush hour. A related issue is the desire of people to buy bigger homes as their income level increases. In a city, the high cost of living serves as a ceiling on the size of the house someone can buy. By moving to far flung suburbs, people aim to get more for their hard earned money. When people first move to their new homes, they are happy about their choice. However, they then undergo 'hedonic adaptation' - the newer bigger house becomes the new normal. With more people moving into the neighborhood (since information is pretty easy to come by), the commute to the office starts getting longer. However, the house has been bought with a mortgage so the owner cannot turn around and uproot his family in search of another place. As a result, they end up suffering through their commute and compromising their health when their original intention was the opposite. The rush of people, away from the cities and into the suburbs, also leads to local governments laying down roads to serve those communities who then end up sitting in traffic during their commute. People looking to score a close parking spot in chain store parking lots would be better off picking the first available spot and walking to the store instead of spending time looking for one. People usually underestimate the time they have spent in getting a parking spot. In cities, traffic on the roads gets congested partly due to people looking for street parking. Cities generally offer free (or cheap) street parking in contrast to garage parking that is usually pricier. Garage parking is expensive but the driver is able to determine its availability whereas street parking is cheaper but requires the driver to drive around to locate one. That interferes with traffic flow on city roads.
Traffic engineers in 1950's and 1960's developed new roads to accommodate the growing population of suburbs. However, research has shown that the more roads traffic planners and engineers build, the more cars show up to occupy them. The author illustrates a real life example of traffic through Washington Square park in Greenwich Village in New York City. The park had people driving through its roads at all times. Once a group of community activists convinced the city to severely constrain traffic on the road around the park, traffic dropped off precipitously that allowed the local residents to use the park safely. The idea of new roads causing more traffic is explained by Braess Paradox - Let us assume there are 2 streets - one is a local lane that always takes an hour for the driver to get to the destination and the other is a highway that takes half an hour to get to destination if it is not crowded but takes an hour if it is crowded. Drivers taking either of the roads will reach their destination in an hour. If the 2 roads are modified so that at the halfway point between the cities, the local lane changes into the highway and vice versa, the total travel time for the drivers remains the same. However, if a bridge is now constructed between the 2 roads allowing drivers to opt for faster moving traffic, it worsens the traffic instead of improving the time for everyone. This is another example of something that is optimal for an individual driver not being optimal for the entire system.
In developed countries, drivers have come to expect roads as a public resource whereas they are willing to pay higher rates for other scarce resources (water, telephone etc.). Because they consider roads to be a public resource, drivers are up in arms when cities institute congestion pricing on roads running into and out of the city (as happened in Washington DC this year). Research has shown that congestion pricing makes drivers think about their commutes and come up with alternatives to avoid paying the congestion tax - leaving for office earlier, taking alternate routes, using public transport etc.,.
The underlying philosophy behind the roads is different in US and Europe - Europe has more roundabouts than US which has more intersections. A roundabout is safer than an intersection because there is less potential for conflict. Drivers have to be alert looking for traffic on a roundabout before merging but that attention is focused in one direction. In an intersection, a driver has to pay attention to the front and both the sides and as a result, a driver's attention is split leading to more accidents.
A highway that a driver perceives to be dangerous is usually safe and vice versa. Traffic signs are usually meant to guide the drivers and warn them of any unexpected obstacles (Children at play etc). Research has shown them to be ineffective because drivers who drive on the same road every day get used to those signs and forget about them. After the sign is put up, households might feel comfortable letting their children play more freely and that results in more accidents. A well known traffic engineer, Hans Monderman advocated for complete removal of traffic signs in cities - his contention was that people living in the cities were the rightful owners of their space and people driving in from outside were guests and as such, were expected to be alert to the city population on foot. He expected drivers to take responsibility for their own driving in densely populated cities. That is in opposition to the current approach of traffic engineers - which is to design roads that are forgiving of the driver error. Traffic engineers achieve this by making sure signage on the roads, with clear lane markings and posted speed limits, plays into the expectations of the driver. However, drivers have taken advantage of that approach by permitting themselves to blaze along roads far in excess of the posted speed limit. US has focused on making the roads more safer for drivers at high speeds whereas other developed countries have reduced speed limits and instituted speed cameras (to provide visual feedback to the driver when they break the law). In US, speed cameras have been introduced but they have become a tool to raise revenue for the local government (as federal and state governments have progressively cut funding for local governments).
Vehicular traffic is dangerous in India primarily because of the population density. The traffic related technologies that are used in India were developed in Western countries that had much less population density. It is not surprising that traffic rules are broken with impunity when they serve as a hindrance to a majority of people (the population of India who are pedestrians far outstrips the vehicular traffic in major cities). Developed countries have developed rules to force the various type of vehicles - cars, trucks, buses, bicycles, hand drawn carts etc to share the road. India has not done that. As a result, people have taken matters into their own hands and come up with approaches to getting to their destination. Research has shown making pedestrians wait at a traffic signal for longer than 30 seconds is an invitation to jaywalk. Considering the roads in India are designed strictly for vehicular traffic, it is no surprise pedestrians take shortcuts to get to their destinations on those roads. When GDP of a country rises, more people purchase cars (since they can afford them) and more roads are built to cater to those car owners. The way drivers comply with rules of the road is also reflective of how corrupt the country is. Nations that are ranked least corrupt in the world - Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, Singapore are also the safest countries to drive. Researchers looked at number of parking tickets issued to diplomats in New York City between 1997 and 2002. Diplomats from the most corrupt countries whereas diplomats from least corrupt countries received no tickets. Indian diplomats were ranked in the middle of the list, mirroring their country's position in the global corruption index.
There was recent news of a fatality during a test run of an autonomous vehicle in the US. Robots are good at carrying out discrete actions (like adaptive cruise control) but they are overwhelmed when they are faced with the vagaries of human behavior. The difficulty of bringing an autonomous vehicle to the market is a testament to the multitude of calculations humans engage in when driving on the road.
Experts market automotive technologies for their safety benefits. Usually, those technologies do not work as originally promised - they do end up saving lives but usually end up far short of what their proponents promise at the time of implementation. As companies add more safety features to vehicles, drivers also get progressively reckless, calculating that the safety measures provide them with higher tolerance for mistakes. In academia, there is a concept called Peltzman effect (named after Sam Peltzman of University of Chicago) that drivers traded a decrease in accident risk with an increase in driving intensity, resulting in more fatalities. Between the forgiving nature of the roads and safety technologies, US drivers nowadays survive mistakes that would have killed them before the introduction of the safety features.
With the growth of cities, people spend a lot of time in traffic and this book delves into why people drive the way they do, across the world. It is a fascinating look at how complicated humans behind the wheel are. The book provides deep insights into why traffic jams happen and how they can be alleviated. It provides a historical overview of how our current traffic infrastructure came to be and how much effort went into standardizing what we now take to be self evident answers (As an example, Green for Go, Red for Stop was arrived at after years of experimentation and behavioral modification of drivers but it is still a hazard for 10 percent of people who are color blind as they only see gray for Red and Green). The one consistent theme about Westerners' (and some Indians as well) perception of Indian traffic is its frightening lack of order. This book provides some context to the madness of Indian (and Chinese) traffic and goes into a discussion of how the pervasive corruption in Indian (and Chinese) society is partly to blame for the present condition. It also puts the behavior of Indian drivers in context with some studies that show that the craziness of Indian drivers is a response to the traffic they see (as opposed to chalking it up to an inborn characteristic of the nation as a whole). It also provides a multitude of reasons why investments in more roads to cater to cars is bad for the drivers and bad for the environment. The book provides a driver centric view into theories of behavioral psychology. Reading the book provides well developed insights into why an average driver responds the way they do in traffic but, attesting from personal experience, that improved awareness does not lead to better driving outcomes.
Analysis:
Watching traffic anywhere in the world (with the exception of a few countries) would provide sufficient evidence to Douglas Adams claim about human condition in Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy - 'Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans'. As much as drivers consider cars as a step up from when humans were roaming the forests in prehistoric times, human brains evolve much more slowly. Cars and trucks provide a multitude of benefits to the drivers but they also are the cause of a host of ills (physical and mental) that befall the general population (drivers and pedestrians alike).
From archaeological evidence, it has been known that Ancient Romans traveled one way on Pompeii's roads on their chariots (or at least people who could afford one). When horse drawn carriages became the travel mode of choice in 18th century, it became the leading cause of death on London's roads. In 19th century, horse drawn carriages killed an average of 4 pedestrians per week in New York City. When bicycles came onto the scene in late 19th century, traffic once again went through a metamorphosis. Every time a new mode of travel became popular, other vehicles on the road had to learn to share the road space and this was true of chariots, horse drawn carriages, bicycles and cars. However, the increased speed of cars has forced people to learn to communicate much faster compared to the earlier eras.
Driving in a car removes the verbal communication between the driver and the outside world. It forces them to communicate using signals (which is one reason why traffic in India is noisy since Indian drivers are trained to hit the horn to convey their presence to other drivers). Because of that lack of communication, drivers, as a rule, make gross generalizations about other drivers - women drivers are bad etc.,. Some of these generalizations are tempered by any commonality a driver can find in a fellow driver on the road - for example, when a driver sees another driver driving a car of similar make and model, they think more positively of them. Bumper stickers that US drivers use on their cars are a way of advertising the values of the driver however whimsical ('Re-unite Gondwanaland'). Other drivers do not stop to think if the driver in a car with a sticker (offensive or funny) owns the car and has placed that sticker themselves - for all they know the driver could be in a borrowed car. Drivers also suffer from above average effect - everyone considers themselves to be an above average driver even if their driving record says otherwise. The lack of real time feedback on driving skills and lack of communication on the road combine to provide a positive feedback (at best) and neutral feedback (at worst) to the driver. Traffic engineers try to provide negative feedback to a driver by instituting speed displays on the side of the road at driver's eye level. When the driver is provided negative feedback (example, ticketed by a cop), they attribute it to cops having to meet their monthly quota than any serious fault on the part of the driver.
Solo drivers in a car are more aggressive because of a lack of communication combined with anonymity that a car provides. When a passenger is present, they operate as a feedback mechanism (backseat driving) that operates as a check on the driver's aggressive impulses. While a driver's identity is bound with the car, the passenger is a passive observer whose identity is not bound with the driver (which is a possible reason why drivers become defensive when passengers engage in backseat driving - drivers take it as the passenger challenging their identity). With no passengers in a car, the solo driver behaves very similar to someone in an online chat room under a pseudonym - there is no facial feedback for an action in an online chatroom so people are more rude and puff themselves up (even if they justify it as 'being themselves'). Because of reciprocal altruism, in a prehistoric group, performing a good deed increased the chances that the recipient of the good deed would reciprocate (either immediately or at a later date). Drivers engage in a form of reciprocal altruism when another driver does something good to them even though the chances of either of them interacting with each other again is slim. Because processing capabilities of human brains become progressively impaired once the speed of vehicles crosses 20 mph, it is possible that the expectation of reciprocal altruism is higher at at lower speeds than at higher speeds.
When drivers are stuck in a lane, the other lanes always seem to move faster. A multi lane highway operates like a queue where anyone can jump their position in the queue as long as they are not a danger to fellow drivers (even though some try even when it is dangerous). Research has shown that multiple queues (like the one in McDonald's) make people more frustrated with their position than in a single queue. This is due to the concept of loss aversion according to which people place more value on their losses than their gains. In a single lane (or queue), people look to their front and back more often. The act of acknowledging the number of people behind them (in a lane or a queue) seems to make the drivers value their current position in their queue much more (as Kannadasan said - 'Unakkum keezhae ullavar kodi, ninaiththu paarththu nimmadhi naadu'). In a multiple queue (or a multi lane highway), people monitor the other queues on their left and right and do not focus as much on people behind them. As a result, the value (and confidence) they place on their current position in the queue is much lesser.
Work zones on roads usually require drivers to merge onto open lanes. The warnings are usually posted well ahead of the actual work zone. Some drivers merge onto the other lanes as soon as they see the warnings (Early mergers). Others drive on the (to be closed) lane and merge onto open lanes at the last possible moment (Late Mergers). While Early Mergers consider themselves to be following the rules as laid down by the traffic authorities, Late Mergers point to their method as a better utilization of the available lanes. Research has shown that the scenario where everyone stays in their lane right until the work zone and merge onto other lanes is the best way to achieve maximum traffic throughput in a work zone.
Drivers also fall for recency bias - If the driver takes the same route to office everyday, they tend to remember the end more than other parts of the commute. If the driver happens to be in an accident that is caused by driver making a wrong choice earlier in their commute, they generally tend to forget it when they review the events leading up to an accident. Furthermore, when accidents actually happen, drivers' memory of events leading up to the accident tends as much as possible to reduce their culpability. There is even a law named for this - Baker's law - 'Drivers tend to explain their traffic accidents by reporting circumstances of lowest culpability compatible with credibility'. Drivers who have the same commute every day become bored or worse, tired with the commute. On the other hand, people who focus on every new challenge in their commute get stressed out. When drivers get bored with their commute, they try to keep themselves occupied by multi tasking while driving (reading books, putting on make up, shaving, to name a few). Research has shown that humans are terrible at multi tasking (irrespective of what people actually claim). Drivers who do a secondary activity (talking on the phone, eating etc.,.) do worse in both the activities - primary activity of driving and the secondary activity. Multi tasking allows people to check off the boxes in terms of activities rather than provide their full attention to each of their activities. When people get into accidents, it is usually because of the 2 second rule - the forward attention of drivers has shifted away from the road for at least 2 seconds. When they shift their attention back to the road, they expect the ground reality to be the same as the snapshot they had before they shifted their forward attention even though at least 2 seconds have elapsed. With increased speeds of cars, it then becomes difficult for the driver to adjust to the new reality. Talking on the cell phone is at least as dangerous as dialing the cell phone while driving. While dialing on the cell phone while driving takes away the driver's forward attention, talking on the cell phone is far more insidious because the driver has their eyes on the road but their mind is splitting the available cognitive resources between registering road feedback and listening to the conversation. Research has shown that humans tend to move their eyes up when asked a question that requires them to pay attention. That would result in the driver taking their eyes off the road even though they still have control of the wheel (as opposed to dialing the phone where one hand will be busy dialing the phone).
Humans suffer from inattentional blindness - researchers showed a video of a circle of people, with half the people wearing white and the other half wearing black, passing a basketball around. Test subjects were asked to count the passes. When they were asked if they saw a person wearing a gorilla suit pass through the middle of the circle, more than half of the test subjects did not notice it. A related concept is Stroop effect - Drivers are slow to respond to an unexpected event if it is outside the realm of their expectations. Researchers showed people a list of color names - Some of the words were printed in the same color they represented (word black written in black ink) while others were in colors different from what they represented (example, the word black written in red ink). It took longer for people in the latter scenario to identify the word (because they were expecting the word black to be in black ink).
Eyes are complex organs that make assumptions about the world they are navigating. At elevated speeds, the world constructed by the mind and eye (which was very useful in evaluating survival risks to humans in prehistoric times) can lead the drivers astray. In wagon wheel effect, rotating wheel of a car looks like it is spinning backward because our eyes cannot keep up with the speed of the rotation of the wheel and as such it confuses the speed of the wheel with its position in the previous frame. As anyone who has sat in a car knows, motion parallax makes the nearer objects move slower while farther objects move faster. Objects that are really far off like mountains seem to move in the same direction as us - Because when we look at an object out of the window of the car, our eyes must move in the opposite direction of the car's motion. Wherever we are looking at the things before the object, they are moving across our retina opposite to the direction we are moving while things after the object we are looking at are moving across our retina in the same direction as our travel.
The behavior of a mass of drivers in rush hour traffic has its analogies in insect world. The author takes a look at 3 insects that operate as a swarm and tries to understand lessons for drivers in rush hour traffic. Mormon crickets engage in extreme competition with each other in their rush to get nutrients. The best way to get the needed nutrients is to eat their neighbors (cannibalism) or any other organism that comes their way. As a result, the move in a tight swarm, with each cricket focusing on eating their neighbor while taking care not to be eaten by others around it. Researchers have found that crickets who are separated from this culture of extreme competition become easy prey for predators so the tight swarm provides its benefits even if it full of danger. This is similar to drivers in states that have a light regulatory touch. Drivers reach their destinations but they also have to make sure they do not get knocked off the road while getting to their destination. Desert locusts have Jekyll and Hyde personalities - when they are alone (Jekyll), they are harmless. When they are looking for food (typically after a drought), they become extremely aggressive. This is similar to drivers who are very calm and cooperative until someone cuts them off and their road rage comes out, causing them to behave in an extremely aggressive manner. While these 2 insects provide an analogy to how traffic operates currently, the New World army ant provides a way where the traffic system works to the benefit of everyone - the ant swarms follow rules during their trips to garner food - ants that are leaving the nest to bring food take the outer lanes while ants returning with food (and as such slower) take the inner lanes. Using pheromones, the 3 lanes operate seamlessly to gather food for the ant colony. An analogous approach to human driving would be for drivers to stay in their lanes and only merge at the last moment (as ants do).
The author also provides examples of alternatives that are not optimal for the driver (making them wait, slowing them down etc) that end up being optimal for the system as a whole(libertarians will not like this). One of them is ramp meters - these are lights at the entrance to the freeway that meter the number of cars that can enter the freeway and is usually used during rush hour. Highway traffic flows smoothly as long as the amount of cars on the road is below a critical mass - very similar to the analogy with locusts - a critical mass of locusts triggers extreme competition among them). When the rush hour begins, traffic on the highway slowly builds up to a heavy but steadily moving pace. Drivers entering the freeway where ramp meters are deployed might complain why they are being forced to wait for the green light when they can see the there is space on the highway for more cars. However, as more cars enter the freeway (when there is no ramp meter during rush hour), critical mass is achieved that results in the merge lane (rightmost lane in case of US) slowing down first. Drivers bail out of that lane and move onto other lanes progressively slowing those lanes down as well. By using ramp meters, traffic engineers try to maintain the amount of cars on the highway below the critical mass. When congestion occurs (either because of someone talking on their cell phone or hitting their brakes indiscriminately), traffic engineers can hold up some part of the traffic at the entrance ramp using the ramp meter that allows the congestion to dissipate.
As a country's GDP increases, the affluence of its population grows. When GDP per capita grows beyond $5000, it leads to an explosion in car purchases which then results in traffic congestion. Historically, people across the world have used 1 hour as the time for their ideal commute to and from their jobs. As speeds and amount of cars has increased, people have ended up with 2 or 3 hours commutes. With the growth of nuclear family across the world, there is far more driving being done by both parents - men predominantly drive to and from work (researchers have found that men's commutes provide no indicator to their family status) while women have the burden of taking their kids to activities. In earlier times, kids would have played in their neighborhood with light adult supervision. With that era gone, parents have been forced to provide activities for kids to keep them engaged. That also means more trips being undertaken by mothers as the activities might not all be in the same area. The desire of parents to micromanage their kids time shows up in the traffic backups during rush hour. A related issue is the desire of people to buy bigger homes as their income level increases. In a city, the high cost of living serves as a ceiling on the size of the house someone can buy. By moving to far flung suburbs, people aim to get more for their hard earned money. When people first move to their new homes, they are happy about their choice. However, they then undergo 'hedonic adaptation' - the newer bigger house becomes the new normal. With more people moving into the neighborhood (since information is pretty easy to come by), the commute to the office starts getting longer. However, the house has been bought with a mortgage so the owner cannot turn around and uproot his family in search of another place. As a result, they end up suffering through their commute and compromising their health when their original intention was the opposite. The rush of people, away from the cities and into the suburbs, also leads to local governments laying down roads to serve those communities who then end up sitting in traffic during their commute. People looking to score a close parking spot in chain store parking lots would be better off picking the first available spot and walking to the store instead of spending time looking for one. People usually underestimate the time they have spent in getting a parking spot. In cities, traffic on the roads gets congested partly due to people looking for street parking. Cities generally offer free (or cheap) street parking in contrast to garage parking that is usually pricier. Garage parking is expensive but the driver is able to determine its availability whereas street parking is cheaper but requires the driver to drive around to locate one. That interferes with traffic flow on city roads.
Traffic engineers in 1950's and 1960's developed new roads to accommodate the growing population of suburbs. However, research has shown that the more roads traffic planners and engineers build, the more cars show up to occupy them. The author illustrates a real life example of traffic through Washington Square park in Greenwich Village in New York City. The park had people driving through its roads at all times. Once a group of community activists convinced the city to severely constrain traffic on the road around the park, traffic dropped off precipitously that allowed the local residents to use the park safely. The idea of new roads causing more traffic is explained by Braess Paradox - Let us assume there are 2 streets - one is a local lane that always takes an hour for the driver to get to the destination and the other is a highway that takes half an hour to get to destination if it is not crowded but takes an hour if it is crowded. Drivers taking either of the roads will reach their destination in an hour. If the 2 roads are modified so that at the halfway point between the cities, the local lane changes into the highway and vice versa, the total travel time for the drivers remains the same. However, if a bridge is now constructed between the 2 roads allowing drivers to opt for faster moving traffic, it worsens the traffic instead of improving the time for everyone. This is another example of something that is optimal for an individual driver not being optimal for the entire system.
In developed countries, drivers have come to expect roads as a public resource whereas they are willing to pay higher rates for other scarce resources (water, telephone etc.). Because they consider roads to be a public resource, drivers are up in arms when cities institute congestion pricing on roads running into and out of the city (as happened in Washington DC this year). Research has shown that congestion pricing makes drivers think about their commutes and come up with alternatives to avoid paying the congestion tax - leaving for office earlier, taking alternate routes, using public transport etc.,.
The underlying philosophy behind the roads is different in US and Europe - Europe has more roundabouts than US which has more intersections. A roundabout is safer than an intersection because there is less potential for conflict. Drivers have to be alert looking for traffic on a roundabout before merging but that attention is focused in one direction. In an intersection, a driver has to pay attention to the front and both the sides and as a result, a driver's attention is split leading to more accidents.
A highway that a driver perceives to be dangerous is usually safe and vice versa. Traffic signs are usually meant to guide the drivers and warn them of any unexpected obstacles (Children at play etc). Research has shown them to be ineffective because drivers who drive on the same road every day get used to those signs and forget about them. After the sign is put up, households might feel comfortable letting their children play more freely and that results in more accidents. A well known traffic engineer, Hans Monderman advocated for complete removal of traffic signs in cities - his contention was that people living in the cities were the rightful owners of their space and people driving in from outside were guests and as such, were expected to be alert to the city population on foot. He expected drivers to take responsibility for their own driving in densely populated cities. That is in opposition to the current approach of traffic engineers - which is to design roads that are forgiving of the driver error. Traffic engineers achieve this by making sure signage on the roads, with clear lane markings and posted speed limits, plays into the expectations of the driver. However, drivers have taken advantage of that approach by permitting themselves to blaze along roads far in excess of the posted speed limit. US has focused on making the roads more safer for drivers at high speeds whereas other developed countries have reduced speed limits and instituted speed cameras (to provide visual feedback to the driver when they break the law). In US, speed cameras have been introduced but they have become a tool to raise revenue for the local government (as federal and state governments have progressively cut funding for local governments).
Vehicular traffic is dangerous in India primarily because of the population density. The traffic related technologies that are used in India were developed in Western countries that had much less population density. It is not surprising that traffic rules are broken with impunity when they serve as a hindrance to a majority of people (the population of India who are pedestrians far outstrips the vehicular traffic in major cities). Developed countries have developed rules to force the various type of vehicles - cars, trucks, buses, bicycles, hand drawn carts etc to share the road. India has not done that. As a result, people have taken matters into their own hands and come up with approaches to getting to their destination. Research has shown making pedestrians wait at a traffic signal for longer than 30 seconds is an invitation to jaywalk. Considering the roads in India are designed strictly for vehicular traffic, it is no surprise pedestrians take shortcuts to get to their destinations on those roads. When GDP of a country rises, more people purchase cars (since they can afford them) and more roads are built to cater to those car owners. The way drivers comply with rules of the road is also reflective of how corrupt the country is. Nations that are ranked least corrupt in the world - Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, Singapore are also the safest countries to drive. Researchers looked at number of parking tickets issued to diplomats in New York City between 1997 and 2002. Diplomats from the most corrupt countries whereas diplomats from least corrupt countries received no tickets. Indian diplomats were ranked in the middle of the list, mirroring their country's position in the global corruption index.
There was recent news of a fatality during a test run of an autonomous vehicle in the US. Robots are good at carrying out discrete actions (like adaptive cruise control) but they are overwhelmed when they are faced with the vagaries of human behavior. The difficulty of bringing an autonomous vehicle to the market is a testament to the multitude of calculations humans engage in when driving on the road.
Experts market automotive technologies for their safety benefits. Usually, those technologies do not work as originally promised - they do end up saving lives but usually end up far short of what their proponents promise at the time of implementation. As companies add more safety features to vehicles, drivers also get progressively reckless, calculating that the safety measures provide them with higher tolerance for mistakes. In academia, there is a concept called Peltzman effect (named after Sam Peltzman of University of Chicago) that drivers traded a decrease in accident risk with an increase in driving intensity, resulting in more fatalities. Between the forgiving nature of the roads and safety technologies, US drivers nowadays survive mistakes that would have killed them before the introduction of the safety features.
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