Collateral Bloggage What passes for thought around here…

Wordful Wednesday: Why We Drive The Way We Do

I really, really don’t like to drive.  Well, at least I don’t like driving around all these other Oregon Drivers.  This is not to say I think drivers in other states are superior or anything.  Indeed, my definition of “good driver” generally starts and ends at “the driver currently behind the wheel of my car.”

This isn’t at all uncommon.  I’ve heard over and over that eighty-five percent of drivers consider themselves to be “above average” drivers.  You do the math.

Mostly, I want to get where I’m going as quickly as possible, and other cars generally prevent me from doing that.  Traffic Lights do a bit of interference, too.

So you can imagine my delight when I saw Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What it Says About Us), by Tom Vanderbilt, on the Bestsellers rack at The Library.  Mostly, I was hoping it would assure me that I really was just that much better than other drivers.

Instead, I learned quite a few things I otherwise wouldn’t have guessed.  For instance (just to pick two):

1. Ramp Lights on Freeway Entrances.  I hate them.  But they make traffic on said freeway faster.  By keeping traffic flow below “critical mass.”

2. Airbags and seatbelts.  I’m for them.  But they don’t really save lives.  (That is, they haven’t been shown to impact fatality rates.  Because we’ve increased our driving risks due to the perceived safety they provide.  Similar to bike helmets not reducing cycling injuries even slightly.)

I knew I would have to read the book after seeing the title of the Introduction, “Why I Became a Late Merger and Why You Should.”  I’ve long been a Late Merger, because it just makes sense that two lanes are better than one, so we should use both as long as possible.  (BTW, he doesn’t really deliver on the promise of that title until the end of Chapter 1.  And yes, the Late Merge has been shown to improve traffic flow by fifteen percent.  Woot!)

The really interesting stuff, to me, was the discussion about our perceptions of our driving skills.  If we get to work safely, meaning without an accident, we think we drove well.  But we may have not noticed something that almost went very badly due to our driving.  Not noticing it, we think we drove well.

The very fact that we call traffic collisions “accidents” is interesting, given that it’s nearly always someone’s poor driving that causes a prang (as they say in New Zealand).  The fact of it not being intentional doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been reasonably avoided.

(I’ve tried over and over to explain to my son that saying something was an accident doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have done more to avoid its happening.)

Anyway, back to the attention thing.  The book has a fascinating chapter (my favorite of the book) titled “Why You’re Not as Good a Driver as You Think You Are.”  In it, the author details a technology called DriveCam which is outfitted in some fleets of trucks.  The camera records “incidents” based on triggers like sudden braking, and maintains the context of what happened.

It often turns out that the sudden “surprising” event was easily foreseeable by a driver who was paying attention.  Chillingly, there was also evidence of completely unnoticed and potentially horrifying events that could have happened.  And here I’ll excerpt:

Traffic, p. 64:

But what is most unsettling in a number of clips is not the event itself as much as what else was visible in the camera, just outside the frame.  In one bit of footage, a man looks down to dial a cell phone as he drives down a residential street.  His eyes are off the road for much of the nine seconds of the recorded event, and his van begins to drift off the road.  Startled by the vibration of the roadside, he swerves back onto the road.  He grimaces in a strange mixture of shock and relief.  Examining the image closely, however, one sees a child on a bicycle and the child’s friend, standing just off the road, less than a dozen feet away from the triggered event.

…Not only was the driver unaware of the real hazards he was subjecting himself and others to in the way he was driving, he was not even aware that he was unaware.

An interesting bit from the following chapter, “How Our Eyes and Minds Betray Us on the Road,” talked about cell phone usage while driving.  The driver will tend to very consciously pay attention to the road, thinking he’s doing a good job.  But he’s not paying the kind of attention he normally would.  Instead, he’s looking at a fixed point on the road ahead, not taking in any of the peripheral views he normally would, and not varying his look-ahead distance.

But if you asked him, he’d say he was alert.

I first picked up this book from the Bestseller rack, so I couldn’t renew it.  And I had a bunch of other book-starts around the same time.  (I count eight of them during the three-week period I had the book.)  This resulted in my starting it in March, but not finishing it until now.

Add to that the fact that the chapters I haven’t mentioned just weren’t quite as interesting, and it didn’t end up a quick read.  Interesting, but not gripping.

I’d reveal what I’ll finish next, but I have four books checked out right now, and I’ve only started one of them, and at least two of the others look more interesting, and there’s a fifth waiting for me at the library…

(Friday-night edit: I started and finished Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years since Wednesday.  Loved it.  Look for the review next Wednesday.)

Oh, BTW, I’ve now passed the Sixty Book Mark for the first time since 2005.  Woo!  I always shoot for fifty-two (a book a week), so this is pretty major.