TLS: On Driving

Driving lessons by Jon Garvie
A world tour to unmask the false gods of mobility, speed and 'beware children crossing' signs.
review of the following books:
Tom Vanderbilt. TRAFFIC Why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us) 416pp. Allen Lane. Pounds 20. 978 0 7139 9931 4 US: Knopf. $29.95. 978 0 307 39772 7
Brian Ladd. AUTOPHOBIA Love and hate in the automotive age 204pp. University of Chicago Press. $22.50; distributed in the UK by Wiley. Pounds 13. 978 0 226 46741 2

Traffic has a bad reputation, much of it fictional. London's choked suburbs provoked J. G. Ballard's vision of fetishized pile-ups in Crash. Gridlock on the freeway propels Michael Douglas into sociopathic free fall in the film Falling Down. The opening voiceover in Paul Haggis's recent Oscar-winning film Crash suggests that alienated Los Angelinos crash into each other "just so we can feel something". For commuters, traffic is an enemy to be beaten or beaten by. For commentators, it is an easy scapegoat, synonymous with social breakdown, urban decay and imminent environmental collapse. All this, suggests Tom Vanderbilt in Traffic: Why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us), is surprising, given that "traffic" once meant the mutually enriching exchange of goods and culture.
A basic paradox governs humanity's relationship with roads. We like them wide, clear and quick, but such circumstances often kill us. Traffic, by contrast, improves health prospects. A line of vehicles crawling along congested roads at 20 miles per hour imitates nature. That speed is the maximum at which even Olympians can run. It is also the limit beyond which humans cannot maintain eye contact and other, vital, non-verbal forms of communication. If cars collide at 20 miles per hour or less, it is unlikely that anyone will die. When humans exceed such limits en masse, the ability to self-organize recedes and death often ensues.
The facts about driving are stark but wilfully ignored. Road fatalities will be the third largest global cause of death by 2020 and more people die each month on American roads than were killed in the September 11 attacks, but where is the war on cars? The majority of deaths spring from egregious human error, yet we persist in labelling them "accidents". Such events are normal, not deviations from an otherwise safe activity. But to recognize this means accepting an unwelcome truth: over millennia, evolution has equipped us to deal with the demands of horses and carts, not horsepower. Driving kills because it is too complicated for our poor brains. The army of evolutionary biologists, molecular physicists and social psychologists whom Vanderbilt interviews have not, between them, produced a robot capable of negotiating a roundabout safely.
read more
In order to sustain global auto-mania, we require overwhelming self-delusion.
Every study on the subject has found that most people think that they are "above average" drivers. Hubris rules the roads. We pay attention fitfully and mistake luck for skill. We treat each disaster averted as a triumph of proficiency. We magnify our losses (the traffic was terrible) and forget our gains (arriving unharmed at our destination). In order to absorb the gulf between the risk of death and the reward of a trip to the supermarket, we require elaborate coping strategies. Economists have suggested that a dagger attached to the steering wheel and pointed at the driver's chest would represent an automobile's "negative externalities" accurately. Instead, we have tended to buy SUVs (more likely to crash than smaller cars), with airbags and computerized gizmos which provide illusions of control. Often, while driving, we eat, text, talk, or drink as if to quell the panic which similarly dangerous situations produce.
So much for self-deception and the frailty of human consciousness. But the second, more important insight in Vanderbilt's study is that road engineers and urban planners tend to design systems which encourage disaster. Smooth roads, enormous signs and distorting markings soothe our brains into believing that we are travelling more slowly than is the case. They prompt false feelings of safety and dull the attention. All this despite the fact that the average driver must attempt to process 1,340 pieces of information per minute. Such innovations, Vanderbilt argues, are "akin to giving a lot of low-fat ice-cream and cookies to someone trying to lose weight". More profoundly, the car-led growth of suburbs and the emergence of exclusively vehicular cities, from Phoenix to Dubai, have destroyed ancient bonds between human and habitat.
Regardless of era and locality, most societies have maintained commuting times of about one hour. This time period has satisfied the need to balance domesticity and mobility from modern London to ancient Rome. The Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti noted that the mean area of Greek villages, from the classical era onwards, has remained approximately seven square miles - an expanse which can be covered in one hour's walk. According to Vanderbilt's surveys, contemporary cultures retain the idea that one hour is an acceptable commute. But the distances made available through car travel unravel the fabric of the village by removing individuals from society. The rich move away from urban centres as affluence increases. And, crucially, they are more likely to crash on their daily return to work into cities which are no less crowded despite their departure.
Vanderbilt has toured the world in search of alternatives. In a book which catalogues human blindness, one perspicacious Dutchman stands out. Hans Monderman, the (recently deceased) "world's most famous traffic engineer", suggested that drivers ignore road signs and race through vulnerable areas because engineers opt for paradigms which impose the "traffic world" of the motorway atop the "social world" of the village. Motorways snake through hamlets in place of cobbled paths. It is commonplace to note that signs that warn drivers to slow down or watch for children have little effect. Monderman realized that these signs, in fact, make things worse by absolving drivers of the need to engage with their environment. He then, heroically, carried this insight through by banishing all the signs, road humps and other safety paraphernalia from the small Dutch village of Oudehaske. Sucked back into their environment, people drove more carefully, and a dramatic fall in accidents resulted. Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council, hardly the most radical of institutions, attempted a similar experiment on Kensington High Street. It resulted in a 60 per cent fall in deaths and serious injuries.
Vanderbilt's anecdotes point to the need for some benevolent despotism. While drivers do not naturally act in their own best interests, they do respond to the perceived order of their environments. It was once thought that road fatalities correlated directly to GDP. It now seems that corruption is the stronger index. In Finland, road penalties are matched to income. Hence, one businessman incurred a $71,400 fine for driving at 43 miles per hour in a 25 mile-per-hour zone. Unsurprisingly, the moralizing Nordics offer the world's safest driving environment. From this perspective, a global prescription seems obvious: smaller roads, fewer markings, more punitive laws.
Vanderbilt, however, cannot quite bring himself to recommend such a route. This reluctance springs from doubts as to whether human nature can ever be improved.
Kensington Council's original intention was not to lower fatalities but to prettify the street and encourage shoppers. This raises Traffic's most important rhetorical question: whether progress only occurs organically, or rather by accident. Why else has Monderman's revolution not spread? A large portion of this book is devoted to our perceptive limitations. Beguiling instances of human failure encourage the idea that people will never design their way out of a jam. New World ants are the world's most efficient commuters. They move in vast self-organizing swarms thanks to a single precept: avoid being eaten by those behind you and move towards your succulent compatriots ahead. Human traffic draws on a far more complex "ballet of wants and needs". The book's most poignant finding is that commuters prefer an ideal of sixteen minutes of "me-time" in their vehicles. Cars offer emotional transport, as well as physical, so we cannot consider them objectively.
Vanderbilt offers no solutions. Sometimes he admires the laissez-faire approach of New Delhi traffic engineers, where central planning founders on the wanderings of sacred cows. But he is equally appreciative of the nerve centre in LA which delivers eighty limousines to Oscar night on time. Instead of recommending particular policies, he sticks, finally, to bland admonishments that driving "is all more complicated than it appears. We would do well to drive accordingly". The epilogue centres on the author's own experiences in a driving school and provides tips to readers. This is a curious coda to an argument which emphasizes that road problems are insoluble at an individual level.
Traffic is a book of the moment. Its unconsummated courtship with ideas of paternalism, organization and risk has brought tributes from such authors as Cass Sunstein (Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness,
2008) and Nassim Taleb (Black Swan, 2007). Autophobia, by Brian Ladd, is a more coherent work, but will inevitably generate less attention. It provides a short, scholarly essay on the history of automobile opposition. Ladd begins from the viewpoint that cars and traffic engineering always represent political choices. Nineteenth-century English conservatives detested the car, believing that it would destroy the looks and manners of the countryside. Italian Futurists exalted "the beauty of speed" in the 1920s, hoping that it would usher in a new violent age, shorn of "emasculating tendencies" like democracy.
Mussolini and Hitler followed through such ideas, the latter bequeathing the autobahns and the Volkswagen to subsequent road enthusiasts. Ladd's explicitly anti-car study questions why machines associated with individual freedom have appealed so greatly to fascists of all stripes (Russian and Chinese central planners were both great admirers of Henry Ford).
Opponents of cars have laboured the same points for more than a century: damage to the environment, social atomization and, of course, a high risk of accident and death. In opposition, the pro-car lobby requires abstract arguments which refuse to address the same set of "facts" and foreground ideology instead. From Hitler to Margaret Thatcher, car advocates have seen them as literal engines of change; vehicles by which to remake society, whether on the basis of individualism or collectivism. Thatcher's dictum that "Any man who rides a bus to work after the age of 30 can count himself a failure in life" provided cover for a period of deregulation which broke free of traditional corporatist conservatism with its natural suspicion of change. Cars have always been dangerously radical experiments. As with Traffic, Ladd's book is full of scarcely credible statistics. In 1906-07, more than 90 per cent of the cars registered in Berlin were involved in an accident. The genius of the pro-car lobby has been to convince the public that roadkill is acceptable collateral damage.
Both Vanderbilt and Ladd raise the theory of "induced traffic", still the most contested idea among engineers and planners. Across the globe, most great motorway-building sprees have relied on a hydrology model. This assumes that traffic, like water, is an independent variable. The sum of cars on the road represents needs and desires statistically. The answer to clogged roads is, therefore, more roads. These theories ignored the fact that new routes tend not to redistribute traffic into even flows, but rather increase the overall volume. As early as 1907, American protesters observed that, on the road, supply induces demand. But to free marketeers, then and now, this is anathema.
The suggestion that drivers, acting freely, will not allocate scarce resources in the most efficient way is one short step from state socialism. Even globally admired regulatory schemes such as London's congestion zone cause these ideologues to despair.
Neo-liberals portray the free market as an expression of innate human characteristics, exempt from society and history. Cars are essential to this vision; not only a lucrative part of the market, they accelerate it and help to justify the whole. Ladd's suggestion that mobility is a "false god" equates to a wider belief that car-led economic growth is not worth the social consequences. This is a more difficult conclusion than the need for driving lessons, and a better one. But the belief in mobility as progress, which has captivated us over the past 150 years, suggests that we will not learn easily from our mistakes.
Both Vanderbilt and Ladd raise the theory of "induced traffic", still the most contested idea among engineers and planners. Across the globe, most great motorway-building sprees have relied on a hydrology model. This assumes that traffic, like water, is an independent variable. The sum of cars on the road represents needs and desires statistically. The answer to clogged roads is, therefore, more roads. These theories ignored the fact that new routes tend not to redistribute traffic into even flows, but rather increase the overall volume. As early as 1907, American protesters observed that, on the road, supply induces demand. But to free marketeers, then and now, this is anathema.
The suggestion that drivers, acting freely, will not allocate scarce resources in the most efficient way is one short step from state socialism. Even globally admired regulatory schemes such as London's congestion zone cause these ideologues to despair.
Neo-liberals portray the free market as an expression of innate human characteristics, exempt from society and history. Cars are essential to this vision; not only a lucrative part of the market, they accelerate it and help to justify the whole. Ladd's suggestion that mobility is a "false god" equates to a wider belief that car-led economic growth is not worth the social consequences. This is a more difficult conclusion than the need for driving lessons, and a better one. But the belief in mobility as progress, which has captivated us over the past 150 years, suggests that we will not learn easily from our mistakes.