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Key insights from
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and
What It Says About Us)
By
Tom Vanderbilt
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What you’ll learn
Driving is a common activity throughout the world, but it
also reveals a whole host of quirks and tics of human nature. In this
exploratory sociology and psychology of traffic, journalist Tom Vanderbilt
holds a mirror up to road culture and wonders what it means.
Read on for key insights from Traffic.
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1. There are legal
rules of the road, and then there are cultural rules of the road.
Do you ever feel like you have that unenviable knack for
selecting the slowest lane on the highway? Or maybe you have just concluded
that there is an inscrutable randomness to traffic’s viscous flow, and that
you “win” the race some days, and “lose” it others.
And then, of course, there are unspoken rules of the road
that won’t get you a traffic citation, but they will win you some dirty
looks and white-knuckled ire. What happens, for example, when signs on the
side of the road alert drivers to a lane closing a mile up the road? Most
people instinctively merge before they get caught in the bottleneck, and
then glare angrily at the insufferable opportunists who breeze ahead while
the rest of the mechanical herd idles bumper-to-bumper.
But why is it that we neurotically yank our vehicles out of
the ending lane the first chance we get? And why do we become so annoyed
and self-righteous when we watch the late mergers zoom past us? Of course,
this is not a universal position. Some people (probably late mergers) view
a belated lane change as maximizing the highway’s utility, and that it is
actually faster for everyone when not everyone merges at once. The road to
traffic jams is paved with good intentions, according to the contrarian
camp. It is the people attempting to be “nice” and “courteous” who are
clogging up the interstate.
What is interesting about traffic scenarios is that people
assume they have the moral high ground and then there are some nefarious
“others” with seared consciences and blackened hearts who do things
differently. At the end of the day, these differences in driving habits
have much less to do with the law and much more to do with personal
intuitions. Very few people reference legal statutes to defend their
actions behind the wheel.
The gap between formal and informal expectations on the road
raises questions of how culture influences traffic. After all, people from
numerous walks of life converge on these miles-long concrete slabs and
interact in a consistent way, and yet there are clear differences in how
traffic moves between Stockholm and New Delhi, for example. What are we to
make of this? What can traffic tell us about ourselves?
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2. Driving is the
most complex workaday task you complete on a regular basis.
Have you ever pondered how much is involved in driving? You
are constantly scanning the lay of the land, staying vigilant to obstacles
and dangers, relying on your spatial reasoning skills, and anticipating the
actions of other drivers, bikers, and pedestrians (and rickshaw walas and
cows if you’re driving in India). Some studies estimate that driving draws
on 1,500 “subskills.” Another study concluded that the rate at which fresh
information flies at us, even at the relatively low speed of 30 miles per
hour, is the equivalent of reading 440 words per minute, while
simultaneously processing a long series of pictures coming to us in rapid
succession.
Driving is so common that we miss how remarkable a skill it
is. The groups most acquainted with the task’s complexity are those
designing self-driving cars. The best engineers scratch their heads and
wonder what it takes for A.I. to drive as well as people. It’s quite a
conundrum: How fast should the car be designed to drive? Should it always
drive that speed? What if there is an object in the car’s path? What
kind of object is it? Does that object require a hard stop, a slow stop, a
lane change, or a no change at all? The answer depends on understanding the
particular circumstances. Is it a child in the road? A pothole? A plastic
bag? Each of these requires a different response.
Even the brightest engineers have difficulty creating
machines that will respond appropriately to the road’s ever-changing
panoramas, but people, for the most part, navigate this complexity and
unpredictability with a great deal of finesse.
Before we pat ourselves on the back, another interesting set
of data reveals that we as individuals tend to overestimate our driving
skills. Exemplifying what social scientists call “optimistic bias,” studies
in the United States, New Zealand, and France all find that most people
consider themselves above-average drivers. From a statistical perspective,
it’s impossible for them to be right. On average, people consider
themselves above the average.
Driving is hardly the only domain in which we overestimate
our abilities, but we seem especially vulnerable to overconfidence when we
are in the driver’s seat. Research indicates that drivers tend to be far
more assured that they will avoid a crash than their passengers. This makes
sense because of the tendency to overestimate ourselves when we have some
control over circumstances. Drivers have the steering wheel in their hands;
their passengers use their hands to cover their eyes or fold them in a
quick prayer.
And, of course, we rarely question our driving methods
(especially men), but we do expect others to change. We like the no texting
laws for everyone else, but chafe against them ourselves because our
driving is the exception. And we conveniently save our moments of
self-evaluation for when there is a moron ahead of us straddling lanes as
he puts the finishing touches on a text. Without feedback (or openness to
that feedback), we will continue driving the way we always do: “above
average.”
In sum, we might maneuver the highways and byways far better
than A.I., but we also tend to overestimate our driving skills—as is common
in situations where we are in control, performing mundane tasks like
driving.
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3. The animal
kingdom has a lot to teach us about traffic systems and collective
intelligence.
According to one Oxford zoologist, there’s no creature
better at building traffic systems than ants. Some swarm species compete
against and even cannibalize themselves. Mormon crickets in the
southwestern US, for example, move quickly across desert and scrub because
they are hungrily trying to catch their neighbor ahead of them while also
desperately striving to avoid the hungry neighbor behind them. They’ve been
described as “black carpets” when they’re on the move, and they decimate
crops and each other.
But ants are different. They cooperate. They help each other
rather than eat each other. They form bridges and rafts, they create
elaborate three-way highways, and their lanes merge seamlessly. No sense of
entitlement clogs up the merge lanes. No ant blocks another’s entrance.
Their object of serving the queen and colony is an all-consuming impulse,
and they do it with mind-boggling efficiency. If one worker brings back a
piece of food that is just too big to manage efficiently, others will join
and assist until they (somehow) sense there are enough limbs on deck to
move that crumb along at an acceptable clip.
Ants don’t get into traffic jams. Why do we? Under special
circumstances, we manage congestion pretty well, but it’s a gargantuan
effort. At the Oscars, for example, reporters are standing at the corner of
Hollywood Boulevard and Highland eager to talk to celebrities about their
films or attire, but no one asks the far more bewildering question of how
hundreds of limousines and other luxury vehicles managed to arrive at the
Kodak Theater in a timely fashion. If you have ever visited Los Angeles,
you understand the city’s reputation for abysmal traffic is well deserved.
Without special-ops style traffic engineering to coordinate
Los Angeles traffic flow the night of the Oscars, hundreds of millions of
fans around the world would miss the star-studded spectacle—as would the
stars themselves.
Normally, the city’s traffic lights run on an algorithmic
system without much outside interference, but for the Oscars, the head
engineer oversees a team to ensure smooth sailing for all celebrity
vehicles. He wields a walkie-talkie in one hand, his cell in the other, and
is ready to receive landline calls as they come in—all while watching the
screens and adapting instructions based on traffic updates. It’s a hectic
night, but it’s one in which the head operator gets a taste of playing God,
or at least prompting ripple effects that emanate through the entire City
of Angels. Part of the task is not just timing lights well, but also
coordinating with squads of “picketing engineers,” protestors strategically
placed at certain intersections who cross streets in order to slow down
traffic in certain quarters so it can flow in others. These protestors
await his instructions on which streets to clog and when.
Perhaps it’s a bit unfair to compare our stress-inducing
traffic systems to the fluid coordination of ant colonies. Ants have been
refining their systems over centuries and centuries, but we have only
recently begun transporting ourselves via motorized metal boxes. Despite
remarkable innovations in traffic flow coordination that have allowed twice
as many cars to pass a day as engineers intended, we are still relatively
new to this pattern of movement. Moreover, ants are unified in their
purpose, but human interests are as disparate as the people who hold them.
We are essentially competitors on the road, not cooperators, more like
Mormon crickets than ants (though we hopefully refrain from cannibalizing
each other).
There is no other city on earth issuing more traffic reports
or commissioning more traffic reporters than Los Angeles. If you view the
city from the air during rush hour, the streams of traffic resemble an ant
colony, but as we know, it’s way more complicated than that. We go where we
want, when we want and we are looking out for number one at the end of the
day.
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4. The number of
cars on the road and road fatality rates tend to rise together, but
eventually, road fatality rates drop.
In 1951, there were 852 road fatalities in the entire
country of China. That same year, the United States tallied up over 35,000.
Nearly half a century later, in 1999, China’s annual death toll on the road
was 84,000, whereas the United States reported 41,508. Road-related deaths
in the US climbed to just slightly over five decades, but by the end of
that same time frame, China’s fatality count was nearly 1,000 times higher
than its count in 1951.
How do we understand such a colossal discrepancy? Part of
the explanation lies in the number of vehicles on the road. In 1951, there
were only 60,000 vehicles in China, but nearly 50 million in the United
States. By the turn of the 21st century, there were 50 million vehicles in
China, and 200 million in the United States. China only had a quarter of
the number of vehicles that the US had, but they had twice as many crashes.
Clearly, the number of vehicles on the road can’t fully explain rates of
car crashes.
The more vehicles there are, the greater opportunity for
crashes and the more fatalities will result, but fatality rates reach a
point where they peak—and then begin to steadily decline. So the total
number of crashes and fatalities may rise just because there are more cars
on the road, but the rate at which those fatalities occur
(relative to number of cars on the road) declines.
In the mid-20th century, a British statistician named R. J. Smeed noted
this phenomenon, which is now referred to as Smeed’s law. Smeed proposed
that there is a period in which a society has to adjust to more cars on the
road, and increased fatalities are growing pains in a societal
coming-of-age process before the culture adjusts to a new normal. Part of
that adjustment is getting serious about addressing the death rates: making
better roads and highways, more stringent vehicle safety measures, stricter
traffic laws, and stiffer penalties for breaking them. In the United
States, for example, annual fatalities peaked in the 1960s, and public
outcry led to improved rules and regulation. Recently, China’s road
fatality rate has begun to dip as well.
Countries have to pay a strange toll on their road to
development. As they build out infrastructure for highways and more
vehicles fill those roadways, the rate of accidents increases. More cars
mean more accidents and fatalities, but only up to a certain point—which
Smeed mapped out more than half a century ago.
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5. India has lots
of car accidents, but far fewer than you would expect.
One in 10 road-related fatalities occurs in India—around
100,000 annually. And while each of those is a tragedy, there is a strange
miracle at work on India’s streets. If you ever visit India, you might be
surprised that there are not more deaths. According to one
government official, there are 48 different means of transportation in the
city of Delhi, including ox-drawn carts, buses, cycle rickshaws, the iconic
green-and-yellow auto rickshaws, vintage Ambassador taxis, and
motorcyclists bearing their sari-clad wife riding side-saddle with small
children dangling from the crook in her arm. All of these forms of
transportation vie for space in the megacity’s congested thoroughfares and
alleyways.
A group of British police officers said they could predict
driver behavior in the United Kingdom with 90 percent accuracy, but when
they came to Delhi and attempted to guess driver decisions, they could only
accurately predict driver behavior 10 percent of the time—which is another
way of saying they could not predict behavior at all. Most Delhi drivers
are aware of the rules of the road. The government does its best to
encourage responsible driving with signs that read “Don’t dream otherwise
you’ll scream” or something equally jarring. But even pithy snatches
of macabre poetry fail to carry the day. Delhi officials estimate 100
million road violations are committed daily.
Part of the reason that Delhi drivers commit so many
infractions to the well-codified, but less-well-enforced rules of the road
is that drivers creatively adapt to traffic violations with their own
traffic violations. If pedestrians and bikes move through a bus lane
(because they have no footpath), then bus drivers have to stop in the
middle of the road to pick up passengers waiting at the bus stand.
To outside eyes, Delhi traffic looks like senseless,
cacophonous mayhem. But there is so much that is unexpected on the Delhi
roads that drivers expect the unexpected, which gives rise to an entirely
new rhythm and culture to traffic flow. As one autorickshaw driver put it
when asked about driving in Delhi, “Good brakes, good horn, good luck.”
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Endnotes
These insights are
just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of Traffic here. And since we get a commission on
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