But today, I wanted to explore a specific theme from this book that reminded me of my recent post about a new traffic light pattern. At these Cambridge intersections, I saw how reversing the turn order created an additional safety margin for drivers. Though I am not formally trained in this field, I concluded the change made the intersection unambiguously safer than it was using the regular turn pattern.
The link between the traffic light pattern and Vance's book is the idea of agency. Hillbilly Elegy describes many struggling people who did not expect their hard work to lead to positive life outcomes. If these people could believe in the possibilities resulting from their own hard work, perhaps things could start to improve in certain struggling areas (1).
A sense of agency makes a big difference in how people confront new situations or navigate unknown environments. The main improvement of the light pattern I described a couple of weeks ago is how it gives drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians more direct control in creating good outcomes as they enter and exit the intersection (2).
It occurred to me later that perhaps my gushing praise for the new traffic pattern missed a larger point. The intersection is safer, of course, and improving safety is critical, but if the design excuses sloppier driving, perhaps the 'sloppy driver' effect starts to cancel out the 'designed safety' effect a little bit. I still like the redesigned pattern I noticed when I rode out of Arlington but I'm pretty sure intersection redesign is only a local solution to road safety issues. For the citywide safety problem, relying solely on this method is an insufficient solution (3).
At best, redesign is like putting a splint over a still-healing leg. The solution does not directly address the problem and, in extreme cases, might encourage more of the destructive behavior. At complex intersections, the main problem is almost always cars getting in each other's way. Thus, the solution should involve keeping cars out of the intersection until the way is clear. The same effect I described resulting from the pattern change would be observed by just keeping all cars at a complete stop for a couple seconds longer. The spirit of the solution is familiar to anyone with fair skin; though sunscreen always helps, the best way to avoid a sunburn is to stay in the shade.
In general, I worry safety-minded rules of thumb like the 'longer red' will struggle to take hold when detailed traffic pattern design changes appear so beneficial. This is a gut feeling based on a number of different things. One factor is the discrepancy in the talk about road safety and the data about road fatalities. In looking at the results, this discrepancy appears to have gone on for decades. In the USA alone, the industry accepts over 30,000 motor vehicle deaths per year (4). In the upcoming three months, history suggests the same number of Americans will die on the road as did from 2001 to 2014 in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars combined. The automobile industry casually accepts more deaths than the military! The last time the total number of automobile fatalities fell below 30,000 was in 1945, a year I can't imagine was very popular for road trips. Safety is a nice concept, I guess, but it's apparently just a little too slow to fully implement on our nation's roads.
My observations of driver behavior further reinforce my skepticism about safety improvements. Each day, I see how little driving decisions might add up to this mythical 30k goal. In my own cycling adventures around town, I frequently witness safety being exchanged for speed. These trades account for almost all of my close calls on two wheels: every driver who accelerated past on the right, made a sudden u-turn on a two-way street, or pulled over without blinkers to pick up ride share customers was cutting down a commute by placing my life at risk.
I once thought drivers were encouraged to do these crazy things by bad road design. A street with free or subsidized curbside parking is a good example. Allowing cars to store themselves for just a few dollars next to buildings which rent for tens of thousands a month endangers cyclists and pedestrians by inviting drivers to take their eyes off the road, stop in the middle of a bike lane, or suddenly start backing up against the flow of traffic to reach a space (5). The road design is nobody's fault and I can't blame a driver for operating within the limits of the law. But such an acknowledgement fails to explain how the system came into existence in the first place. A driver playing by the rules of the game rarely seems to ask about the author of the rulebook.
These days, though, I'm not as convinced about the role of poor road design. The culture in the automobile industry pays a great deal of lip service to safety and, although I believe the sentiments about protecting riders are genuine, I think the lack of real results (you know, as in, a number less than thirty thousand annual fatalities) is creating a sense of powerlessness among drivers. I rarely get the sense a driver believes in his or her ability to make the roads safer by simply being a better driver. Those self-driving cars looming on the horizon don't help the message much, either, as their development implies a future where no human will be a good enough driver to remain behind the wheel. Could such a future exist if drivers in the present were good enough? I suspect not (6).
Some might argue here (or perhaps just helpfully point out, in case I'm unaware) that the progress made over the years in the field of automotive safety has been significant. But despite all the new seatbelts, airbags, and traffic signals, the results do not support the rhetoric. Motor vehicle collisions remain a major cause of preventable death in children. For American teenagers, car crashes are the leading cause of death. I don't know who coined the expression 'think of the children' but I'll rule out Messers Ford, Honda, and Buick.
Improving safety features at complex intersections is a crucial component of creating safer cities and towns for everyone. It always will be. But drivers relying on superior intersection design to excuse their poor decisions behind the wheel? It would be like NRA members handing out bulletproof vests to improve gun safety.
A safety feature is very different from a culture of safety. To effectively cultivate such a culture requires commitment from day one of a driver's participation in the industry. My experience suggests we are not quite there yet. I still remember my driver's license test: four total minutes, three left turns, two right turns, and a partridge in a pear tree (7).
In hindsight, my test experience says an awful lot about what the standards are for acceptable driving. After supplying almost no proof of my driving ability, I left the DMV with a new license and an implied message about how little my driving ability had to do with overall road safety. Many speculater later that the only way I probably would have failed the test was by not buckling my seatbelt, perhaps further reinforcing my lack of agency in making the roads a little safer for all. It's too bad, really, since agency is the most important feature in a safety culture (and the only relevant one from a long term perspective). If drivers do not feel their actions influence overall safety, I assume they won't make much effort to drive safely.
It brings me back to Vance's book. Agency is one of the main ideas tying together much of Hillbilly Elegy. A sense of agency separated those who fought against the downward pull of their surroundings from those who allowed themselves to get sucked into its negativity. In many examples, readers see how those who felt in control of their life outcomes behaved differently than those who did not.
Of course, improving the sense of agency is a mammoth task. It took Vance around three hundred pages just to explain the idea (8). It will probably take more than a post or two on TOA to get the point across to the automobile industry. So, in the meantime, I suppose there is little choice but to continue on the current path (9).
Not all hope is lost, though. The good news about agency problems is anyone can help. Each little action builds a community's sense of control over its collective destiny. It occurred to me the other day in the context of cycling. I used to think it would be terrific if a law passed tomorrow mandating we all wear a helmet when we ride. But then I realized that if everyone wore a helmet by choice, no such law would be required.
A great reason for me to wear a helmet is that anytime I do so advertises the idea of wearing a helmet to everyone else. Now, I suspect most adults make their helmet decisions independent of what I put on my head. But who knows, maybe some little kid will see me zip by and go 'who is this unemployed blogger wearing that awesome helmet? I want to be almost as cool as him.' If that kid straps on a helmet the next time he rides a bike, that's a big win to me. If a ripple effect of helmet-wearing spreads across the city, that's a big win for Boston's culture of road safety.
I can contribute in other ways. I've noticed that although I often see cyclists zip through red lights, whenever I stop my bike at an intersection others behind me tend to stop as well. This might be because I'm sort of in the way (which isn't the idea, but I'll take it) or perhaps my fellow riders suspect I see something ahead making it unsafe to ride through. I suspect sometimes it has to do with the 'advertising' concept, though. By stopping, I suggest to those behind me that maybe they should stop, too. I've started stopping several feet behind big trucks lately (because the Demands Of Industry sometimes dictate sudden, sweeping right turns which temporarily turn bike lanes into human meat grinders). In these cases, I'm often joined by the riders coming in behind me.
Improved intersection design remains a critical component of improving road safety. It is made deceptively appealing as a strategy because on the surface it appears a win-win: implementing superior design will improve safety without coming at a cost for anyone. But seeing it as a silver bullet hides the cost of discouraging drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians from remaining vigilant about making healthy decisions for themselves and for those around them.
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. What a dumb thing for a researcher to conclude!
Vance cited research which showed that those who believed drug addiction was a disease 'show less of an inclination to resist it'. In my original draft, I included this in the main post. But as I edited, I realized that I did not agree with the idea. So though perhaps the post flowed better with that concept included, I decided to remove it in the editing step.
My question here is how does someone 'show less of an inclination to resist' an addiction? Perhaps my objection was to the phrasing of the findings as much as it was to the idea these researchers were studying.
2. No need to drive safe, the guardrail will catch me!
This is not the first time a book influenced my understanding of traffic. If my memory serves me correctly, I read in Tom Vanderbilt's efficiently named Traffic about the higher incidence of car crashes along dangerous mountain roads with a guardrail compared to similar roads without a guardrail.
One explanation for this finding cites the agency felt by drivers as they responded to an apparently more dangerous section of guardrail-free road. A driver, seeing the guardrail, senses a safe road and drives more recklessly. The safer appearance of the road perhaps suggested to drivers a reduced ability to control their safety outcome as they drove along it.
3. This is who I wanted to be when I grew up?
As I typed this sentence, I realized I talk about intersections far more frequently than logic would dictate.
4. Though with this type of thinking, I suppose I could be wrong about anything...
I concede the possibility that every weekday morning the bigwigs at Honda and Toyota and GM sit around a conference room table and pound their fists about the unacceptability of so many road fatalities. If this is the case, I've yet to hear about it.
All I see is the same marketing I assume everyone else does. These advertisements tout the car's safety features relative to other cars, a clever tactic because in order for a 'relative' safety feature to have any merit it must be compared against a fixed/accepted status quo consumers are unable to improve upon unless they pay extra money.
In the end, it should just come down to lives lost. One way to get to 30,000 deaths next year would be if my entire hometown was run over by a 34E bus on January 1, 2018. This is obviously an unrealistic scenario (though not difficult to imagine as my premise for a modern interpretation on 'The Lottery').
5. FOR FREE!
The baffling aspect of 'on street' parking is how it seems to contradict my understanding of local land values. I used to live in an apartment in South Boston where the driveway rented for around $300 per month. That's about $10 per day for a fixed place to leave a car all year.
To calculate what an on-street spot should go for based on $10 per day for a driveway, I first needed to understand the premium for temporary parking compared to permanent parking. To calculate such an amount, I looked at how hotels were priced relative to apartment rents. My logic was the difference between the permanent living space and the temporary one would give me a decent estimate of the premium an on-street space should charge.
My casual observation concluded hotels go for around two to three times the daily rent of area apartments. Using $10 per day for my former driveway, on street parking should go for around $20 to $30 per day. It feels about right because local parking garages charge a comparable amount for all-day parking.
I looked up what the rates are on local meters and found the range varied from $1.25 to $4 per hour. This is not quite the 'close but no cigar' result I was expecting. A driver paying to park all day at those rates will spend somewhere between $15 and $40 per day or so. But keep in mind the meter rates do not factor in all the free spaces available. If the free and metered spaces were averaged out, the hourly 'rate' will surely fall.
On the topic of free...people love FREE stuff, do they not? Those who choose to drive in gas-guzzling circles seeking a FREE space instead of paying some garage $10 might choose differently if the FREE on-street option was eliminated. Just by charging a nominal sum, a city could dissuade some of the congestion-causing traffic resulting from people seeking out a FREE space. These drivers would either drive straight to a garage or find an alternate means to enter the city.
6. Will the next invention be the self-ranting blogger?
I wanted to rant against the self-driving car in this post but it (somehow) didn't fit. So, I'll just put into this footnote the thing I always rant about regarding these self-driving autos:
If automating driving is so easy, why are humans still driving subway cars?
And the self-driving car is not really a special example. Almost all inventions appear designed to take driving decisions away from drivers. What's the last invention whose purpose was to make drivers better at driving?
7. I passed, by the way...
I thought the test was funny at the time but I know better than to laugh today. My singular experience hardly proves any larger trend, of course, but I'm open to explanations about this whole 'thirty thousand deaths a year' thing.
8. Well, among other things...
If agency was such a simple concept to teach, Vanderbilt's Traffic would have fit on the back of a t-shirt. It would have looked like this:
Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt
Chapter 1: Drive better...
The End
Perhaps, a bumper sticker would work better:
"If you can read this, get your eyes back on the road!"
9. And what is this 'current path', dare I ask?
Glad you asked! It's the one where car makers produce expensive new safety features every year while the rest of us struggle through clogged intersections, the unavoidable result of months-long construction projects resulting from traffic engineers deciding to change two traffic lightbulbs and paint a couple of stripes on the road to improve traffic flow by a percentage point or two.
