Traffic (10 page)

What do we learn from mistakes? This last question was also raised by the technology of a company called DriveCam, located in an office park in suburban San Diego, where I spent a day watching video footage of crashes, near crashes, and spectacularly careless acts of driving. The premise is simple: A small camera, located around the rearview mirror, is constantly buffering images (the way TiVo does for your television shows) of the exterior view and the driver. Sensors monitor the various forces the vehicle is experiencing. When a driver brakes hard or makes a sudden turn, the camera records ten seconds before and after the event, for context. The clip is then sent to DriveCam analysts, who file a report and, if necessary, apply “coaching.”

DriveCam, whose motto is “Taking the risk out of driving,” has its cameras installed in everything from Time Warner Cable vans to Las Vegas taxicabs to rental-car shuttle buses at airports. Companies that have installed DriveCam have seen their drivers’ crash rates drop by 30 to 50 percent. The company contends that it has several advantages over the traditional methods of trying to improve the safety records of commercial fleets. One earlier approach, as DriveCam CEO Bruce Moeller told me, was giving drivers spot safety drills. “They’d come in for the training. You’re all hopped up, ‘I’m going to do right.’ But then over time, you start pushing the envelope. You didn’t hit anybody and nobody yelled at you. So that’s fine, you get away with it, and pretty soon you start lapsing back to your old ways.” The widespread onset of “How’s My Driving?” phone numbers in the 1980s created the potential for more constant feedback, but it was often late or of debatable quality, says Del Lisk, the company’s vice president. “It’s highly prone to very subjective consumer call-ins,” he said. “Like, ‘I’m mad about my phone bill so I’m going to call in that AT&T guy.’”

Given that the company car is the most statistically hazardous environment for workers, it seems appropriate that the thinking behind DriveCam is inspired by the work of H. W. Heinrich, an insurance investigator for the Travelers Insurance Company and the author of a seminal 1931 book,
Industrial Accident Prevention: A Scientific Approach.
After investigating tens of thousands of industrial injuries, he estimated that for every one fatality or major injury in the workplace, there were 29 minor injuries and 300 “near-miss” incidents that led to no injury. He arranged these in the so-called Heinrich’s triangle and argued that the key to avoiding the one event at the top of the triangle lay in tackling the many small events at the bottom.

When I’d met Moeller, the first thing he’d told me, after introductory pleasantries, was: “If we were to put a DriveCam in your car, not knowing you at all, I guarantee you that you’ve got driving habits you’re not even aware of that are an accident waiting to happen.” He pointed to the Heinrich triangle he had drawn on a whiteboard. “You know about the twenty-nine and the one”—the crashes and the fatality—“because there’s hard evidence that somebody got killed or somebody crashed,” he said. “What we show you with the DriveCam monitoring this thing twenty-four/seven is that all the very same unsafe behaviors that are going on down here”—he pointed to the bottom of the triangle—“can result, or will result, in accidents, except for pure luck.”

The key to reducing what DriveCam calls “preventable accidents,” as Lisk sees it, lies at the bottom of the triangle, in all those hidden and forgotten near misses. “Most people would look at that triangle and use the top two tiers as their way of estimating how good a driver they are. The truth is, it’s really the bottom tier that is the real evaluator.” In other words, a driver thinks of their own performance in terms of crashes and traffic tickets. People riding along with a driver look at it differently. “All of us, as passengers,” Lisk said, “will ride along and evaluate drivers from the bottom of the pyramid, squeezing the armrest and pushing our feet into the floorboards.”

As I played virtual passenger on a number of DriveCam moments, a disturbing realization came to my attention. There is much careless driving, to be sure. In one clip, a man takes his hands off the steering wheel to jab at a boxer’s speed bag suspended from the rearview mirror. In any number of clips, drivers struggle to keep their eyes open and their bobbing heads erect. “We’ve got one where a guy’s driving a tanker truck full of gas for
eight
full seconds as he’s asleep,” Moeller said. (A dip on a Los Angeles freeway had triggered the camera.)

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. “Do you think he ever even saw the bike rider and other person?” Lisk asked. “It’s just luck. It’s that pyramid.”

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. “This guy’s probably a great guy, good family man, good employee,” Lisk said. “He doesn’t even know this is happening. If we told him it happened, with a black box or something, he wouldn’t even believe it.” Without the video, the driver would not have realized the potential consequences of his error. “I get reinforced more positively every day that I don’t hit a kid because I’m not seeing that stuff,” Moeller said. “I’m thinking I’m good, I can do this. I can look down at my BlackBerry, I can dial a phone, I can drink. We all get reinforced the wrong way.”

Until the moment when we do not, of course, and something goes wrong. We commonly refer to these moments as “accidents,” meaning that they were unintended or unforeseen events.
Accident
is a good word for describing such events as an otherwise vigilant driver being unable to avoid a tree that suddenly fell across the road. But consider the case of St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Josh Hancock, who was tragically killed in 2007 when his rented SUV slammed into the back of a tow truck that was stopped on the highway, lights flashing, at the scene of a previous crash. Investigators learned that Hancock (who days before had crashed his own SUV) had a blood alcohol concentration nearly twice the legal limit, was speeding, was not wearing a seat belt, and was on a cell phone at the time of the fatal crash.

Despite the fact that all these well-established risky behaviors were present, simultaneously, the event was still routinely referred to in the press as an “accident.” The same thing happened with South Dakota congressman Bill Janklow. A notorious speeder who racked up more than a dozen tickets in the span of four years and had a poster of himself boasting that he liked to live in the “fast lane,” in 2003 Janklow blazed through a stop sign and killed a motorcyclist. The press repeatedly called it an “accident.”

The problem with this word, as the
British Medical Journal
pointed out in 2001 when it announced that it would no longer use it, is that accidents are “often understood to be unpredictable,” and thus unpreventable. Were the Hancock and Janklow crashes really unpredictable or unpreventable? They were certainly unintentional, but are “some crashes more unintentional than others”? Did they “just happen” or were there things that could have been done to prevent them, or at least greatly reduce the chances of their happening? Humans are humans, things will go wrong, there are instances of truly bad luck. And psychologists have argued that humans tend to exaggerate, in retrospect, just how predictable things were (the “hindsight bias”). The word
accident,
however, has been sent skittering down a slippery slope, to the point where it seems to provide protective cover for the worst and most negligent driving behaviors. This in turn suggests that so much of the everyday carnage on the road is mysteriously out of our hands and can be stopped or lessened only by adding more air bags (pedestrians, unfortunately, lack this safety feature).

Most crashes involve a violation of traffic laws, whether intentional or not. But even the notion of “unintentional” versus “intentional” has been blurred. In 2006, a Chicago driver reaching for a cell phone while driving lost control of his SUV, killing a passenger in another car. The victim’s family declared, “If he didn’t drink or use drugs, then it’s an accident.” As absurd as that statement may sound, given that the driver intentionally broke the law, the law essentially agreed: The driver was fined $200. Similarly strange distinctions are found with “sober speeders.” There is a huge gulf in legal recrimination between a person who boosts his blood alcohol concentration way over the limit and kills someone and a driver who boosts his speedometer way over the limit and kills someone.

A similar bias creeps into news reports, which are often quick to note, when reporting fatal crashes, that “no drugs or alcohol were involved,” subtly absolving the driver from full responsibility—even if the driver was flagrantly exceeding the speed limit. Car companies would rightly be castigated if they advertised the joys of drinking and driving. But as a survey of North American car commercials by a group of Canadian researchers showed, it is quite acceptable to show cars being driven, soberly, in ways that a panel of viewers labeled “hazardous.” Nearly half of the more than two hundred ads screened (always carrying careful, if duplicitous, disclaimers) were considered by the majority of the panel to contain an “unsafe driving sequence,” usually marked by high speeds. Ads for SUVs were the most frequent offenders, and across all commercials, when drivers were shown, the majority were men.

What the video footage at DriveCam showed, more often than not, is not that unforeseen things happen on the road for no good reason but that people routinely do things to make crashes “unpreventable.” If the van driver had struck the child by the side of the road, it would have been reasonably “accidental” only in the sense that he did not intend to do it. Would this have just been “bad luck”? The psychologist Richard Wiseman has demonstrated in experiments that people are also capable of making their own “luck.” For example, people who know lots of people are more likely to have seemingly lucky “small-world” encounters than those who do not (and those who did not have many such chance meetings more often viewed themselves as “unlucky”).

We cannot entirely prevent “bad luck” from landing on our doorstep, but the van driver dialing his cell phone, the one who narrowly missed the kids in the DriveCam video, was virtually throwing open his door and inviting it inside. DriveCam’s hindsight does make it glaringly easy to see all the things drivers were doing wrong. The question is, Why didn’t they? Why do people act in ways that put themselves and others at unnecessary risk? Are they being negligent, ignorant, overconfident, just plain dumb—or are they just being human? Can we actually learn from our mistakes
before
they have real consequences?

Psychologists have demonstrated that our memory, as you might expect, is tilted in favor of more recent things. We also tend to emphasize the ends of things—as, for example, when told a series of facts and later asked to recall the entire series. Studies have confirmed that people are less likely to remember traffic accidents the further back in time they happened. In this same way, a near crash or a crash might loom more vividly than the things that led up to it. “Almost rear-ending someone will stick in your mind, but that freezing it and remembering it comes at the cost of losing the precipitating events,” Rusty Weiss, director of DriveCam’s consumer division, explained. Time also takes its toll. A study led by Peter Chapman and Geoff Underwood at the University of Nottingham in England found that drivers forgot about 80 percent more of their near crashes if they were first asked about them two weeks later than if they were asked at the end of their trip. This is exactly the point with DriveCam: It does not let you forget the precariousness of your existence on the road.

Weiss, who came to DriveCam after setting up a program to put the camera in the cars of teenage drivers in a trial in Minnesota, theorizes that this amnesia for what helped lead up to a crash, something we are all subject to, troubles beginning drivers in particular. They are the ones, ironically, who are constantly finding themselves moving in and out of risky situations. “These kids should be learning rapidly,” he says. “There’s lots of learning opportunities, yet they continue making mistakes. At the moment they say it wasn’t their fault, but then they see the video and go, ‘Oh my God.’ It’s like video feedback for your golf swing. It makes you aware of things you’re not aware of when you’re there in the moment.”

The problem may be that they are simply forgetting the moments they should be learning from. Another study by Chapman and Underwood found that when drivers were shown videos of hazardous driving situations, novice drivers were less likely to remember details from the event than were more experienced drivers.