Traffic (6 page)

Why should proper signaling, even when it’s seen and understood by the driver, be more linked to danger in this study than lack of signaling? The answer may be that the cyclists are guilty of simply looking like humans, rather than anonymous cars. In a previous study, Walker had subjects look at various photographs of traffic and describe what was going on. When subjects saw a photograph with a car, they were more likely to refer to the photo’s subject as a thing. When subjects looked at a picture that showed a pedestrian or a cyclist, they were more likely to use language that described a person. It somehow seems natural to say “the bicyclist yielded to the car,” while it sounds strange to say “the driver hit the bicycle.” In one photograph Walker showed, a woman was visible in a car, while a man on a bike waited behind. Although the woman could be clearly seen in the car, she was never referred to as a person, while the cyclist almost always was. Even when she was visible she was rendered invisible by the car.

In theory, this is good news for bicycle riders: What cyclist does not want to be considered human? The problem may come from the inhuman environment of traffic I have already described. Vehicles are moving at velocities for which we have no evolutionary training—for most of the life of the species we did not try to make interpersonal decisions at speed. So, when we’re driving and along comes a
person
on wheels, we cannot help but look at their face and, again, their eyes. In another study Walker performed, using photographs of cyclists and subjects hooked up to eye-tracking software, he found that the subjects’ gazes went instinctively toward the cyclists’ faces and lingered there longest, no matter what other information was in the picture.

Eyes are the original traffic signals. Walker has a good demonstration of this. On his laptop are two photographs of himself. In one, he is looking straight at the camera (i.e., the viewer). In another, he’s looking almost imperceptibly askance, but I could still feel, quite powerfully, that something had changed. How much had his eyes moved so that I knew he was no longer looking at me? A mere two pixels (out of 640 pixels across the width of the screen). What Walker is suggesting is that when we view a cyclist’s eyes, or even their arm motion, we begin—perhaps automatically—a chain of cognitive processing. We cannot help but look for those things we seek out when we see another person. This seems to take longer than looking at mere things, and it seems to involve more mental effort (studies have shown that electroencephalographic, or EEG, readings spike when two people’s eyes meet). We may be trying to gauge more from them than simply which direction they are going to turn. We may be looking for signs of hostility or kindness. We may be looking for reciprocal altruism. We may look where they are looking rather than see what their arm is signaling.

Whether or not we realize it, we are always making subtle adjustments in traffic. A kind of nonverbal communication is going on. Walker revealed this in a powerful way when he moved from the lab setting to the actual road. As a cyclist himself, he was curious about the anecdotal accounts from cyclists who said, in effect, that the more road space they took up, the more space passing cars gave them. He was also curious about survey reports that hinted that drivers tended to view cyclists wearing helmets as more “serious, sensible and predictable road users.”

Did any of this matter on the road, or did cars simply pass cyclists
as
cyclists, more or less randomly? To find out, Walker mounted a Trek hybrid bicycle with an ultrasonic distance sensor and set out on the roads of Salisbury and Bristol. He made trips wearing a helmet and not wearing a helmet. He made trips at different distances from the edge of the road. And he made trips dressed as a man and dressed as a woman, wearing, as a rough signifier of gender, a “long feminine wig.” After he had crunched the data, the numbers revealed an interesting set of patterns. The farther he rode from the edge of the road, the
less
space cars gave him. When he wore a helmet, vehicles tended to pass closer than when he did not wear a helmet. Passing drivers may have read the helmet as a sign that there was less risk for the cyclist if they hit him. Or perhaps the helmet dehumanized the rider. Or—and more likely, according to Walker—drivers read the helmet as a symbol of a more capable and predictable cyclist, one less likely to veer into their path. In either case, the helmet changed the behavior of passing drivers.

Finally, drivers gave Walker more space when he was dressed as a woman than as a man. Was this a “novelty effect” based on the fact there are statistically fewer female cyclists on England’s roads? Or were drivers simply thinking, “Who is this crazy man-cyclist wearing that terrible wig?” Or were drivers (whose gender Walker was not able to record) giving women cyclists more room out of some sense of politeness or, perhaps, as he suggests, because they were operating with a stereotypical idea of women cyclists as less predictable or competent?

Interestingly, the possible gender bias, however misguided, echoes the intersection study mentioned earlier, in which drivers were more likely to yield the right-of-way if a female driver was approaching. Drivers, whether aware of it or not, seem to rely on stereotypes (a version of Walker’s “mental models”). Indeed, stereotypes seem to flourish in traffic. One reason, most simply, is that we have little actual information about people in traffic, as with the “Bumper of My S.U.V.” dilemma. The second reason is that we rely on stereotypes as “mental shortcuts” to help us make sense of complex environments in which there is little time to develop subtle evaluations. This is not necessarily bad: A driver who sees a small child standing on the roadside may make a stereotypical judgment that “children have no impulse control” and assume that the child may dash out. The driver slows.

It does not take a great leap to imagine, however, the problems of seeing something that does not conform to our expectations. Consider the results of one well-known psychological study. People were read a word describing a personal attribute that confirmed, countered, or avoided gender stereotypes. They were then given a name and asked to judge whether it was male or female. People responded more quickly when the stereotypical attribute matched the name than when it did not; so people were faster to the trigger when it was “strong John” and “gentle Jane” than when it was “strong Jane” and “gentle John.” Only when subjects were actively asked to try to counter the stereotype and had a sufficiently low “cognitive constraint” (i.e., enough time) were they able to overcome these automatic responses.

Similarly, the drivers passing Walker on his bicycle seemed to be making automatic judgments. But did the stereotype of the helmet-wearing Walker as a competent, predictable cyclist help or hurt in the end? After all, motorists drove more closely to him. Would he have been better off wearing a wig, a Darth Vader mask, or anything else that sent a different “traffic signal” to the driver? The answer is unclear, but Walker came away from the experiment with a positive feeling about what looking human can mean in traffic. “You can stick a helmet on and it will lead to measurable changes in behavior. It shows that as a driver approaches a given cyclist, they can make an individual judgment on that person’s perceived needs. They are judging each person as individuals. They’re not just invoking some default behavior for passing cyclists. That’s
got
to be encouraging.”

Our traffic lives are ruled by anonymity, but this doesn’t mean we give up trying to infer things about the people we encounter, or acting on those things in ways we may not even register.

When people are waiting, they are bad judges of time, and every half minute seems like five.

—Jane Austen,
Mansfield Park

When was the last time you were angry at something that seemed out of your control? There is a very good possibility it was in one of three situations: being stuck in a traffic jam; waiting in line at a bank, an airport, a post office, or some such place; or being placed on hold for a “customer service representative.”

In all three cases, you were in a queue. Of course, you were probably
more
angry in the first and third cases, because you were most likely in the privacy of your car or home. But there is ample opportunity for you to get angry in a public queue, which is why corporations have spent a lot of money, and thought long and hard, not only about how to reduce queues but how to make them feel shorter.

In traffic, we wait in several kinds of queues. Traffic lights cause the most traditional kind. The traffic light takes the place of the “server.” A particularly slow server, like a particularly slow traffic light, bears the brunt of our frustration. As with traditional queues, traffic engineers try to estimate the flow of “arrivals.” Do cars arrive in a random way, or in a “Poisson” process (after the French mathematician Siméon-Denis Poisson), as in a bank queue? Or is it non-Poisson, nonrandom (think of immigration queues at airports, which are periodically flooded by “platoons” of deplaning passengers)? Traffic engineers extend the “cycle time” during peak hours in the same way a Starbucks might add employees during the morning rush.

There are also “moving queues,” as when you’re in the faster left-lane on a highway, stuck behind what engineers call a “platoon” of vehicles. As some vehicles shift to slower lanes, you can “move up” the queue. If someone is in your way you might flash your lights or crowd their tail, which is roughly the equivalent of lightly coughing or tapping the shoulder of someone who is daydreaming in line ahead of you and has forgotten to move. You may have noticed how we tend to do this even when it clearly will not change the overall wait time, as if the sight of empty space makes us anxious.

Traffic congestion baffles traditional queue logic. We are waiting in a queue, but we often do not know where it begins or ends. How are we to measure our progress? Whether or not traffic always acts like a traditional queue, what’s interesting is that it seems to affect us in exactly the same way. David Maister, an expert in “the psychology of queuing,” has come up with a series of propositions about waiting in line. Strikingly, they all seem to hold true for traffic.

Take proposition no. 1: “Unoccupied time feels longer than occupied time.” This is why grocery stores put magazines near the cashiers, and why we listen to radios or talk on cell phones in our cars. Or proposition no. 3: “Anxiety makes waits seem longer.” Ever been stuck in traffic on your way to an important meeting or when you were low on gas? Or proposition no. 4: “Uncertain waits are longer than known, finite waits.” This is why highway engineers use CMS, or “changeable message signs,” to tell us how long a stretch of commute will take. Studies suggest that when we know the exact time of a wait, we devote less attention to thinking about it. Traffic engineers in Delhi, India, have put up “countdown signals” on a number of traffic lights, marking the number of seconds until the light turns green, for this very reason.

Also worth considering is proposition no. 6: “Unfair waits are longer than equitable waits.” Think of ramp meters, those signals that delay drivers’ entrance onto the freeway. Drivers fume: Why should I have to wait on the ramp while the freeway is moving? One study found that people thought of waiting on the ramp as 1.6 to 1.7 times “more onerous” than waiting on the highway itself. The more people understand the purpose of ramp meters (which I will discuss in Chapter 4), the less bothersome the wait becomes. This relates to proposition no. 5: “Unexplained waits are longer than explained waits.” Hence our frustration when we find no “cause” for a traffic jam. If we know there is an accident or construction, the delay is easier to process. Proposition no. 8 is appropriate, too: “Solo waiting feels longer than group waiting.” One study found that solo drivers placed the highest value on saving time in traffic. The implication is that they are more affected by delays than people not traveling alone, which is ironic, considering that under HOV lane schemes people traveling in groups often move faster.

Queues, wherever they occur, play strange games with our perception of time, our feeling of satisfaction, even our sense of “social justice.” Studies have shown that people routinely overestimate the amount of time they have actually spent in a queue, and thus are less satisfied when they get served. (This is why Disney World inflates the posted waiting times for their attractions.) And while you might think that the most important factor of a queue is how many people are in front of the person waiting, research suggests that the number
behind
is significant as well. One study, at a Hong Kong post office, found that the more people there were behind a person waiting in a queue, the less likely they were to “renege,” or quit. The queue might have suddenly seemed more valuable. Another theory is that when people are anxious—as is common in queues—they’re more likely to make “downward” comparisons than “upward”: instead of “Look how far along they are,” at the front of the line, they think, “At least I’m better off than you at the back.”

What really seems to rankle us is seeing people get ahead. This is why, says Richard Larson, director of the Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the world’s leading authorities on queues, any number of companies—from banks to fast-food chains—have switched from systems in which multiple lines feed multiple servers to a single, serpentine line. “There’s a theorem in queuing theory that says the average wait in either configuration is the same,” Larson explains. Yet people prefer the single line, so much so that they have said they would be willing to wait in a longer line at Wendy’s, the hamburger chain where a single line is used, than at a shorter line at McDonald’s, which uses multiple lines. Why? Social justice, says Larson. “If you have the single serpentine line, you’re guaranteed first come, first served. If you have the multiple lines, you have what happens at McDonald’s at lunchtime. You have the stress of joining a line with high likelihood that somebody who’s joined a queue next to you will get served before you. People get really irritated with that.”