Traffic (61 page)

car was going to do: D. Lechner and G. Maleterre, “Emergency Maneuver Experimentation Using a Driving Simulator,” Society of Automotive Engineers Technical Paper No. 910016, 1991; referenced in Dilich, Kopernik and Goebelbecker, op. cit.

“living room on wheels”: Micheline Maynard, “At Chrysler, Home Depot Still Lingers,”
New York Times,
October 30, 2007.

warnings he or she might disregard: See, for example, M. P. Manser, N. J. Ward, N. Kuge, and E. R. Boer, “Influence of a Driver Support System on Situation Awareness and Information Processing in Response to Lead Vehicle Braking,”
Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Forty-eighth Annual Meeting
(New Orleans, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 2004), pp. 2359–63, and “Crash Warning System Interfaces,” DOT HS 810 697, January 2007.

be able to react accordingly: This is one of the problems that plague automation. Barry Kantowitz at the University of Michigan notes that automation “works fine up to a certain point, and then it fails utterly and completely.” He uses the example of a plane crash in which the autopilot, in attempting to correct for an imbalance in fuel, tipped the plane to the point where the autopilot couldn’t control it any longer. “So essentially it did the equivalent of ringing a bell and telling the pilot, ‘Okay, you take over now,’” he says. “You have a pilot who’s unaware there’s a problem. He’s ‘out of the loop.’ He has to very quickly figure out what the hell happened.” But when people fail, they have what he calls a “graceful degradation. They fail slowly instead of abruptly. They can cope with it a little better.” Design theorist Donald Norman gives a driving example in his book
The Design of Future Things:
A friend was driving with adaptive cruise control. This is the device that measures the distance away in time, in speed, of the vehicle in front, and keeps the car automatically at a safe distance. But, Norman notes, his friend suddenly moved to exit the freeway, forgetting the ACC was on. The car, thinking it suddenly had clear road ahead, chose to accelerate at the very moment it should have been decelerating. Automation is supposed to relieve the driver of having to pay attention, but in this case, if the driver hadn’t been paying attention there would have likely been a severe crash. Norman argues that while full automation would be safer than human manual driving, the “difficulty lies in the transition towards full automation, when different vehicles will have different capabilities, when only some things will be automated, and when even the automation that is installed will be limited in capability.” See Donald Norman,
The Design of Future Things
(New York: Basic Books, 2007), p. 116.

memory playing tricks): A group of psychologists at the University of Nottingham showed subjects a series of eight-second film clips of “dangerous” and “safer” situations that had been digitally manipulated to play at a range of faster or slower speeds (but always for eight seconds). Subjects were more likely to have judged the “dangerous” films as having been sped up. “If real dangerous events are remembered as if time slowed down,” the authors write, “this will create an expectation that videos of such events should run slowly…. Becausethe actual speed of the video does not slow down, viewers will judge films of dangerous events as having been sped up.” See Peter Chapman, Georgina Cox, and Clara Kirwan, “Distortion of Drivers’ Speed and Time Estimates in Dangerous Situations,” in
Behavioral Research in Road Safety
(London: Transport for London, 2005), pp. 164–74.

A Note About the Author

Tom Vanderbilt writes on design, technology, science, and culture, among other subjects, for many publications, including
Wired, Slate,
the
London Review of Books, Gourmet,
the
Wall Street Journal, Artforum, Travel & Leisure, Rolling Stone,
the
New York Times Magazine, Cabinet, Metropolis,
and
Popular Science.
He is contributing editor to the award-winning design magazines
I.D.
and
Print,
and contributing writer for the popular blog Design Observer. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and drives a 2001 Volvo V40.

ALSO BY TOM VANDERBILT

Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

Copyright © 2008 by Tom Vanderbilt

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
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Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vanderbilt, Tom.
Traffic: why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us) / by Tom Vanderbilt.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Automobile driving—Psychological aspects. 2. Traffic congestion. I. Title.
TL152.5.V36 2008
629.28'3—dc22                                                                                          2008011507

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Vanderbilt, Tom.
Traffic: why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us) / by Tom Vanderbilt.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Automobile driving—Psychological aspects. 2. Traffic congestion. I. Title.
TL152.5.V36 2008
629.28'3—dc22                                                                                          2008011507

eISBN: 978-0-307-27054-2

v3.0