Traffic_ Why We Drive The Way We Do Part 2

How's My Driving? How the h.e.l.l Should I Know? Why Lack of Feedback Fails Us on the Road There are two things no man will admit he cannot do well: drive and make love.

-Stirling Moss, champion racer

A splashy television advertising campaign for the online auction site eBay came with the simple tagline "People Are Good." Interestingly, a number of the images it showed involved traffic: In one spot, people joined to help push a car stuck in the snow; in another, a driver slowed to let another driver in, with a wave of the hand. By tapping into these moments of reciprocal altruism, eBay was hoping to underscore the idea that you can buy something from somebody you have never met, halfway around the globe, and feel confident that the product will actually show up. This "everyday trust," as an eBay spokesperson described it, which "blossoms into millions of strangers transacting with each other and overwhelmingly comes off without a hitch," roughly describes what happens in traffic.

And yet people are not always good. Each month seems to bring some new form of scam to eBay, which the company duly investigates. Sophisticated software, for one thing, sniffs out suspicious bidding patterns. What keeps the site running, however, is not the prowess of its fraud squad-which would hardly have time to monitor more than a fraction of the many millions of daily auctions-but a more simple mechanism: feedback. The desire to get positive feedback and avoid negative feedback is, as anyone who has bought or sold on the site knows, a crucial part of the experience. This probably has less to do with people wanting to feel good than the fact that sellers with good reputations can, as one study found, make 8 percent more in revenue. Either way, feedback (provided it's authentic) is the social glue that holds eBay together.

What if there was an eBay-like system of "reputation management" for traffic? This idea was raised in a provocative paper by Lior J. Strahilevitz, a law professor at the University of Chicago. "A modern, urban freeway is a lot like eBay, without reputation scores," he wrote. "Most drivers on the freeway are reasonably skilled and willing to cooperate conditionally with fellow drivers, but there is a sizeable minority that imposes substantial costs on other drivers, in the form of accidents, delays, stress, incivility, and rising insurance premiums."

Inspired by the HOW'S MY DRIVING HOW'S MY DRIVING stickers used by commercial fleets, the idea is that drivers, when witnessing an act of dangerous or illegal driving, could phone a call center and lodge a complaint, using mandatory identification numbers posted on every driver's b.u.mper or license plate. Calls could also be made to reward good drivers. An account would be kept and, at the end of each month, drivers would receive a "bill" tallying the positive or negative comments called in. Drivers exceeding a certain threshold could be punished in some way, such as by higher insurance premiums or a suspension of their license. Strahilevitz argues that this system would be more effective than sporadic law enforcement, which can monitor only a fraction of the traffic stream. The police are usually limited to issuing tickets based on obvious violations (like speeding) and are essentially powerless to do anything about the more subtle rude and dangerous moments we encounter-how often have you wished in vain for a police car to be there to catch someone doing something dangerous, like tailgating or texting on their BlackBerry? It would help insurance companies more effectively set rates, not to mention giving frustrated drivers a safer and more useful outlet to express their disapproval, and gain a sense of justice-than by responding in kind with acts of aggressive driving. stickers used by commercial fleets, the idea is that drivers, when witnessing an act of dangerous or illegal driving, could phone a call center and lodge a complaint, using mandatory identification numbers posted on every driver's b.u.mper or license plate. Calls could also be made to reward good drivers. An account would be kept and, at the end of each month, drivers would receive a "bill" tallying the positive or negative comments called in. Drivers exceeding a certain threshold could be punished in some way, such as by higher insurance premiums or a suspension of their license. Strahilevitz argues that this system would be more effective than sporadic law enforcement, which can monitor only a fraction of the traffic stream. The police are usually limited to issuing tickets based on obvious violations (like speeding) and are essentially powerless to do anything about the more subtle rude and dangerous moments we encounter-how often have you wished in vain for a police car to be there to catch someone doing something dangerous, like tailgating or texting on their BlackBerry? It would help insurance companies more effectively set rates, not to mention giving frustrated drivers a safer and more useful outlet to express their disapproval, and gain a sense of justice-than by responding in kind with acts of aggressive driving.

But what about false or biased feedback? What if your next-door neighbor who's mad at you for your barking dog phones in a report saying you were acting crazy on the turnpike? As Strahilevitz points out, eBay-style software can sniff out suspicious activity-"outliers" like one negative comment among many positives, or repeated negative comments from the same person. What about privacy concerns? Well, that's exactly the point: People are free to terrorize others on the road because their ident.i.ty is largely protected. The road is not a private place, and speeding is not a private act. As Strahilevitz argues, "We should protect privacy if, and only if, doing so promotes social welfare."

Less ambitious and official versions of this have been tried. The Web site Platewire.com, which was begun, in the words of its founder, "to make people more accountable for their actions on the roadways in one forum or another," gives drivers a place to lodge complaints about bad drivers, along with the offenders' license plate numbers; posts chastise "Too Busy Brus.h.i.+ng Her Hair" in California and "Audi A-hole" in New Jersey. Much less frequently, users give kudos to good drivers.

However n.o.ble the effort, the shortcomings of such sites are obvious. For one, Platewire, at the time of this writing, has a bit over sixty thousand members, representing only a minuscule fraction of the driving public. Platewire complaints are falling on few ears. For another, given the sheer randomness of driving, the chances are remote that I would ever come across the owner of New Jersey license plate VR347N-more remote even than the chance that they're reading this book-and, moreover, I'm unlikely to remember that they were the one a Platewire member had tagged for "reading the newspaper" while driving! Lastly, Platewire lacks real consequences beyond the anonymous shame of a small, disparate number of readers.

The call-center idea is aimed at countering the feeling of pervasive anonymity in traffic, and all the bad behavior it encourages. But it could also help correct another problem in traffic: the lack of feedback. As discussed earlier, the very mechanics of driving enable us to play spectator to countless acts of subpar driving, while being less aware of our own. Not surprisingly, if we were to ask ourselves "How's my driving?," research has shown that the answer would probably be a big thumbs-up-regardless of one's actual driving record.

In study after study, from the United States to France to New Zealand, when groups of drivers were asked to compare themselves to the "average driver," a majority inevitably respond that they were "better." This is, of course, statistically quite improbable and seems like a sketch from Monty Python: "We Are All Above Average!" Psychologists have called this phenomenon "optimistic bias" (or the "above-average effect"), and it is still something of a mystery why we do it. It might be that we want to make ourselves out to be better than others in a kind of downward comparison, the way the people in line in the first chapter a.s.sessed their own well-being by turning around to look at those lesser beings at the back of the queue. Or it might be the psychic crutch we need to more confidently face driving, the most dangerous thing most of us will ever do.

Whatever the reason, the evidence is strong that we self-enhance in all areas of life, often at our peril. Investors routinely claim they are better than the average investor at picking stocks, but at least one study of brokerage accounts showed that the most active traders (presumably among the most confident) generated the smallest smallest returns. Driving may be particularly susceptible to the above-average effect. For one, psychologists have found that the optimistic bias seems stronger in situations we can control; one study found drivers were more optimistic than pa.s.sengers when asked to rate their chances of being involved in a car accident. returns. Driving may be particularly susceptible to the above-average effect. For one, psychologists have found that the optimistic bias seems stronger in situations we can control; one study found drivers were more optimistic than pa.s.sengers when asked to rate their chances of being involved in a car accident.

The above-average effect helps explain resistance (in the early stages, at least) to new traffic safety measures, from seat belts to cell phone restrictions. Polls have shown, for example, that most drivers would like to see text messaging while driving banned; those same polls also show that most people have done it. We overestimate the risks to society and underestimate our own risk. It is the other other person's behavior that needs to be controlled, not mine; this reasoning helps contribute to the longstanding gap, concerning evolving technology, between social mores and traffic laws. We think stricter laws are a good idea for the people who need them. person's behavior that needs to be controlled, not mine; this reasoning helps contribute to the longstanding gap, concerning evolving technology, between social mores and traffic laws. We think stricter laws are a good idea for the people who need them.

Another problem with our view of ourselves is that we tend to rank ourselves higher, studies have shown, when the activity in question is thought to be relatively easy, like driving, and not relatively complex, like juggling many objects at once. Psychologists have suggested that the "Lake Wobegon effect"-"where all the children are above average"-is stronger when the skills in question are ambiguous. An Olympic pole-vaulter has a pretty clear indication of how good she is compared to everyone else by the height of the bar she must clear. As for a driver who simply makes it home unscathed from work, how was was their performance? A 9.1 out of 10? their performance? A 9.1 out of 10?

Most important, we may inflate our own driving abilities simply because we are not actually capable of rendering an accurate judgment. We may lack what is called "metacognition," which means, as Cornell University psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning put it, that we are "unskilled and unaware of it." In the same way a person less versed in the proper rules of English grammar will be less able to judge the correctness of grammar (to use Kruger and Dunning's example), a driver who is not fully aware of the risks of tailgating or the rules of traffic is hardly in a good position to evaluate their own relative risk or driving performance compared to everyone else's. One study showed that drivers who did poorly on their driving exam or had been involved in crashes were not as good at estimating their results on a simple reaction test as the statistically "better" (i.e., safer) drivers. And yet, as mentioned earlier, people seem easily able to disregard their own driving record in judging the quality of their own driving.

So whether we're c.o.c.ky, compensating for feeling fearful, or just plain clueless, the roads are filled with a majority of above-average drivers (particularly men), each of whom seems intent on maintaining their sense of above-averageness. My own unscientific theory is that this may help explain-in America, at least-why drivers polled in surveys seem to find the roads less civil with each pa.s.sing year. In an 1982 survey, a majority of drivers found that the majority of other people were "courteous" on the road. When the same survey was repeated in 1998, the rude drivers outnumbered the courteous.

How does this tie into pumped-up egos? Psychologists suggest that narcissism, more than insecurity propelled by low self-esteem, promotes aggressive driving. Rather like the survey data that show a mathematical disconnect between the number of s.e.xual partners men and women claim to have had, polls of aggressive driving behavior find more people seeing it than doing it. Someone is self-enhancing. And so narcissism, like road nastiness, seems to be on the rise. Psychologists who examined a survey called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, which has for the past few decades gauged narcissistic indicators in society (measuring reactions to statements like "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place"), found that in 2006, two-thirds of survey respondents scored higher than in 1982. More people than ever, it seems, have a "positive and inflated view of the self." And over the same period that narcissism was growing, the road, if surveys can be believed, was becoming a less pleasant environment. Traffic, a system that requires conformity and cooperation to function best, was filling with people sharing a common thought: "If I ruled the road, it would be a better place."

When negative feedback does come our way on the road, we tend to find ways to explain it away, or we quickly forget it. A ticket is a rare event that one grumblingly attributes to police officers having to "make a quota" a honk from another driver is a cause for anger, not shame or remorse; a crash might be seen as pure bad luck. But usually, for most people, there is no negative feedback. There is little feedback at all. We drive largely without incident every day, and every day we become just a little bit more above average. As John Lee, head of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at the University of Iowa, explained, "As an average driver you can get away with a lot before it catches up to you. That's one of the problems. The feedback loops are not there. You can be a bad driver for years and never really realize it, because you don't get that demonstrated to you. You could drive for years with a cell phone and say, 'How can cell phones be dangerous, because I do it every day for two hours and nothing's happened?' Well, that's because you've been lucky."

Even the moments when we almost crash become testaments to our skill, notches on our seat belts. But as psychologist James Reason wrote in Human Error, Human Error, "In accident avoidance, experience is a mixed blessing." The problem is that we learn how to avoid accidents precisely by avoiding accidents, not by being in accidents. But a near miss, as Reason described it, involves an "In accident avoidance, experience is a mixed blessing." The problem is that we learn how to avoid accidents precisely by avoiding accidents, not by being in accidents. But a near miss, as Reason described it, involves an initial error initial error as well as a process of as well as a process of error recovery. error recovery. This raises several questions: Are our near misses teaching us how to avoid accidents or how to prevent the errors that got us into the tight spot to begin with? Does avoiding a minor accident just set us up for having to get out of much bigger accidents? How, and what, do we learn from our mistakes? This raises several questions: Are our near misses teaching us how to avoid accidents or how to prevent the errors that got us into the tight spot to begin with? Does avoiding a minor accident just set us up for having to get out of much bigger accidents? How, and what, do we learn from our mistakes?

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 a.n.a.lysts, 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 pus.h.i.+ng the envelope. You didn't hit anybody and n.o.body 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 p.r.o.ne 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. 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. 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 pa.s.sengers," Lisk said, "will ride along and evaluate drivers from the bottom of the pyramid, squeezing the armrest and pus.h.i.+ng our feet into the floorboards."

As I played virtual pa.s.senger 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 eight full seconds as he's asleep," Moeller said. (A dip on a Los Angeles freeway had triggered the camera.) 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 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 Hanc.o.c.k, 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 flas.h.i.+ng, at the scene of a previous crash. Investigators learned that Hanc.o.c.k (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. 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 Hanc.o.c.k, 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 flas.h.i.+ng, at the scene of a previous crash. Investigators learned that Hanc.o.c.k (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 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 Hanc.o.c.k 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 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 Hanc.o.c.k 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, 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). 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 pa.s.senger 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 before they have real consequences? 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 G.o.d.' 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.

One reason may have been that they were not looking in the right places. Researchers have long known that inexperienced drivers have much different "visual search" patterns than more experienced drivers. They tend to look overwhelmingly near the front of the car and at the edge markings of the road. They tend not to look at the external mirrors very often, even while doing things like changing lanes. Knowing where to look-and remembering what you have seen-is a hallmark of experience and expertise. In the same way that eye-tracking studies have shown reliable differences in the way artists look at paintings versus the way nonartists do (the latter tend to zero in on things like faces, while artists scan the whole picture), researchers studying driver behavior can usually tell by a driver's glance activity how experienced they are.

Teenage drivers were, in many ways, the perfect next step for DriveCam. Like the drivers of commercial vehicles, teens are often driving someone else's car, and they are driving under the supervision of a higher authority-in this case, Mom and Dad. A trial in Iowa put DriveCams in the cars of twenty-five high school students for eighteen weeks. Triggered events were sent to parents, and the scores (using an anonymous ID) were posted so the drivers could judge exactly where they stood in relation to their peers. According to Daniel McGehee, the trial's head and director of the Human Factors and Vehicle Safety Research Program at the University of Iowa's Public Policy Center, teenagers in Iowa, because of its agricultural character, can begin driving to school at fourteen. "That crash rate is absolutely out of sight," he said. Teenagers in Iowa also drive a lot: In thirteen months of driving, the twenty-five drivers put over 360,000 miles on the odometer, many of them on the statistically most dangerous roads: rural two-lane highways.

The early clips he showed were indeed troubling: drivers sailing heedlessly through red lights, or singing and looking around absentmindedly before flying off a curve into a cornfield. Admittedly, I felt a bit uneasy peering into this little coc.o.o.n of privacy during these moments of raw, unfiltered emotion. Apparently the teens, in this age of reality television, were not so shy. The DriveCam contains a b.u.t.ton that drivers can press to add a comment about a triggered event. Some teens used it to record diary entries, a sort of dashboard confessional about events in their lives outside the car. Driving also provided a rather unique window on to the social lives of teens, McGehee told me. "We could tell when someone got a new girlfriend or boyfriend. They would drive more aggressively to show off."

But it was the safety effects, not the video confessions or dating habits, that interested the researchers. When I spoke to McGehee later, he was in the sixteenth week of the trial. "The riskiest drivers dropped their safety-relevant behaviors by seventy-six percent," he said. "The farther we get into this, the risky behaviors are just drying up." Whereas before, the riskiest drivers had been triggering the device up to ten times a day, McGehee said, they were now triggering it only once or twice a week. "Even the magnitude of those triggers is pretty benign relative to their early days," he noted. "They still might be taking a corner a little too fast but it might be right above the threshold."

What was really happening to the teens? Were they afraid of getting in trouble with their parents? Were they just seeing their own mistakes for the first time? Or were they simply gaming the system, trying to crack the code like they do with their SATs? "I think what you see is that drivers in this pure behavioral psychology loop are becoming sensors themselves," McGehee said. "This little accelerometer in there-they start to sense over time what the limit is." As DriveCam's Weiss put it, "One kid said, 'I figured out how to beat the system. I just look way ahead and antic.i.p.ate traffic and slow down for corners, and I haven't set it off in a month.'" He was, whether he realized it or not, acting like a good driver.

But what happens when the DriveCam is gone? "I don't pretend to represent DriveCam as anything but an extrinsic motivation system," Moeller had said. He admits that in the early days of a DriveCam trial, the mere presence of the camera is enough to get drivers to act more cautiously, in a version of the famous "Hawthorne effect," which says that people in an experiment change their behavior simply because they know they are in an experiment. But without any follow-up coaching, without "closing the feedback loop," results begin to erode. "The driver starts to think, 'The camera's not intrusive at all. Nothing's ever going to happen-this is just there so in case I get in a crash this will record who was at fault,'" Moeller said. "When you inject coaching in, then he realizes there is an immediate and certain consequence for his risky driving behavior. That twenty-second loss of privacy is enough for most people."

The things that DriveCam finds itself coaching drivers on most often do not involve actual driving skills per se-like cornering ability or obstacle avoidance-but mistakes that are born from overconfidence. The most striking example of this came in a trial that Weiss, then with the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, did with an ambulance company that was trying to improve the "ride experience" for patients. One might think the DriveCam would have been triggered quite regularly in emergency situations, when the drivers, with lights and sirens, were speeding their patients to the hospital, careening around corners, and slaloming through red lights. That was not the case. "It's actually smoother when you have the red lights and siren on, is how it turned out," Weiss explained. "We triggered more events-we had harder cornering and more erratic driving-when they were just doing their own thing." Weiss, himself a former ambulance driver and paramedic, suspected he knew why. "The big difference between running lights and a siren and your normal driving is that you're focused. They're seeing the hazards that are out there and they're slowing sooner when someone can't see them. Smoother is quicker when you're running lights and a siren."

Since most of us don't have sirens and lights, our driving is of the everyday variety. As the sense of routine begins to take over, we begin to ratchet up our sense of the possible-how close we can follow, how fast we can take curves-and become conditioned to each new plateau. We forget those things that the Stanford researchers were learning as they tried to teach their robot to drive: It is not as easy as it appears. Lisk, who had that morning reviewed a sheaf of collision reports, said that "the large majority were just people who didn't have enough s.p.a.ce, or were not attentive enough. A lack of good old-fas.h.i.+oned basic driving skills was a huge part of it."

He showed one clip, of a driver moving rather quickly down an open lane toward a tollbooth, flanked on either side by queues of cars. "The driver's thinking it's wide open. It's a football mentality-I've got all my blockers and I can go," Lisk said. It's as if the driver has already imagined himself to have pa.s.sed through the lines of cars and past the open tollbooth. There is just one problem: All those other drivers are eagerly salivating over that same s.p.a.ce. "Because they're boxed in they've got to come in a pretty abrupt angle and at low speed," Lisk said. "We see a lot of collisions where the driver hasn't slowed down enough when they're approaching that high-risk, open-lane situation."

This may help explain why EZ Pa.s.sstyle automated payment lanes at tollbooths, which should theoretically help reduce crashes at these statistically risky areas-drivers no longer have to fumble for change-have been shown to increase crash rates. Drivers approach at a higher speed, with nothing to stop them from zooming through the toll plaza, while other cars, finding themselves in the "wrong" lanes, dart out and jockey among lanes more than they would have under the old system, in which there was less chance of finding a shorter queue.

Each month, DriveCam receives more than fifty thousand of these triggered clips, making it, Moeller said, the world's largest "repository of risky driving behavior." The technology of the camera is allowing glimpses into what has been, for most of the automobile's existence, a kind of closed world: the inner life of the driver.

"Driver behavior" has previously been teased out through things like driving simulators, test tracks, or actually having a researcher sit in the car, clipboard in hand-none of which is quite like real-world driving. Cars could be watched from the outside, via cameras or lab a.s.sistants on highway overpa.s.ses, but that did not give any glimpse into what the driver was doing. The study of crashes was based largely on police investigations and witness reports, which are both p.r.o.ne to distortion-the latter particularly so.

People are more likely to a.s.sign blame to one person or another when a crash is severe, research has shown, than when it is minor. In another study, a group of people were shown films of car crashes. When the subjects were asked, a week later, to gauge the speed of various cars in the films, they estimated higher speeds when the questions used the word "smash," versus words like "hit" or "contacted." More subjects remembered seeing broken gla.s.s when the word "smash" was used, even though no gla.s.s was broken. A driver's own memory of events is usually clouded by a desire to lessen their own responsibility for an event (perhaps so as to not conflict with their enhanced self-image or to avoid legal liability). "Baker's law," named after crash reconstructionist J. Stannard Baker, notes that drivers "tend to explain their traffic accidents by reporting circ.u.mstances of lowest culpability compatible with credibility"-that is, the most believable story they can get away with.

Most elusive of all, before Drivecam-style devices, were the crashes that almost almost happened. There was no way to determine why and how they nearly occurred (or did not), nor how often these near misses took place. If the top of the triangle was murky, the bottom of the triangle was as vast a mystery as the deepest ocean floor. happened. There was no way to determine why and how they nearly occurred (or did not), nor how often these near misses took place. If the top of the triangle was murky, the bottom of the triangle was as vast a mystery as the deepest ocean floor.

That has now changed, and large-scale studies, using technology like DriveCam's, are providing new clues into how drivers behave and, most important, new insight into just why we encounter trouble on the road. The answer is not so much all the things that the road signs warn us about-the high winds on bridges or the deer crossing the highway. Nor is it mostly tire blowouts, faulty brakes, or the mechanical flaws that prompt car makers to issue recalls ("human factors" are said to account for 90 percent of all crashes). Nor does it seem to be "driver proficiency" or our ability to understand traffic signals.

What seems to gives us the most trouble, apart from our overconfidence and lack of feedback in driving, are the two areas in which Stanley and Junior, Stanford's clumsy robot drivers, have a decided edge. The first is the way we sense and perceive things. As amazing as this process is, we do not always interpret things correctly. More important, we aren't always aware of this fact. The second thing that separates us from Stanley and Junior on the road is that we are not driving machines: We cannot keep up a constant level of vigilance. Once we feel we have things under control, we begin to act differently. We look out the window or talk on a cell phone. Much of our trouble, as I will show in the next chapter, comes because of our perceptual limitations, and because we cannot pay attention.

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How Our Eyes and Minds Betray Us on the Road Keep Your Mind on the Road: Why It's So Hard to Pay Attention in Traffic Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.

-Albert Einstein

Here is a common traffic experience: You are driving, perhaps down a mostly empty highway, perhaps on the quiet streets around your house, when you suddenly find yourself "awake at the wheel." You realize, with a mixture of wonder and horror, that you cannot remember what you have been doing for the past few moments-nor do you know how long you have been "out." You may find yourself sitting in your driveway and asking, as the Talking Heads once did, "How did I get here?"

This phenomenon has been called everything from "highway hypnosis" to the "time-gap experience," and while it has long puzzled people who study driving, it is still not fully understood. What is known is that it usually happens in fairly monotonous or familiar driving situations. Some scientists suggest that it's related to drowsiness, and that we may even be taking what are called "microsleeps" at the wheel.

What is also unclear is how much attention we were actually paying to the road while under the spell of highway hypnosis versus to what extent we have simply forgotten everything that happened during that period. You may have wondered why you did not drift off the side of the road. Perhaps you were lucky; one study that had subjects drive for several (boring) hours in a driving simulator found that the roughly one in five drivers who succ.u.mbed to "driving without awareness"-as measured by EEG readings and eye movements-drifted out of their lane one-third of the time. You may have wondered what would have happened if a car (or bike or small child) had veered into the lane while you were zoning out. Would you have responded in time? Did Did a near accident almost happen during that period, one that you have since forgotten about? a near accident almost happen during that period, one that you have since forgotten about?

Think back to the blank stares of drivers monitored by DriveCam. Why is it so hard to pay attention while we are driving? How and why do our eyes and mind betray us on the road?

Driving, for most of us, is what psychologists call an "overlearned" activity. It is something we're so well practiced at that we're able to do it without much conscious thought. That makes our life easier, and it is how we become good at things. Think of an expert tennis player. A serve is a complex maneuver with many different components, but the better we become at it, the less we think of each individual step. This example comes from Barry Kantowitz, a psychologist and "human factors" expert at the University of Michigan; he has spent years studying the safest and most efficient ways for humans to interact with machines, working with everyone from NASA pilots to operators of nuclear power plants. "One of the interesting things about learning and attention is that once something becomes automated, it gets executed in a rapid string of events," he says. "If you try to pay attention, you screw it up." This is why, for example, the best hitters in baseball do not necessarily make the best hitting coaches. Coaches need to be able to explain what to do; Charley Lau, the legendary batting coach and author of the cla.s.sic book The Art of Hitting .300, The Art of Hitting .300, never actually hit .300 himself. never actually hit .300 himself.

The more overlearned an activity becomes, the less cognitive workload it imposes-though studies suggest that even the most mundane activities, like switching gears, never become fully automatic. The task always costs something. Having less workload is, on the one hand, a good thing. If, while driving, we were to really process every potential hazard, carefully a.n.a.lyze every motion and decision, and break down each maneuver into its component parts, we would quickly become overwhelmed. People who bring test subjects into driving simulators find something like this happening. "We're not going to get a driver to be one hundred percent vigilant to the driving task, because we would all get out of the car sweating," according to Jeffrey Muttart, a crash investigator and researcher at the University of Ma.s.sachusetts. "If you see people get out of a driving simulator test, almost the first thing they do is take a deep, cleansing breath. Because I'm frying their brains. This is a ten-minute drive, and they want to try hard to do well."

Too little workload has its own problems. We get bored. We get tired. We lapse into highway hypnosis. We may make errors. Anyone who has (like me) put on mismatched socks or run the coffeemaker without adding coffee or water will be aware of this phenomenon. The absolute ease of the activity allows the mind to wander. A cla.s.sic psychological principle, the Yerkes-Dodson law, posits that the ability to learn is harmed by too little-or too much-"arousal." This idea applies as well to human performance. Driving in North Dakota is on the low side of the curve, driving in Delhi on the high side. The ideal conditions presumably lie somewhere in between.

But where? Most driving rarely requires our full workload. So we listen to the radio, look out the window, or, increasingly, talk on the cell phone or read text messages-in the case of one fatal crash in California, the driver may have been operating a laptop computer as he drove. Or we may change the way we drive-we speed up because driving does not seem overly taxing. To the extent that this keeps us in the middle of the Yerkes-Dodson curve, it's a good thing. But the problem with driving is that we never know for sure when things are going to change very quickly, when that nice empty road-seemingly safe for a cell phone conversation-is going to turn into an obstacle course. We may also be unaware of just how much workload our secondary activity is consuming.

"Let's say you're driving on a straight road. It's relatively easy. I could ask you to do arithmetic at the same time and it wouldn't mess up your driving," Kantowitz said. "If you're driving on a curved road, especially if it's sharp curve, that takes more attention if you're to keep the car operating safely within the lane. If I ask you to do mental arithmetic on a curve you'll do it more slowly and you'll screw it up. Or if you do it well you'll screw up the driving." A study by a Danish researcher found that those same types of arithmetic problems took longer to do when driving in a village than on a highway.

This raises another point: Researchers look at how driving is affected when people do other things, but research also shows that secondary tasks suffer as well. We become worse drivers and and worse talkers. This is obvious to anyone who has listened to the wandering, interrupted musings of a driver talking on a phone (journalists know that people calling from their cars give terrible interviews). As Kantowitz put it, "There's no free lunch." worse talkers. This is obvious to anyone who has listened to the wandering, interrupted musings of a driver talking on a phone (journalists know that people calling from their cars give terrible interviews). As Kantowitz put it, "There's no free lunch."

"My basic belief after almost forty years of studying this stuff is that people can't time-share at all," Kantowitz told me. "You only get the appearance. It's like speed-reading. You think you can read really fast but your comprehension disappears. You can give the illusion of time-sharing if it's simple information, but in general we're not built for time-sharing." Think of the annoying crawl type found on the bottom of the screen on CNN and other news networks. We are led to believe that this is how people now process information, as if we are suddenly genetically programmed to mult.i.task. Studies have shown, however, that the more information there is on the screen, the less we actually remember.

The relative ease of most driving lures us into thinking we can get away with doing other things. Indeed, those other things, like listening to the radio, can help when driving itself is threatening to cause fatigue. But we buy into the myth of mult.i.tasking with little actual knowledge of how much we can really add in or, as with the television news, how much we are missing. As the inner life of the driver begins to come into focus, it is becoming clear not only that distraction is the single biggest problem on the road but that we have little concept of just how distracted we are.

In the largest study to date of the way we actually drive today, the Virginia Tech Transportation Inst.i.tute, working with NHTSA, equipped one hundred cars in the Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., and northern Virginia area with cameras, GPS units, and other monitoring devices, and then set about recording a year's worth of what it calls "pre-crash, naturalistic driving data." After poring over forty-three thousand hours of data and more than two million miles of driving, the study found that almost 80 percent of crashes and 65 percent of the near crashes involved drivers who were not paying attention to traffic for up to three seconds before the event.

That period of time is critical. "A total time of two seconds looking away from the forward roadway is when people start to get in trouble," explained Sheila "Charlie" Klauer, a researcher at VTTI and the study's project manager. "That's when they get to the point when they are starting to lose track of what's going on in front of them." The two-second window is not technically related to the "two-second rule" for following distance, but the comparison is instructive. The point is that a lot can happen in two seconds-like colliding with the car in front if it came to a stop or slowed-but drivers, lulled by the expectancy that it will not stop, drive as if the world will not have changed when they return their eyes to the road after that two seconds. They drive as if the world is a television show viewed on TiVo that can be paused in real time-one can duck out for a moment, grab a beer from the fridge, and come back to right where they left off without missing a beat. For many of the crashes, Klauer found that "the eye glance happened to be at exactly the wrong time. If they had not chosen to look away at that very second they would have probably been okay."

The sources of distraction inside a car have been painstakingly logged by researchers. We know that the average driver adjusts their radio 7.4 times per hour of driving, that their attention is diverted 8.1 times per hour by infants, and that they search for something-sungla.s.ses, breath mints, change for the toll-10.8 times per hour. Research has further revealed just how many times we glance off the road to do these things and how long each glance takes: In general, the average driver looks away from the road for .06 seconds every 3.4 seconds. "On average, radio tuning takes seven glances plus or minus three," said Linda Angell, a safety researcher at General Motors, in a conference room at the Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. "That's for an oldish radio. We do better with the modern radio, which zeroes you in on the right region." Most of these glances, Angell noted, do not take our eyes off the road for longer than 1.5 seconds. But there are exceptions, such as "intense displays"(e.g., lots of features) or looking for a b.u.t.ton you have not pressed in a while. The iPod is changing the equation yet again: Studies have shown that scrolling for a particular song takes our eyes off the road for 10 percent longer than simply pausing or skipping a song-plenty of time for something to go wrong.

Even a succession of very short glances, less than two seconds each, can cause problems. Researchers talk of the "fifteen-second rule," which indicates the maximum amount of time a driver should spend operating any kind of in-car device, whether navigation or radio, even as they are (at least occasionally) looking at the road. "What we believe is that task time is very important," Klauer said. "The longer the task time, the more dangerous the task is, and the greater the crash risk." And so a fifteen-second task might require only short glances at the device, but, Klauer said, "that risk increases every time the driver looks away."

The study found that while dialing a cell phone put drivers at a greater crash risk, talking on a cell phone presented only a slightly higher risk than normal driving. "When a driver is talking or listening on their cell phone, at any given moment within that conversation what our odds ratio is telling us is they're only at a slightly higher crash risk than an alert driver. Statistically speaking, it's not different," Klauer said. Does that mean talking on a cell phone is safe? Maybe it's all that dialing dialing we need to worry about. But the study also found that talking (or listening) on a cell phone was a contributing factor in as many crashes as dialing was. "We think that's probably true because while dialing is a much more dangerous task while the driver's doing it, the task is fairly short," Klauer told me. "But drivers typically talk on their cell phone for a long period of time. Over that long period of time a lot more crashes and near crashes are more apt to occur. That slight increase in crash risk is starting to add up." As more drivers talk for longer periods, Klauer said, "it's going to become a lot more dangerous." we need to worry about. But the study also found that talking (or listening) on a cell phone was a contributing factor in as many crashes as dialing was. "We think that's probably true because while dialing is a much more dangerous task while the driver's doing it, the task is fairly short," Klauer told me. "But drivers typically talk on their cell phone for a long period of time. Over that long period of time a lot more crashes and near crashes are more apt to occur. That slight increase in crash risk is starting to add up." As more drivers talk for longer periods, Klauer said, "it's going to become a lot more dangerous."

The reason we talk for a long time on our cell phones is related to the reason we all think we are better drivers than we are, and to the thing that also makes us think we are better drivers on our cell phones than we are: lack of feedback. Cell phone users are not aware of the risk because, by all surface measures, they seem to be driving fine. Traffic affords us these illusions-until it does not, as the hundred-car study showed. "Cell phone conversations are particularly insidious because you don't notice your bad performance, particularly the cognitive side," John Lee argues. "So if you're dialing the phone, you get immediate feedback because you don't quite stay in the lane, because you're punching the b.u.t.tons." Once the dialing is done, the driver can again look at the road. The weaving stops. They seem to be in control.

Drivers may confidently a.s.sume they can adequately compensate for talking on a cell phone or texting on a BlackBerry by lowering their speed or putting more s.p.a.ce between their own car and the car ahead of them, but the evidence gleaned from the hundred-car survey suggests otherwise. One might think, for example, that rear-end collisions most commonly occur because the driver behind was following too closely. Yet the study found that the majority of rear-end crashes happened when the following car was more more than two seconds away from the car it struck. "I think people compensated a little bit for their inattention," Klauer said. "'I need to answer this cell phone, I need to look at these papers on the seat next to me.' So they back off the lead vehicle and give themselves some s.p.a.ce. Then they start to engage in something else. Then something unexpected happens and they're in trouble." than two seconds away from the car it struck. "I think people compensated a little bit for their inattention," Klauer said. "'I need to answer this cell phone, I need to look at these papers on the seat next to me.' So they back off the lead vehicle and give themselves some s.p.a.ce. Then they start to engage in something else. Then something unexpected happens and they're in trouble."

The drivers were redistributing workload. With more of their attention devoted to a cell phone conversation, they may have had to work just a bit harder to stay in their lane; similarly, the narrower the lane, the more mental energy it takes to stay in that lane (my own theory is that cell phones in cars have contributed to the seeming death of signaling for turns). Driving closer to someone also requires more mental energy, as does driving fast. We can usually feel this starting to take a toll, so we do things like drop back from a car in front of us or slow down. Clearly we do not always compensate enough, and there is evidence to suggest that we hardly compensate at all for our cell phone impairment when we're doing things like changing lanes.

Something similar happens with very new drivers on highways: So much of their mental concentration is devoted to simply staying in the lane, they have trouble paying attention to their speed. And it is not only drivers who suffer, as anyone who has walked behind someone talking on a mobile phone has noticed. When psychologists have asked people to walk around a track while memorizing words that were shown to them, walking speeds slowed as the mental task got harder. Similarly, researchers in Finland have found that pedestrians using mobile devices walked more slowly and and were less able to interact with the device, pausing occasionally to "sample the environment." But pedestrians on cell phones do not sample the environment as often as they should, as a study of a Las Vegas crosswalk showed: Those talking on cell phones were less likely to look at traffic while crossing were less able to interact with the device, pausing occasionally to "sample the environment." But pedestrians on cell phones do not sample the environment as often as they should, as a study of a Las Vegas crosswalk showed: Those talking on cell phones were less likely to look at traffic while crossing and and took longer to do so. took longer to do so.

Our attention, like a highway dropping from three lanes to two lanes, suffers from a bottleneck, one theory claims: Only so much can get through at once. Trying to squeeze more mental "cars" past the bottleneck means we have to slow them all down, s.p.a.ce them out-or it means that some of those cars might drive off the road. In the hundred-car study, something else was also happening when drivers got on their cell phones. They began to look almost exclusively straight ahead, much more so than they did when they were not on their cell phones. They were, by external measures, "paying attention." But keeping one's eyes on the road is not necessarily the same thing as keeping one's mind on the road.

Consider for a moment the incredibly complex question of what it even means to pay attention while driving. There are an infinite number of things we could notice if we chose to, or had the spare mental capacity. But through practice and habit we learn to expertly a.n.a.lyze complicated scenes and extract only the information we need, ignoring the rest. New drivers, as we have seen, look rather rigidly ahead and near the front of the car, using "foveal" rather than peripheral vision to help them stay in their lane. As drivers get more experienced, they cast their eyes farther out along the road, barely registering the pavement markings. This happens without their even noticing. Experiments have been done in which researchers pulled over drivers on the highway and asked them if they recalled having seen certain traffic signs. The recall rates were as low as 20 percent. Were drivers simply not seeing things? One study found that the remembered signs were not necessarily the most visible ones but the signs that drivers judged most important (e.g., speed limit). This suggests that drivers saw enough of the signs to process what they were, at some subconscious level, and then effectively forgot most of them.

We do this sort of thing all the time-and for good reason. Remembering traffic signs we have seen is not useful to our lives. Steven Most, a psychologist at the University of Delaware, compares the flow of information and images we get in daily life to a stream pa.s.sing through our heads. Unless we stop to "scoop up" some of that water-or "capture" it with our attention-it will flow in