Traffic Psychology on the Internet: Part I

Traffic Psychology on the Internet: Part I

Report 3: Traffic Psychology on the Internet: Part I

(a) Search the Internet for each of the 5 topics you selected in your first report. Keep notes for your report.

(b) Summarize the content and make links to them.

(c) Relate this content to traffic psychology (i.e., their theoretical and practical implications).

In my first report, the topics I covered were:
1. personality change behind the wheel
2. why people speed
3. pedestrian traffic on campus
4. overconfidence in driving
5. an article written by Dr. Leon James entitled The Private World of The Driver

I searched Metacrawler for Personality Change While Driving, which gave me a link called Excerpts. These were actually from a document called A COLLECTION OF EXCERPTS FROM TARGET RISK. In this document, there was a section called:

The famous Munich taxicab study:

"Part of a taxi fleet in Munich was equipped with an anti-lock brake system - also known as ABS. This type of brake system prevents the wheels from locking up under extreme braking conditions. It offers the advantage of improved steering control over the vehicle during rapid deceleration, especially on slippery road surfaces. The system makes it possible to change the direction of the car and abruptly reduce speed at the same time, at a considerably reduced risk of losing control."

"ABS brakes offer a perfect example of what was called a change in intrinsic risk towards the end of Section 3.4 -a change in the objective accident loss expected if drivers don't change their behaviour when a "safer vehicle" is made available. However, according to risk homeostasis theory, drivers are expected to change their behaviour and to maintain their accident likelihood per hour of driving as long as the target level of risk is not altered."

"The drivers were not aware that their driver behaviour was being observed and the observers did not know whether they were in a taxi with ABS or without. The drivers did, of course, know whether or not they were operating an ABS cab, because of their familiarity with the car they were driving."

"Subsequent analysis of the rating scales showed that drivers of cabs with ABS made sharper turns in curves, were less accurate in their lane-holding behaviour, proceeded at a shorter forward sight distance, made more poorly adjusted merging manoeuvres and created more traffic conflicts."

"The Munich taxicab experiment attracted a great deal of attention, not only in the professional circles, but also in the popular press. Newspapers carried articles about it and Bavarian Television wanted to show the viewers what had happened. As the experiment had already been completed, they decided to re-enact the experimental manipulation and the way the drivers had responded."

The article goes on to quote many other interesting personality changes which may or may not happen while behind the wheel, such as:

Managing risk:
"If a person's decision-making or vehicle-handling skills are poor, that person's level of perceived risk should be high, and if it is not, this reflects overconfidence in one's skills. The same holds for sensory abilities. To be colour-blind or hard of hearing does not imply a significant increase in accident liability, provided the driver considers these handicaps in the estimation of risk.

Poor night vision will not increase a person's accident risk unless the person is unaware of it or is willing to accept high levels of accident risk. Deficiencies in skills and sensory functioning, other things being equal, can increase a person's accident likelihood only to the extent that these deficiencies are being underestimated by the person in question, and thus lead to an inappropriately low level of perceived risk. "

and

Incentives can be effective but...:
"It should be noted, however, that the attitude-shaping effect of modest awards can only take place after the operators have changed their behaviour for some minor external inducement. So, the award should be big enough to achieve some behaviour change to begin with. In some cases, a small material reward might imply a major social reward because of its symbolic function. Safe behaviour may thus become "the right thing to do". This might help explain why a modest incentive such as free licence renewal for one year produced a major reduction in the accident rate of California drivers."

I also found the

Traffic Safety Information Page.

For my second topic, why people speed, I found an article called Street Driving and the Gas Pedal. I found this within the Traffic Safety Information Page by using their keysearch. They have a search engine for their pages.

An excerpt:
"Today's auto advertisers know that speed and power sell. And they also know that they're selling to a largely unsophisticated market in which most of the "targets" of the advertising are not particularly knowledgeable about what power and speed mean, or how to use them.

Car advertising consistently depicts speed and maneuverability as selling points, and when it comes to speed the most commonly cited statistic is acceleration from 0-60 mph (0-100 km/h). And that, according to auto technology journalist Gerry Malloy, is a particularly useless statistic to offer in relation to a car's acceleration needs for common traffic situations."

Unfortunately, it did not answer why people speed, but it did give some reasons for accidents relating to speed:

"...What is more relevant to the street driver, Malloy says, is how the engine responds to pressure on the pedal.

If the response is too slow, the driver may regard the engine as underpowered, even though it may, in fact, be more powerful than the engines of comparable cars. And if the response is too quick it may be difficult, or even impossible, to get smooth starts or smooth transitions to higher speeds. Also, the car may be difficult to control, particularly in slippery conditions, because it's all-too-easy to overdo things with the gas pedal at the wrong moment."

The article goes on to talk about how manufacturers are choosing better performance over more horsepower because of this.

My third topic, pedestrian traffic on campus, was surprisingly much easier to look for and returned more links, when I used Metacrawler. One that was interesting was from Stanford,

Portfolio-Pedestrian Safety Zone

In it, they clearly laid out where a motorcycle, motorscooter, or moped could not be on campus, not even parked. The rules and regulations also addressed skateboards, and stated that they were not allowed on campus as well. I don't know how effectively these are enforced, but a listing does help if someone is injured.

A link to the Oklahoma State University's Pedestrian Traffic Laws were less of a help, because they lumped the foot traffic and the vehicular traffic into the same code, which was very short. They did not address what vehicles could not do. As far as the code goes here, someone could drive a motoscooter into your dorm bathroom and not break any university violations.

A letter from Kansas State University clearly shows the problems when things are not enforced and not laid out.

An excerpt:
Having an open campus is a very dangerous thing. There have been 10 reported cases of pedestrian and vehicle accidents on the campus during the last two years. Compared to the University of Kansas...there is a 50-percent greater risk of getting hit on the K-State campus than on another walking campus.

...On the K-State campus, the contact is about seven cars per day.

The dangerous restrictions that are placed around campus are not monitored...The solution to this problem is to have restricted traffic on campus.

The campus should not have to be completely shut down, but the heart of campus should be freed of unneeded traffic. Emergency vehicles, handicapped services, personnel and some faculty could be allowed on campus. This could be done with a pass system...

A student's life may depend on it.

Christina Scheuerman
junior in elementary education

My fourth topic, overconfidence in driving, was more difficult to find links to. Many of the links in Metacrawler did not give me what I wanted, and often the links had changed addresses or were dead.

I ended up back at Excerpts, which gave me this article in reference:

Differences between individuals: "Even if there were such a thing as a general risk-taking trait, there is a further reason for the weakness of association between a personality trait such as this, or any other personality trait, and accidents. This is because the tendency to have accidents is not a stable human characteristic. "

Differences between situations: "It is evident that risk taking is not a personality trait that is consistent from one situation to another. Similarly, the tendency to have accidents is not consistent from one time period to another. To believe otherwise may well be an example of the "fundamental attribution error". This expression is used by social psychologists to refer to the fact that people typically attribute another person's behaviour to that person's lasting character and not often enough to that person's passing state or the prevailing environmental condition. "

From this I can only conclude that overconfidence, or overestimating one's reaction time/ability under duress, is directly related to risk-taking. It is only the driver who overestimates himself who takes the unnecessary risk.

This leads to accidents more often than the old woman who is driving too slowly or too carefully; this causes unpredictable behaviour and may cause accidents as well. I think we have much more of the former rather than the latter.

Overconfidence is something that comes when one either has too much driving experience and believes he can do anything (me for example) or has not enough driving experience and has never realized how slow reaction time in a crunch really is. Either way, it is something we always need to be aware of, and looking back at Report 2, I see how the self-awareness log really did help.

Looking up this in a search engine resulted in the finding of the same, specific article by Dr. James. Or else it gave me drivers as in "drives" for the computer. It took more searching, till I typed in car drivers, that I got hits which weren't completely related to computer hardware.

One that proved interesting was:

Traffic/Traffic Flow.

This discussed the dynamics of traffic. Why, for instance do car jams occur? And is the resulting frustration at all justified by other drivers? There are many influences, such as the number of car lanes and weather, psychological founded behaviors of other drivers. Even a single driver who does not follow the same idea of how fast or how to merge as you do (or as the rest of traffic flow at a particular time does) can cause a traffic jam which will affect more people than you will be able to see, stuck as you are in the middle of the freeway. We are not able to calculate all the factors in an unforseen traffic event, and so why should we experience frustration, pointed at the driver in front of us?

But this too, is in the private world of the driver, because it occurs in the privacy of the driver's car...and this allows us the freedom to curse and curse and curse. For all the person next to us knows, we're singing along with the radio. Just remember to bob your head every now and then.

E-mail for Jason Nakasato

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