Toban Black

(Photo by Andy_K)

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John Bennett (in this blog post) -
“How can simply placing our hands on the steering wheel impair our judgement, turn us against our fellow citizens and cause us to engage in risky behavior that we know will yield only small, fleeting rewards (if any).”

I’m going to start to explore those issues here –
without focusing so much on car equipment (such as steering wheels).

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Matt Richtel on the New York Times Gadgetwise blog -
“Driving While Texting Remains Popular — and Dangerous” (May 20th)

Brad Aaron on the New York Streetsblog -
“Ad Nauseam: Antisocial Thuggery From Pioneer”

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Tom Vanderbilt (in this blog post) -

“It’s almost as if there’s something about being inside a vehicle of any kind, removed from the normal pace and experience of walking — the only thing we were actually born to do, after all — that evokes its own special behaviors, its own convulsive social physics, and problems — traffic fatalities, it should be noted, were ranked as the leading cause of fatalities in London in the early 18th century.”

“There’s all sorts of other things underlying bad road behavior. Anonymity is a huge issue — I compare traffic to being online. You can act nastily, veiled behind a pseudonym, then leave in a hurry, with no consequences.” “All kinds of psychological studies have shown how one’s chances of gaining cooperation increase when we can make eye contact.” “Speed is linked as well to anonymity, nowhere more so in a car; the faster you go, the more divorced you become, in a sensorial and practical way, from the environment around you. It doesn’t help that we tend to engineer our roads to seem as if they were designed for nothing more than the fast movement of vehicles.”

“Then there’s the issue of driver’s actual grasp of the traffic law. Police in Chicago recently posed as pedestrians to nab drivers acting badly in intersections. In many cases drivers, and sometimes pedestrians, seemed clueless as to the actual right of way laws. Studies by David Ragland and Meghan Mitman at UC-Berkeley have confirmed this, and the implications of their studies were that pedestrians, in many cases, were better off in unmarked than marked crosswalks because there was less certainty over who had right of way, and thus more caution.

That’s sort of the unfortunate aspect of clinging to traffic laws as a way to try assure good behavior — we’re not even sure who’s aware of the laws, perhaps not a surprise given how complex the traffic environment can be. We need, in the end, to rely more on just basic precepts of polite behavior and social cooperation — there’s so many things that can’t be readily enforced, so many roads where police can’t be present.”

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( “Do your makeup safely while driving” )

That image is a “Windows Live Today” screenshot from the 30th of June. (I cropped out the rest of what was on my screen.)

That “do your makeup safely while driving” box linked to about a “Makeup Tentacle” device — which apparently allows drivers to do their make-up while also concentration on the road. (Yeah, right!)

The thing is, this Tentacle device wasn’t mentioned or shown in the Windows Live box (as you can see in my screenshot). Instead, Microsoft implied that it generally is OK when women apply make-up while they’re driving.
(I doubt that most of the people who saw the message about make-up ’safety’ actually followed the link to read about the Tentacle.)

In any case, that message from Microsoft encouraged drivers to take road safety less seriously.

A lot of people saw this message about driving and make-up –
given how that Windows Live box is integrated into MSN messenger.

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Shawn Micallef on car drivers in recent history -
“[they] are always battling each other for space and there is not, and never will be, enough roads in most urban centres to declare a truce in that war. I drove for nearly a decade in Windsor [in Ontario] and I’ve driven enough here in Toronto to know the war is ongoing. Whether I’m driving on College Street downtown, rolling on big fat Jarvis Street (with that middle lane intact), out in Kingston-Galloway along Councillor Ainslie’s six-lane-wide arterials or speeding along the incredible 16 lanes of the 401 near the airport, a drive in the city a constant battle with other cars for space. Civility breaks down in seconds, people hustle for position, they swear the most vile swears at each (I do it too — it just comes out), and it’s Hobbsian and brutish because there is just not enough room. There hasn’t been room for decades — the term ‘gridlock’ is thirty years old.”

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A couple of related posts on this blog -
- “Full Throttle”
- “Mass isolation“