Traffic (40 page)

As societies, we have gradually accepted faster and faster speeds as a necessary part of a life of increasing distances, what Adams calls “hypermobility.” Higher speeds enable life to be lived at a scale in which time is more important than distance. Ask someone what their commute is, and they will inevitably give an answer in minutes, as if they were driving across a clock face. Our cars have been engineered to bring a certain level of safety to these speeds, but even this is rather arbitrary, for what is safe about an activity that kills tens of thousands of people a year and seriously injures many more than that? We drive with a certain air of invincibility, even though air bags and seat belts will not save us in roughly half the crashes we might get into, and despite the fact that, as Australian crash researcher Michael Paine has pointed out, half of all traffic fatalities to seat-belt-wearing drivers in frontal collisions happen at impact speeds at or below the seemingly slow level of 35 miles per hour.

We have deemed the rewards of mobility worth the risk. The fact that we’re at the wheel skews our view. Not only do we think we’re better than the average driver—that “optimistic bias” again—but studies show that we think we’re less likely than the average driver to be involved in a crash. The feeling of control lowers our sense of risk. What’s beyond our control comes to seem riskier, even though it is “human factors,” not malfunctioning vehicles, faulty roads, or the weather, that are responsible for an estimated 90 percent of crashes.

On the road, we make our judgments about what’s risky and what’s safe using our own imperfect human calculus. We think large trucks are dangerous, but then we drive unsafely around them. We think roundabouts are more dangerous than intersections, although they’re more safe. We think the sidewalk is a safer place to ride a bike, even though it’s not. We worry about getting into a crash on “dangerous” holiday weekends but stop worrying during the week. We do not let children walk to school even though driving in a car presents a greater hazard. We use hands-free cell phones to avoid risky dialing and then spend more time on risky calls (among other things). We carefully stop at red lights when there are no other cars, but exceed the speed limit during the rest of the trip. We buy SUVs because we think they’re safer and then drive them in more dangerous ways. We drive at a minuscule following distance to the car ahead, exceeding our ability to avoid a crash, with a blind faith that the driver ahead will never have a reason to suddenly stop. We have gotten to the point where cars are safer than ever, yet traffic fatalities cling to stubbornly high levels. We know all this, and act as if we don’t.

Driving Lessons

Before embarking on this book, I hadn’t thought much about driving since first learning to do it and acquiring my license on the, ahem, second try. Since then, I’ve logged a few hundred thousand miles or so, had several minor crashes (“accidents” if you must, though both were easily my fault, because of careless behavior whose specifics shall be withheld), and dropped by to the Department of Motor Vehicles every decade or so to glance at an eye chart and get renewed by a grumpy clerk. I mostly just got behind the wheel, fussed over the radio, and hit the road with a mixture of anxiety and wonder: anxiety over the danger of it all, the crumpled cars on the roadside, the shockingly poor behavior, the nervous way people say, “Drive safely” as you leave them; and a simultaneous sense of wonder that we’re all able to move about at high speeds, in such great numbers, with such fluidity.

After spending a long time sifting through the theories and science of traffic, I wondered if there was not still more to be learned about driving a car. I thought, Why not go to those people who, for sport and for a living, drive cars at the absolute limits, in conditions that make even the most frantic traffic seem sedentary? What could race-car drivers have to teach civilians about driving? And so one morning I found myself hunched into one of those small chairs with an attached desk, part of a group including gum-chewing teens and graying sixtysomethings, in a brightly lit classroom at the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving, just south of Phoenix. At the front of the class stood Les Betchner, jauntily tanned and with spiky blond hair, a sometime stock-car racer who exuded the easy patter and ridiculously innate competence that just seems the birthright of people like airline pilots and sports instructors.

Drivers, as you well know by now, tend to self-enhance. We are thin-skinned about our sense of driving competence. One is loath to admit, at age forty, that there are new things to be learned. And yet this is just what was happening. “A steering wheel doesn’t do much,” Betchner was saying. “You steer with the pedals.”
What?
I snapped to attention. Steer with the pedals? He was PowerPointing his way through the problems of skidding around corners. Racers loathe skidding, not because it means they are out of control but because they are, as they say, “scrubbing speed.” “We never want to slide,” Betchner said. “That’s the slow way around the track.”

As you may recall from your driving lessons, there are two kinds of corner skids, an “understeer skid” and an “oversteer skid.” On the race track they say an understeer skid means it’s your front end that’s smacking the guardrail, while in an oversteer skid your rear end hits first. Despite the word
steer,
steering is only part of knowing how to react to and correct for under- or oversteer situations. It can often hurt more than help. “Add a bunch of steering, you go right off the road,” Betchner said. “Physics is now part of your life.”

The real key to skid control, he explained, is “weight transfer.” In an understeer skid, the car’s front wheels have lost traction. Attempting to steer will only make matters worse. Braking shifts weight to the front and adds grip. In an oversteer skid, meanwhile, the rear of the car has lost traction and wants to pass the front. The slip angle, or the difference between the direction the tires are pointed and the direction they are actually moving, is greater in the rear tires than the front. The first step in taming the rear wheels is, essentially, taking the turn more widely. So instead of moving the steering wheel in the direction of the turn, increasing the slip angle, you must “steer into the skid”—move the steering wheel in the direction the rear of the car is moving. Many of us know what “steer into the skid” means without really knowing what it means. The larger problem, Betchner pointed out, is that no one is ever taught what to do next. He queried the room. There were some half-mumbled answers. No two seemed to be the same. “Pray?” someone joked.

The answer is the opposite of what you might expect: Hit the gas. “When in doubt, flat out,” instructed Betchner. (Actually, he added, you want to add just a touch of throttle input.) The natural instinct, of course, is to hit the brakes. The problem is that this shifts weight to the front end of the car—exactly where you don’t want it to be. As your car dips toward the front end, you’re helping your rear wheels lose their already tenuous grip on the road. They need every ounce of pressure they can get. Then there is the final problem. You can’t just keep steering into a skid. “That’s where we find ourselves getting into trouble,” said Mike McGovern, another longtime Bondurant instructor. “We do that first part well, but when the car hooks up and comes back to straight, we hold the steering. We don’t unwind it. We’re telling the car to turn again, and that’s when you get into a secondary skid.” This is another somewhat counterintuitive lesson: To fully reassert control, you need to relinquish the steering, letting the pull of the realigned tires do the work as the steering wheel spins through your hands.

Another lesson that seemed rather obvious—but proved curiously powerful once tried out on the test track—was the Bondurant mantra “Look where you want to go.” This recalls the “moth effect” phenomenon and brings up a chicken-and-egg sort of problem that vision researchers still debate: Do we automatically travel in the direction we are looking, or do we first search for a target destination and then keep looking in that direction to maintain our course? Do we drive where we look or look where we drive? The former, arguably: As one study found, “there is a systematic and reliable tendency for [drivers] to follow their direction of gaze with their direction of travel, in many cases without the conscious awareness of doing so at all.”

This might seem rather academic and of little concern to you, but consider what happens when a car suddenly pulls out in front of you as you’re speeding down a rural road. If you “target fixate,” as the Bondurant instructors call it—that is, look at the car that pulled out instead of where you need to be to evade the crash—do you have less chance of avoiding the accident? Does your “gaze eccentricity,” as vision people call it, negatively affect your ability to steer away from the obstacle?

The science is still inconclusive, but on the Bondurant “skid pad” the effectiveness of the racer’s maxim “Look where you want to go” was made strikingly clear. I was driving a Pontiac Grand Prix equipped with outrigger wheels attached to the back end. At the flick of a switch, the instructor could raise the car to simulate a skid at much faster speeds. As I repeatedly drove in loops and practiced getting out of oversteer skids, I found I corrected more easily by concentrating not on the giant barrier of rubber tires I was sliding toward (admittedly not an easy thing to ignore) but on that place around the corner where I wanted to be.

It would be easy to dismiss the school, with its fleets of Corvettes, its acrid tang of burned rubber and exhaust, its looping Grand Prix–style track, as a playground for the unhinged libidinal fantasies of people normally shackled by the world of everyday driving. Indeed, there was a heavy midlife-crisis vibe about the place. And yet there were myriad moments where I thought to myself, Why didn’t I know this before?

“Driver’s ed taught you how to get a license,” Bob Bondurant told me in his office, his ever-present dog Rusty, a Queensland heeler, panting nearby. “It didn’t teach you skid control or evasive emergency maneuvers.” In 1967, Bondurant’s promising racing career was cut short when the steering arm on his McLaren Mk II broke at 150 miles per hour, propelling him into an embankment that sent his car “as high as a telephone pole.” Since then, he has been teaching people like Clint Eastwood and James Garner how to handle a car. This is not how most of us learn, of course. “The driver-ed guy might be your English teacher,” Bondurant said. He or she knows as much about driving, he implied, as the average person. And mostly, this is
fine.
Despite the prediction from Karl Benz, the founder of the Mercedes-Benz company, that the global car market would be limited because only a relative few would possess the skills needed to drive, most of us, as Bondurant said, “just plunk our butt down in the seat and drive down the road.”

Indeed, there is a strong argument against the idea that we should emulate the actions of people like race-car drivers in everyday life. In a well-known (but not since repeated) study conducted in the 1970s, researchers from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety looked into the off-course driving records of a pool of stock-car drivers. These drivers were no doubt capable of handling themselves around tight turns, no doubt superior at anticipating their moves ahead of time, no doubt possessed faster reaction times than ordinary people. How had they actually performed on the road, off the track? They’d not only gotten more traffic tickets (which we would expect given their penchant for risk) but they’d also had more crashes than the average driver. Racers possess superior control of a car, to be sure, but control alone does not win races. They also need that ineffable something within that tells them to push just slightly beyond their limits, and the limits of every other driver, to win. As Mario Andretti put it, “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.” They had, one might argue, put themselves into positions in which their skills were not always enough to keep them out of trouble.

In everyday traffic, “good driving” has little to do with cornering ability or navigating between tight packs of high-speed vehicles. It’s more a matter of just following the rules, staying awake, and not hitting anyone. This is not to say that racing cannot teach us things about everyday driving. Racers, Betchner said, sit erect and close, alert for feedback signals that can be felt in the pedals and steering wheel. The typical driver’s posture, however, is terrible. “Most of us sit back, the ‘Detroit lean,’” he said. “The car communication is horrible.” Some drivers, he lamented, sit so far back they cannot reliably depress the brake pedal far enough to activate the antilock system. Or consider vision, the sense that is supposed to account for 90 percent of our driving activity. The racer’s dictum that you should always be looking ahead to where you want to go next, which helps them speed through turns, is just as apt for something as prosaic as navigating an intersection. One reason for the high numbers of pedestrians struck in the crosswalk by vehicles turning is that drivers are simply not looking in the right place; they may be concentrating on making the corner itself as they turn (particularly if they are on a cell phone or otherwise distracted), rather than on what the result of their turn will be. In racing, this slows you down. In real life, it means you might hit someone.

Everyday driving also presents those moments for which nothing in our previous experience can have adequately prepared us: the oncoming car crossing the line, the sudden obstacle in the headlights. At Bondurant, I went through repeated drills—for instance, driving a car as fast as I could toward a set of cones, hitting the brakes hard enough to activate the antilock system (something that actually took me several tries), and then steering off into a small lane marked by different cones. I was struck by just how much control of the vehicle I had under full braking. The ABS did not help me stop any more quickly; indeed, another exercise, one that involved steering into one of three lanes at the last moment at the command of a signal, drummed home the idea that certain crashes, inevitable if I had braked, could be rather easily avoided by simply steering. It did, however, open my eyes to the ability one has, with ABS, to stop
and
steer at the same time.

That may seem, like the other lessons at Bondurant, rather common knowledge, but the wealth of evidence derived from studies of what drivers actually do in the critical moments of emergency situations suggests otherwise. First, drivers are actually quite reluctant to steer when an obstacle suddenly looms in front of them. The majority of drivers brake first and steer last, if at all, even in tests where steering is physically the only way to avoid a crash. This may be because steering might seem to put the driver in an even more precarious position, or it may be because the driver is unaware of the way the car is capable of handling, or it may simply be a form of “operant conditioning”—pressing our brakes, like staying in our lane, has so often been the right thing to do in everyday driving, it begins to seem the only thing to do. But research has also shown that drivers rarely activate the brakes to their full power. Other studies have demonstrated that when steering is attempted, the maneuver tends to be in the same direction the obstacle is moving, which hints that drivers are not “looking where they want to go” (and moving in that direction) but are focused instead on the obstacle to be avoided.

Whether or not the “muscle memory” of my evasive actions on the test course can be sustained over years of uneventful driving is an open question. The major problem is that so many things can go wrong in traffic that it would be impossible to teach, much less remember, appropriate responses for each scenario. Add to this the problem that because these events are unexpected, our reaction times are slowed; the emotional duress of a potential crash might even further slow our reactions—sometimes, studies have shown, to the point where we do nothing.