The NY Times recently wrote about a crash test demonstrating that if you crash a small car into a medium-sized car, occupants of the medium-sized car fare better. Duh. The article also uncritically quotes the president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety with the conclusion that “downsizing and down-weighting [cars to save fuel] is also associated with an increase in deaths on the highway.”
This conclusion is so dumb I barely know where to start, but here are just a few points:
If no-one drove small cars, the benefits shown in this test for occupants of bigger cars would go away (since there would no longer be smaller cars for them to crash into).
With the above point in mind, many people end up in an arms-race mindset, continually upsizing so their car is bigger than everyone else’s. Just look at people choosing S.U.V.s (a.k.a. “chelsea tractors”) for safety reasons. While socially detrimental, this mindset is individually rational, cf. tragedy of the commons.
Such an arms-race mindset is detrimental because, as everyone inside cars upsizes, they do not gain any net benefit, but everyone outside of cars (pedestrians, cyclists) loses, and so does the environment.
Additionally, based on this crash test we cannot even conclude that drivers in bigger cars are safer in the current environment, because it relies on the assumption that drivers of big and small cars are just as likely to get into a crash in the first place. There are at least two reasons why this assumption is probably wrong: risk compensation and physical constraints. Risk compensation implies that since the driver of the bigger car feels safer, he or she will drive ever-so-subtly less carefully, and hence get into more crashes. Physical limitations imply that the bigger car is harder to manoeuvre, and has a longer stopping distance, and will get into more crashes than the lighter, nimbler car. If you want to know more about this, I cannot recommend highly enough Malcolm Gladwell’s (now of “Blink” fame) 2004 New Yorker article “Big and Bad - How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety”
As a decision-making psychologist, it also galls me that the article presumes that people are motivated exclusively by narrow self-interest (”save fuel” vs. “increase own safety”). Hint: people do care about others, and some people consciously refuse to engage in an arms race of ever-upsizing cars precisely because they predict its futility and socially detrimental effect. (I’m not at all saying people are selfless altruists without limits. For example, nobody wants to be the only one in a tiny car surrounded by S.U.V.s. That is why some people support political legislation to punish or even prohibit driving S.U.V.s, or why they make an effort to ostracize S.U.V. drivers by condemnig or ridiculing their choice of vehicle).
For further reading, I really recommend John Adam’s Risk and Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic.
Posted on 27 April, 2009, 14:24 by
Marianne
Categories: Cars, Risk 1 Comment »
This one shows areas where going by bike beats public transport if you need to get to the DfT office (note that all the areas that are not in grey are the ones where the bicycle is faster):
This is not surprising and matches my experience. It is still impressive, especially to see how far the area extends. I’d add two caveats, though.
Don’t misread the map as presumably saying that all the trips within the shown area are faster by bike. Remember that we are talking about trips to the DfT office, shown in the centre. Additionally, even if you take other trips in central London of about the same distance, if your trip just happens to conveniently start and end at a directly connected tube station, the tube would win hands down.
I’d also like to know the cyclist’s speed that was the basis for the calculation. I’m able to go pretty fast (as far as traffic allows it), but I’ve found the times given by the DfT’s own Journey Planner when selecting the “cycle only” option to be wildly optimistic.
Still, I can confirm that from Hackney (where I live) to basically any location in central London I’m on average faster by bike. I’ve actually done quite a few involuntary experiments when I was with someone who didn’t have a bike and we needed to do the same trip. In the best case, when the bikeless person got lucky and caught all buses without a wait, we arrived at about the same time. In most cases, I was between ten and twenty minutes faster. In one case, I was an hour ahead (I don’t remember exactly what that was — some extreme situation like a bus line not running at all, I guess. In all fairness, the equivalent scenario for this would be having a puncture on a bike. I often don’t carry a repair kit.)
The Economist of 6th December, 2007 (full story, requires login) writes about U.S. subsidies for ethanol:
In other words, the demands of America’s ethanol programme alone account for over half the world’s unmet need for cereals. Without that programme, food prices would not be rising anything like as quickly as they have been. According to the World Bank, the grain needed to fill up an SUV would feed a person for a year.
Yet another example how the state panders to people who choose to drive motorized vehicles by paying for the damage they cause (in this case, paying farmers cash to get drivers to switch away from petrol). Why not tack on an extra tax on petrol if the state now believes its use to have more negative consequences than previously known? Car drivers will say, “but I don’t choose to drive, I have to – I live in the middle of nowhere and have to work in the city.” They forget that they choose to live in the middle of nowhere, to have a big house and be surrounded by pretty countryside. They reap the benefit, they should pay for the cost.
I choose to live in a city (London) where I can reach everything by bike. No-one subsidizes my rent payments.
How’s this for an innovative, low-cost DIY traffic calming measure? A stretch of rope laid across the street:
Our Man in Tirana posted this in July and noted that cars “almost always slow to a crawl when approaching” it.
There’s a whole collection of community initiatives to take traffic calming into their own hands at the International Home of Roadwitching, most notably the works of the Beech Croft Residents’ Association in cooperation with Sustrans. Here are a few I found particularly interesting:
Cars parked diagonally so they “stare” down cars entering the street, additionally creating an irregular zigzag contour (while in reality leaving a wide enough strip of the carriageway open for cars to pass):
Paintwork that extends across the whole street and both pavements to blur the distinction between pavement and carriageway:
Onstreet cycle parking:
The latter is great because it could also solve a common problem in London: There are often not enough Sheffield stands to lock your bike up, but putting them in on the pavement would make the already narrow pavement untolerably crowded for pedestrians (especially wheelchair users, people with baby buggies etc). I think it would be more than justified to sacrifice a minimal amount of car parking space: I bet you could easily fit Sheffield stands for at least six bicycles in the parking space of just one car.
Notably, all these DIY traffic calming measures work by introducing unexpected elements into an environment that has become so predictable for drivers that they perceive no danger and hence drive too fast. The unexpected elements create uncertainty and ambiguity, and the hope is that this increases drivers’ perception of danger, which in turn will make them take action to reduce that danger, namely by driving more slowly. As such, this concept has much in common with the Shared space/ Naked Streetsconcept that is currently gaining popularity across Europe and thankfully slowly taking over from the mentality of the 60’s trough 80’s that relied on segregation, such as pedestrian barriers.
However, I’d be very interested how long-lasting the effect is. Do the cars in Tirana still slow down to a crawl months after the rope has been laid across the street (assuming it’s still there)? How long until drivers get used to, and immune to, a row of cars “staring them down” when they enter the Beech Croft steet?
Maybe then the residents will have to resort to more drastic measures, such as this guy:
