Read Online Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt - Free Book Online

suggests, because they were operating with a stereotypical idea of women cyclists as less predictable or competent?
    Interestingly, the possible gender bias, however misguided, echoes the intersection study mentioned earlier, in which drivers were more likely to yield the right-of-way if a female driver was approaching. Drivers, whether aware of it or not, seem to rely on stereotypes (a version of Walker’s “mental models”). Indeed, stereotypes seem to flourish in traffic. One reason, most simply, is that we have little actual information about people in traffic, as with the “Bumper of My S.U.V.” dilemma. The second reason is that we rely on stereotypes as “mental shortcuts” to help us make sense of complex environments in which there is little time to develop subtle evaluations. This is not necessarily bad: A driver who sees a small child standing on the roadside may make a stereotypical judgment that “children have no impulse control” and assume that the child may dash out. The driver slows.
    It does not take a great leap to imagine, however, the problems of seeing something that does not conform to our expectations. Consider the results of one well-known psychological study. People were read a word describing a personal attribute that confirmed, countered, or avoided gender stereotypes. They were then given a name and asked to judge whether it was male or female. People responded more quickly when the stereotypical attribute matched the name than when it did not; so people were faster to the trigger when it was “strong John” and “gentle Jane” than when it was “strong Jane” and “gentle John.” Only when subjects were actively asked to try to counter the stereotype and had a sufficiently low “cognitive constraint” (i.e., enough time) were they able to overcome these automatic responses.
    Similarly, the drivers passing Walker on his bicycle seemed to be making automatic judgments. But did the stereotype of the helmet-wearing Walker as a competent, predictable cyclist help or hurt in the end? After all, motorists drove more closely to him. Would he have been better off wearing a wig, a Darth Vader mask, or anything else that sent a different “traffic signal” to the driver? The answer is unclear, but Walker came away from the experiment with a positive feeling about what looking human can mean in traffic. “You can stick a helmet on and it will lead to measurable changes in behavior. It shows that as a driver approaches a given cyclist, they can make an individual judgment on that person’s perceived needs. They are judging each person as individuals. They’re not just invoking some default behavior for passing cyclists. That’s
got
to be encouraging.”
    Our traffic lives are ruled by anonymity, but this doesn’t mean we give up trying to infer things about the people we encounter, or acting on those things in ways we may not even register.
Waiting in Line, Waiting in Traffic:
Why the Other Lane Always Moves Faster
    When people are waiting, they are bad judges of time, and every half minute seems like five.
    —Jane Austen,
Mansfield Park

    When was the last time you were angry at something that seemed out of your control? There is a very good possibility it was in one of three situations: being stuck in a traffic jam; waiting in line at a bank, an airport, a post office, or some such place; or being placed on hold for a “customer service representative.”
    In all three cases, you were in a queue. Of course, you were probably
more
angry in the first and third cases, because you were most likely in the privacy of your car or home. But there is ample opportunity for you to get angry in a public queue, which is why corporations have spent a lot of money, and thought long and hard, not only about how to reduce queues but how to make them feel shorter.
    In traffic, we wait in several kinds of queues. Traffic lights cause the most traditional kind. The traffic light takes the place of