Distracted driving

It's a hot topic. It was described in shocking detail in Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic.



And, I mean, it has its own dot gov site.



A dot gov website featuring, naturally, the most celebrated and multi-modal friendly Secretary of Transportation of all time, Ray LaHood.



And this year, congress declared April National Distracted Driving Awareness Month after passing a resolution introduced by Colorado's own Betsy Markey.

Most discussion of distracted driving concerns drivers of automobiles. Which is fair to a degree because the most gross examples of it are kind of unique to automobiles. Meaning, you can't fiddle with the stereo while shaving on a bicycle.

But that doesn't mean even a little bit that distracted driving is limited to drivers of automobiles. I've seen bikers doing it, and it seems I'm noticing it more and more. Others are noticing it too; several states with laws regulating cell phone use in cars are considering extending those restrictions to cyclists.

Which makes sense. It would be consistent with the expectation that the rules of the road apply to cyclists and motorists in equal measures. I don't see any downside to saying you can't text while biking. It's a little invasive, but so are seat belt laws.

And it would prevent the scene I saw yesterday.



That's a photo I took with my one-of-a-kind handlebar-mounted MS PAINT GOOGLE MAPS camera. It's a photo of a dude on a bike flying down the new bike lane on MLK Blvd. He exhibits perfect posture. And he has both eyes and both hands on his cell phone.

Clearly this is distracted driving. And it's happening on one of the busier streets you're likely to come across in this area.

And it's happening because of the false sense of security of the bike lane.

A couple months ago, there were no bike lanes on MLK, and you rarely saw a cyclist there because of the thick, fast traffic. Now there are bike lanes and the shift from scary to bike-friendly was almost instantaneous. You see a ton of cyclists on it. They obviously now feel safe on this road.

It takes a certain amount of hubris and a certain feeling of invulnerability in order to engage in distracted driving, because it is a willful choice to fish your phone out of your pocket or to start putting on your makeup. Bike lanes, similar to being nestled deep within three tons of steel, can provide such a false feeling of security that you see things like the above gentleman, oblivious to his surroundings and flying down one of Denver's busiest streets.

Vehicular cyclists, who take the lane and otherwise share the road with motorists, must be actively engaged with their surroundings in order to survive their rides. It's unlikely for them to engage in distracted driving.

So if you want to reduce distracted driving among cyclists, and assuming a primary function of bike lanes are to make novice cyclists feel more comfortable on the road, take the funds set aside for installing new bike lanes and divert them to classes aimed at making the novice cyclist feel more comfortable on the road.

Can pretty people literally stop traffic?

Found a research paper, Designing Roads that Guide Drivers to Choose Safer Speeds (pdf), that's interesting to skim over. The authors are able quantify how much things like sidewalks/curbs, on-street parking, and building setback affect how fast drivers choose to drive.

For example, given two streets with speed limits of 35 mph, drivers on the one with a sidewalk average 34.7 mph. Drivers on the road without the sidewalk averages 42 mph.

One of the most interesting parts of this report is the effect of beauty on the speed of traffic. A line pulled from the report and highlighted on the Tom Vanderbilt Traffic blog—

The aesthetics or “beauty” of a road environment has also been investigated in relation to traffic safety. Drottenborg (1999) studied the impact of speed on streets that appear as “beautiful” due to the blossoming of cherry trees along the streets in Lund during springtime, and similar streets that lack such beautification. She found that the free-flow mean speed decreased by about 5 percent and the number of vehicles traveling at high speeds between 50-60 km/h decreased by about 12 percent during the cherry blossom period.

That's pretty awesome.

And I know it to be true. I definitely slow to an amble down streets like Montview when the leaves are starting to change.

Of course, there is an associated increase in the appreciation of your surroundings as you slow down. It allows you to stop and smell the proverbial roses. Or coffee. Or bacon. Or whatever it is you like to smell.

And I have to be careful not so succumb to modal bias here. You can see and appreciate more on a bicycle than you can zooming along in your car. But I've definitely seen and noticed things while strolling on foot that I missed while zooming along on my bike.

Pedicab vs. Taxicab

Video streaming from a NYC Fox News site, and found on LJ Bikepirates.



Which one of these seems like a disproportionate response to you? Throwing a cup of coffee at somebody's car? Or hitting somebody with your car?

The biggest danger of engaging a motorist is that—

1. motorists have precious few avenues of communication, and
2. a motorist's car is such an extension of his body that it may feel like hitting you with the car is not that different from hitting you with his fist.

In Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic, he says that there are several thing about driving itself that predisposes drivers to frustration and anger, the biggest of them being that it severely limits our abilities to communicate.

Humans are incredibly communicative creatures who rely heavily on nonverbal signals like facial expressions, body posturing, tone of voice and volume of voice. In a car, you are deprived of all of that. Instead, you are expected to use a car horn (often used too frequently) and a turn signal (often not used enough) to express yourself and convey depth and meaning.

Which is ridiculous when you think about it.

So this taxi driver obviously felt he could not adequately express his anger through any combination of sounding car horn and blinking turn signal. It's the torture of an artist, really. Having so much to share and not being able to articulate it satisfactorily.

But when an artist dramatically hurls a canvas painting across a room in frustration, people don't die like they do when a car hurls into people.

I myself had a "failure to communicate" moment the other day during my commute home.

A pickup truck and I were approaching a four-way stop from opposite directions. The truck didn't have its blinkers on, it was in the middle of the traffic lane, and its front tires were pointing straight ahead. So I logically assumed it was going straight.

Right up until it executed a right-hand turn directly across my path.

The truck had plenty of time to complete its turn. This wasn't any kind of a near miss, but I became frustrated at the lack of communication.

I raised my right hand in the air and starting doing that thing you do when you want to tell people to turn their lights on. Repeatedly closing my fist and then spreading my fingers wide. You know, that thing.

The truck then—in a surprise move—quickly pulled over to the side of the intersecting street and the driver hollered out his window, "What?"

Surprised to suddenly find myself in a conversation, I quickly blurted, "TURN SIGNAL!"

In answer to which he called back out, "Okay! Blobby flarggin blip bloop dada!"

Or something like that. I could only make out the "Okay!" before I was too far away to make out what he was saying.

He probably said something like, "Okay! And how about next you don't run the stop sign!"

Cause I did. I idahoed it.

Two sides to every story, right?

Like in the video above.

The pedicab driver ultimately chose to engage the taxicab by throwing his cup of coffee. And then he chose later to throw a friggin trash can at the driver.

I, on the other hand, did not pause or stop to throw anything at this pick-em-up truck. Because I knew I was a little bit wrong in this encounter, and that I would soundly lose an actual confrontation.

I, instead, was pedaling quickly away and discovering my "Donotgetintoafightwithatruck" mantra.

Point is folks, ultimately, go ahead and think twice before engaging the deaf, dumb, blind, raging bull-moose cars you share the road with everyday.