By MARKUS MANNHEIM
Not long after Henry Ford drove the car into mainstream American life, a new area of psychology began to flourish. Its aim, in layman’s terms, was to understand why apparently normal people become complete arseholes behind a steering wheel. Leon Brody’s 1955 book, The psychology of problem drivers, concluded that ”problem drivers are problem people; or rather, people with problems, including problems of which they often are not aware”. Until then, researchers had believed most crashes were caused by physical shortcomings such as slow reflexes, poor eyesight and glare-recovery time. But, as Herbert Stack wrote in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine in 1956, ”[In] all of our studies, these characteristics have been found to have little significance. The real causes of accidents are far more deep-seated. They have to do with our attitudes, our emotions, and our judgments.”
We don’t need to read this in journals; it’s evident to any observant driver, even on Canberra’s comparatively calm roads. Once inside a car, a harsh self-interest replaces many civilians’ usual willingness to co-operate. Driving becomes less a means of travelling efficiently than a competition to get ahead of nearby ”rivals”. We throw caution out the window in favour of cutting our journeys by seconds. Drivers who are mild mannered in all other aspects of life become enraged by the perceived slights of other motorists (and especially cyclists). And almost no one respects basic road rules such as speed limits and the requirement to indicate; somehow, when we’re in a car, these laws become optional.
Why the transformation? Tom Vanderbilt, the author of the best seller Traffic, suggests many reasons. But among the most important is that we often drive alone, and we opt to cut out external reminders (such as sounds) of the people around us. ”[We] think of traffic as an abstraction, a grouping of things rather than a collection of individuals. We talk about ‘beating the traffic’ or ‘getting stuck in traffic’, but we never talk in polite company, at least about ‘beating people’ or ‘getting stuck in people’.” For some people, driving is as surreal as a video game.
This week, talkback radio was alive with indignation as Canberrans discussed the prospect of paying a toll on the Majura Parkway. It became apparent that drivers’ lack of reason extends well beyond the confines of their cars to any road-related discussion. Caller after caller pleaded emotionally that they had already paid for the roads they use through registration fees and fuel excises. It’s a fallacy often repeated and just as often debunked. Still, let’s try again.
In 2006-07, the Federal Government collected about $14billion in fuel excises, but returned about $4billion in tax credits. Also that year, the states and territories garnered $6billion in rego fees, car stamp duties, insurance levies, parking charges and so on. So, all up, motorists directly forked out $16billion in 2006-07. In the same year, governments spent about $12billion building roads and bridges.
So drivers do pay their way? Not quite, because roads and cars create vast economic externalities; costs that the taxpayer usually wears because no one else will. The Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics estimates the social costs of road crashes alone in 2006 was about $18billion; expenses such as health care and rehabilitation, damaged infrastructure, legal bills and emergency services. The bureau also estimates that congestion cost about $10billion in 2006, mostly as a result of lost productivity. And then there’s the lost value of the public land on which roads are built: vast stretches of tarmac put to relatively unproductive use, criss-crossing Australia’s prime real estate.
In other words, driving is a highly-subsidised privilege; not a right that we have purchased. It’s worth remembering next time we feel a whine, or a rage, coming on.
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https://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/opinion/editorial/general/drivers-smash-the-illusion-that-were-a-rational-society/2221294.aspx?storypage=2oldId.20110914132222852
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