driving in la la land

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/traffic

I've always concluded that people in SUVs and trucks drive like assholes because they feel the large size of their vehicle makes them impervious to a general accident.
But the generally unregarded fatalism that the only thing that really matters to predicting traffic accidents is the number of cars on a road is wise beyond any measure. Paradoxically it is the sheer volume of cars that demands our attentions and makes us individually drive more 'safely' that contributes to the amount of accidents.

My own personal driving habits may be regarded as reckless or eccentric, but I've generally ignored or bypassed traffic signals and signs, instead relying on more of an instinctive reaction to traffic conditions to tell me how fast to drive or when to come to a complete stop at an intersection. Obviously I still feel compelled to stop at red lights, but I often find ways to bypass them..especially when I'm not carrying passengers. Stop signs in most residential neighbourhoods seem completely arbitrary and often pointless. Because there's so rarely the traffic in place to justify it in hours other than rush hour commutes, why should we then have to stop when there is no one there? It wastes time and fuel. So I don't.

Of the more obvious complaints of drivers are the preponderance of speed limits and (as the article shows) the arbitrary changes we make to them. Speed limits as I understand them used to be determined by estimating the average speed at which a driver would use on a given road. People naturally drive slower in residential areas with houses and driveways right on the road because there are other variables besides cars (children, pets, and the elderly) to consider. By contrast a highway or large-wide thoroughfare has a few controlled entrances and exits and allows for more controlled and maintained speed over long distances.. speed which most people take advantage of (excepting fuel considerations). But these are the roads which arbitrarily change speeds so frequently as to make it impossible to determine at times what is the appropriate speed legally speaking as opposed to the actual flow of traffic speed as determined by the comfort and adaptation of the driver to actual traffic and road conditions. Granting driving really doesn't take that much attention, the average person is not as attentive as they believe themselves to be (perhaps including myself from time to time). They're constantly missing turns or exits, forgetting to signal, stopping or braking abruptly when following other cars, and so on. Taking further attention away from such fragile consciousness is virtually guaranteed to cause mayhem and disorder on the freeway.

More amusing still is this point: "traffic signs in the U.K. are often on the road itself, where the driver should be looking." Rarely are stop signs still indicated in the manner of a stop bar painted on the road itself because people are trained to look for the sign. The move toward putting information on HUDs in luxury vehicles (eventually the rest) makes it possible to feed drivers useful information on which to make driving decisions...but why are the roads themselves not used in the same manner? Why must we look off to the side to decide how to drive?

One element the article does not expound on is that Americans drive a LOT more than other countries. And in general traffic congestion is more uniformly bad (while it is more dense and confused in say Europe, it's busy virtually everywhere there's a road in America). I'm not sure that either of these two factors are necessarily contributing to the relative safety as much as our obsession with legal disclaimers on how to drive in general rather than merely making presumptions about how to do so ourselves based on the objective conditions we're presented with at the time, but they do need to be accounted for before anything would change.