Something about driving always inspires me to conduct informal experiments. The boredom, the lack of mental stimulation and the intolerable waiting for the sea of cars in front of me to move motivates me to look elsewhere to mitigate my unpleasant circumstances.
In that vein, I decided to conduct an experiment to see how much pedestrians and cyclists would trust me when interacting with me as a driver. It must be kept in mind that I had no intention of frightening anyone or of putting them at risk. I was merely interested in their own perceptions of how I was going to behave in various scenarios.
As I headed out from a parking lot driveway into late rush hour traffic, I decided to test the reactions of pedestrians crossing the road where I was driving. A little background on this road: it is a four-lane road which rarely has any police patrols due to territorial issues. In other words, it is a Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation road, which means that it is the responsibility of the Massachusetts State Police.
Since it is not in a high accident area, as some of their other roads are, they believe it is not necessary to patrol the road. The local police don’t bother either since it is not within their jurisdiction, even though it is within their town.
Most locals know that the road is police-free so they drive 20 miles per hour over the speed limit and don’t stop for pedestrians on the two crosswalks near the residential portion of this road. My experiment included the crosswalk closest to the condominium developments along the road.
I have walked along this road myself, and I have tried to cross the road at this crosswalk. Even when the walk signal is lit, the cars don’t stop. They think the red light doesn’t apply to them, which is what cyclists are always accused of.
Like most pedestrians in that area, I stare down the lead driver to make sure that he or she will stop before I step into the road. Usually, this works, but not always. Once I stepped in front of a car that was slowing down at the red light only to have the car steer around me and continue through the red light.
As luck would have it, I was the first car in line when the light turned red. To the disgust of the car behind me, I put my foot on the brake at the first sign of the yellow light.
Two pedestrians were standing on the side of the road waiting to cross. When the Walk signal lit up, neither one stepped off of the curb, despite the obvious slowing of my car.
They both scrutinized me as if they could tell by my looks how I would act. I don’t look particularly menacing. Nor do I drive like a maniac, so I thought that they would trust me.
Wrong.
Neither one was willing to risk walking in front of my car. One pedestrian, a tall woman wearing a fashionable coat, stared at me as if I were a serial killer. The piercing, mistrustful look in her eyes was a sad sign indeed.
Only once my car was completely still, with no sign of movement on my part did the pedestrians begin to cross. The only problem with their life preserving strategy was that the Don’t Walk light had already illuminated before they reached the halfway mark. This caused the cars in the opposing lanes to have to wait for them after the light had turned green.
Much horn blowing ensued as the drivers on the other side of the road were inconvenienced for thirty seconds while waiting for the pedestrians to make it across. I concluded that these pedestrians had been conditioned not to trust drivers on this road, so no matter how the first driver behaved they were going to assume the worst and stay put on the sidewalk. The term I devised for this phenomenon was “learned pedestrian helplessness.”
Granted, it’s not very original, but this is what it reminded me of. The pedestrians had lost their ability to make judgments in specific situations and just defaulted to a mistrustful state, even if it was unrealistic.
Having concluded this part of my experiment, I continued on my journey. I had to stop at a a supermarket to pick up something to eat for dinner. As I often do when I’m running late, I stopped at the Trader Joe’s in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Regardless of how one feels about Trader Joe’s — apparently, one either loves it or hates it — its difficult to deny the ease with which a hurried person can find an edible microwave ready meal there. I don’t know what I would have done if the microwave hadn’t been invented. It, and Trader Joe’s, keeps me from starving to death.
But, back to the experiment. After an eternity of fighting traffic through a stop and go hell I finally turned into the street behind Trader Joe’s. Despite the hour, well into the evening, a queue had formed to enter the parking lot.
I opted to turn into the bank’s parking lot to avoid the chaos in the official Trader Joe’s parking lot. Cars, pedestrians and cyclists always cross between these two adjacent lots.
Just as I was entering the lot, I saw two cyclists heading for the posts which separated the two lots. The first cyclist was a young woman on a broken down bike. Although she could have been anyone, given the location and the number of college students who live there, I thought of her as a student.
If I hadn’t been a cyclist, I might not have realized that she was going to ride between the posts and cut through the bank’s parking lot. She would have been better off exiting to the street from the Trader Joe’s lot, as most drivers would not expect to encounter her at this location.
Fortunately, I was prepared. I slowed down to see where she was headed. As she passed between two posts, barely three feet in front of my car, she suddenly realized that she was about to ride in front of a car.
She panicked. I saw her put one foot down onto the ground to supplement the poor braking power of her decrepit bike. The fear on her face made me pity her. I could see that she believed she was going to get hit by a car and she was afraid of getting hurt.
By the time she stopped in front of my bumper, I was already stopping and did not hit her. She stopped and stared at me in a daze. It was almost as if she couldn’t believe that I had stopped and she was safe.
A moment or two passed before she composed herself and started to ride off with her companion following behind. Even though she had made a mistake in how she rode her bike, it was clear that she had learned to mistrust cars. She had been conditioned to assume the worst.
This was another case of car-induced fear. After finishing my shopping, I got back into my car to contemplate the results of my experiment.
It dawned on me that as ingrained as cars are in our culture, many people have come to fear them. Or, maybe it’s that they fear the people behind the wheel. Or maybe it has become impossible to distinguish between the two, driver and car.
They have become a unit in the minds of pedestrians and cyclists and no matter how you look at it, the combination can cause great harm. It’s healthy to fear that which can harm you. But, it’s not healthy to idolize that which you know is harmful, the way our culture idolizes cars.
With this strange dilemma in mind, I drove home vowing to think more about this experiment on another day.
