Motorway driving and speed trance

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32775, 27 November 1971, Page 13

Motorway driving and speed trance

(By

SIMON MARSH)

If someone covered the speedometer of your car with his hands and said: “Calculate how fast you are travelling and reduce it by 25 m.p.h.,” how near could you get to the correct speed ?

If you got to within 15 m.p.h., you’d be doing pretty well. For, according to the results of hundreds of simulated tests, the average motorist is an appalling judge of speed at the best of times.

When he gets on a motorway or a fast unobstructed dual-carriageway a new and sinister influence takes over which makes him even more deadly behind the wheel. Scientists have labelled it “speed trance.” What it does is to impair and sometimes destroy, our judgment of speed. Speed trance takes its most perilous form when we leave a fast open road and turn on to a slower junction-road.

Faulty judgments Every year hundreds of drivers plough , through, roundabouts, jump traffic : lights and misjudge comers simply because they think they are travelling slower than they actually are. Now, researchers in both Europe and America, well aware that over 50 per cent of serious road accidents are caused by faulty judgment of speed, are trying new ways of breaking speed trance before it does any damage. At Britain’s Road Research Laboratory, scientists are pioneering a system which involves painting geometric patterns on the road up to a quarter of a mile from a junction or roundabout. Called “perceptual lines,” they are claimed to break the grip of the speed trance by making drivers think they are travelling faster than they really are. Up to that point, the fast road has lulled them into thinking they are travelling slower than they really are. Simulated tests Certainly without any kind of visual aid on the road, drivers can make speed calculations which are up to 30 per cent wrong. This has been shown during tests involving a car control panel wired to a film projector. Film of a motorway unrolling in front of the windscreen can be slowed

down or speeded up by the car’s accelerator.

In this way, volunteers can be told to reduce their simulated speed and prepare to branch off into a junction. Without a speedometer to guide them they invariably “drive” into the junction at speeds faster than the safe limit.

Speed trance, according to Dr Robert Yoss, a nerve specialist at America’s Mayo Clinic, is a form of hypnosis brought about by. the highspeed world of motorway driving. And the effects can linger for quite a long time.

High-speed hypnosis For instance, surveys have shown that drivers pulling up at motorway service stations for petrol and oil often complain about “slow service” when in fact the service is faster than average. On a number of occasions, managers have asked motorists to estimate the time taken to attend to the car. In every case the estimate was well above the actual time.

Research by Britain’s Medical Research Council Applied Psychology Unit has shown that during motorway driving, the brain becomes accustomed to taking in information from “cats’ eyes” and other road signals, at a certain rate.

When we come off the ‘motorway this high-speed reaction takes some time to slow down.

An unawareness of danger is another symptom? of speed trance, international road safey experts were told when they met in Rome recently. No skid marks This is symbolised by a particular type of car accident where in spite of good visibility and conditions, the driver crashes his car into the back of another vehicle moving in the same direction at a slower speed.

. Generally the police find no skid marks. The driver doesn’t appear to have made any'effort to save himself. If he had ducked into the passenger seat beside him he might have been less hurt. But usually the only defensive effort he makes is to snatch his left hand from the wheel and shield his face. Experts now believe that the modem motorway, combined with the modem car, provides the perfect conditions for speed trance. The road curves slowly

back and forth before your eyes. The hills seem unreal as the modern car engine sweeps you up them without effort. Concentration bogy Power steering and automatic transmission make driving comfortable and relaxed. The time goes by easily and smoothly. Such a trance is not sleep —it involves almost total concentration. Consequently, according to one theory, anything which interferes with this concentration will lesson the hypnotic effect.

One method is to allow advertising hoardings on main highways, though not all experts think this is the answer.

Britain’s experts think the "perceptual lines” could offer at least a partial solution. Certainly, when 12 volunteers tried out the experimental system, their estimation of speed improved enormously. Now it is hoped that the “pretty patterns”—making the roads gay with yellow paint—will be tried out at some 6f the country's worst accident spots. According to a leading psychologist. Professor John Cohen, who has made a special study of our relationship with speed, we will never stop man travelling fast.

But what we can do, with the aid of a few .yellow lines, is to make him fully aware of how fast he is travelling.

Jet lullaby

Pregnant women should live near an airport if they want their babies to sleep soundly. This remarkable conclusion, arrived at by two Japanese scientists, was described in a 8.8. C. programme.

They concentrated their research in Itami City, near Osaka Airport, to find out how the thousands of babies bom there reacted to aircraft noise. It was discovered that mothers who had spent their entire pregnancy in the city usually gave birth to children who slept undisturbed when jets passed overhead. But for mothers who had moved there just before the birth their infants woke up and cried much more often.