Policymakers, pundits, and others concerned with the tragic problem of North Carolina car accidents are desperate for solutions. We all want to decrease the number of people killed and injured on North Carolina roads. We want to make vehicles safer. We want to engineer roads that will be easier to use, and we want to make driving conditions more “humanistic” – to borrow philosophy from Tom Vanderbilt (author of the opus Traffic).

So, in many senses, we are all on the same team.

Where legislators, pundits, analysts, and others in the North Carolina car accident community disagree is on the tactical/strategic level.

We all have pet theories about what causes car accidents and what you can do to prevent them or at least make them less lethal. Some popular theories address driver distraction: you can be lethally distracted by literally dozens of things, from pure fatigue to the radio to drugs or alcohol. The list goes on. Other theories focus on road design. Still other theories discuss car safety engineering. And yet others ruminate over how engineers can adapt safety mechanisms to coordinate with the “caveman-like” brains of the typical North Carolina drivers. (This is not an insult – we evolved in Paleolithic times to deal with Paleolithic conditions – chasing woolly mammoth and the like, not driving 200 miles per hour in a Ferrari.)

It’s crucial that we, as a community, parse out these various theories, compare them, discuss which strategies work and which don’t, assess them using the best science available, educate the public, and constantly refine and think about various accident prevention paradigms.

Having said all that, we must be mindful of our human tendency to create “just so stories” to support our philosophies about car accident prevention.

Once you become set on a certain way of thinking about car accident prevention, you will tend to see all the data and evidence in terms of that paradigm. If you think distracted driving is the main problem, for instance, you will suddenly be focused on all the science that supports the distracted driving paradigm, and you will ignore work produced by people who favor other hypotheses that focus on road design or on treating other drivers humanely.

In a subsequent post we will probe how to get beyond this “just so story” problem and make real progress toward solving the pernicious problem of auto accidents and injuries and deaths on our state’s roads.

On a more pragmatic and actionable note, if someone you care about has been hurt in a crash, it’s in your interest to connect with the North Carolina car accident law firm to discuss your needs and possible recourse.

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Tom Vanderbilt’s blog

just so stories

This post closes our four-part series on how a “caveman driving” approach to road safety might substantially reduce or even eliminate many dangerous, typical North Carolina car accidents.

In our previous post, we explained:

• Why road safety engineers face a fundamental constraint – that is, we use caveman brains to navigate super highways, and that’s a problem;
• How engineers might be able to use this construct to think differently (and better) about safety and policy;
• Heuristics (rules of thumb) for moving policy in a “caveman driver” direction.
In this last part, we are going to get super practical and discuss possible ways that you, personally, can reduce your risk of North Carolina car accidents by honing your personal caveman driving skills.

One caveman driving-inspired approach is to improve your reaction time. Human beings are adaptable, if nothing else, and the more we adapt our habits, reactions, and thought processes to relevant situations, the better/safer/healthier our lives can be. In other words, we can train ourselves to be better drivers, but it’s going to take some effort. And to that end, here are some suggestions:

• Take drivers’ education refresher courses once every few years (instead of minimum requirements) so that you can really drill into your brain “best practices” for driving.
• Pay attention to when you do and do not drive well. Especially if you drive long distances (e.g. if you are an interstate trucker), keep a log of how you felt at different times along your journey. Obviously, wait until you stop to write this stuff down! Review this driving journal and make notes of your habits, so you can see when you are most alert and active and when your skills behind the wheels start to flag.
• Improve your diet, health, and sleep patterns so that you can have more energy and alertness in all activities – including driving.
• Pay attention to other limitations that you face as a caveman trapped in a super highway world. Since the many millennia since we stopped living as hunter-gatherers, human beings have adopted some strange behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes that fundamentally depart from the “caveman ideal.” Some theorists believe that the more we come in line with this caveman/Paleolithic ideal, the healthier, the safer, happier and better we will be.

On a more specific and practical note, if you or a loved one is facing a crisis caused by motor vehicle accident (e.g. a serious injury, chronic whiplash injury, property damage, etc.), a North Carolina car accident law firm can help you. A qualified attorney will help you figure out what you need to do to resolve the situation and get fair compensation.

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Human reaction time

Improve reaction times

Unless you lived your whole life under a rock, you no doubt are familiar with that vivid image of Fred Flintstone peddling his stone-aged car with his feet in the opening credits of the old school Flintstones cartoon. What can Fred’s approach to “driving” teach us about how to tackle the problem of North Carolina car accidents?

Here are three crucial lessons.

1. Slow is the new fast.

In a recent post on North Carolina car accidents and caveman driving, we touched on the idea that human beings did not evolve to travel at speeds that even the average Peugeot can travel – much less at the top speeds of sports cars like Porsches, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis. On a fundamental level, we need to slow down the driving experience. Does this necessarily mean we need to reduce our velocities on the road? Not necessarily. Which brings us to the second point…

2. “Slowing down” has more to do with our perceptions of road events than the actual events themselves.

This is a tricky point to grasp. The absolute speed a vehicle goes is probably less relevant than the perceived speed of the vehicle, the perceived acceleration, the perceived torque, etc. We already drive cars, planes, boats, and other vehicles, far in excess of speeds that we “evolved” to “handle.” And our safety record is actually pretty amazing, given how unnatural it is to use these modes of transportation. So we’ve already created a kind of virtual slowing down of systems that allow us to slow down our perceptions of movement. We build our roads wide; we maintain large “space pockets” between vehicles, and we engineer sensitive equipment to help us compensate for our unnatural speed, acceleration, torque, etc.

3. The process of getting close to a Flintstone-like driving ideal must be continually refined.

Vigilance is key. We must pay attention to problems that drivers have, punish bad driving, hold wrongdoers accountable (a North Carolina car accident law firm can help), and refresh, refine, and renew our policies, engineering approaches, and even attitudes toward driving if we hope to make serious progress and make “driving” as safe as it used to be in Fred’s golden age.

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Fred Flintstone driving

Flintstone credits

In a recent post on the relevance of evolution to theory about North Carolina car accidents (what can and cannot be done to solve our country and state’s motor vehicle accident problem), we touched on the idea that the root cause of vehicle crashes may be completely insoluble.

Basically, our brains evolved in Paleolithic times to deal with Paleolithic conditions. One might speculate about how our Paleolithic ancestors lived. But chances are they did not spend a significant percentage of their day riding across concrete landscapes at speeds approaching and exceeding 70 miles per hour. Even the occasional Grok who managed to hitch a ride on the back of a cheetah probably did not last long enough to take such a joyride more than once or twice.

So we face a dilemma, as people who want to end the problem of North Carolina car accidents. How can we engineer cars, roads, driver behavior, etc., to minimize risks, given that we have this fundamental constraint?

Obviously, this blog cannot hope to solve the problem in one fell swoop. But if you need help with a specific car accident question (for instance, if a drunk and driver hit you, or if a truck drove you off the road into a ditch and now you are injured and sick), a North Carolina car accident law firm can help you to deal with your specific legal, logistical, and other concerns.

Beyond that, maybe we can start a dialogue about more constructive ways to think about road safety. Because once we accept this fundamental “caveman constraint” on road safety engineering, we can contextualize engineering features that have already worked or might work. For instance, let’s think about reaction time. Paleolithic people in no way and shape or form had to confront super-fast decision making – like swerving at the last minute to avoid a truck travelling 80 miles per hour.

But we did evolve sensitive mechanisms to help us during normal flight and fight responses. For instance, when our Grok ancestors engaged in battle with saber-toothed tigers, they needed to respond rapidly to stressful conditions during the hunt, so we have evolved sensitive mechanisms that can help us react at the last second. The question is: How do we tap into those natural, spring-like mechanisms to react to a predator and apply them to engineer safer cars, better roads, smarter drivers, better signage, etc.?

We’ll leave the specifics to engineers. But just thinking in terms of this paradigm – the caveman driver paradigm – should allow us some new and cool insights that could lead to better engineering solutions.

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Who is Grok?

What Did Grok Eat?

The perennial quest to nibble away at the rates of North Carolina car accidents obsesses bloggers, pundits, and policymakers in equal measure. Theories abound about how to improve the situation. Some policymakers suggest doing things like lowering the speed limit. Others argue that we need better safety features. Still others argue that we need more to move to an electric car system, or even to more fanciful solutions like setting up a magnetic road system that strips drivers from their autonomy (and capacity to make mistakes) and automates all of our driving through a massive, hyperintelligent computer grid. All very interesting. All plausible, even if those solutions might take 100 or 1,000 years to implement.

But, in the midst of all this exciting planning and speculation, we tend to think more in terms of how North Carolina car accidents (and crashes across the nation) can be contained instead of what’s causing these accidents.

The Sticky Evolution Problem

Human beings for 99.9% of their evolutionary history lived as hunter-gatherers. We lack the ability to travel more than around 20 miles per hour, so we did not evolve the cognitive apparati to manage the risks of going over 20 miles per hour. So when you put these caveman-type people into vehicles capable of traveling 120 miles per hour or greater, you fry their circuits. And this is, ultimately, what the problem is about. As Tom Vanderbilt astutely pointed out in his landmark opus, Traffic, part of the main root cause of traffic accidents is the fact that drivers fail to see other drivers as humans. In other words, something about driving at fast speeds strips us of our ability to see one another as human beings and that may be at the heart of many of our problems. And if Vanderbilt’s thesis is correct, the problem ultimately is an evolutionary problem.

So it’s really an evolutionary question. It’s a prickly one because we can’t completely rewire the human brain just for the purposes of improving road safety. That obviously makes no sense. But if this conundrum is going to persist, no matter how many safety features we add to the cars, there might never be a full solution – 100 years, 1,000 years, 10,000 years in the future. It may not matter how many fancy, speculative engineering fixes we develop and deploy.

And this is something we’ll have to get used to. This doesn’t mean that we can’t improve safety. It doesn’t mean that we can’t significantly reduce injuries and accidents, improve the quality and comfort of rides, reduce stress on environment, and so forth. But it does mean that we are going to run into this fundamental limit because of the capacity of our brains.

On a less speculative note, and a more pragmatic one, if you or someone you care about has been recently involved in a motor vehicle collision, a North Carolina car accident law firm can help.

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Roads guided by magnets?