Changing lanes
Nick, Peter and Fraser discuss whether lane changing gets you anywhere.
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by TellMeStudios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing the efficacy of changing lanes when driving. So I sense there are some powerful emotions behind this as a choice for today's podcast. Nick, I believe the impetus for this was your recent holiday to France,
Speaker B:so can you set the context for us, paint us a picture? Yeah well we had to drive from all the way back from the south of France up back to our house in London and so there was quite a lot of motorway driving and I am a terrible driver. I've got no situational awareness at all but motorway driving is one of the easier tasks. You know I can more or less go into mental cruise control, you keep going at the same speed, I'll get there eventually, that's fine for me. I'm very motivated to reduce stress while driving. Driving around town during rush hour is horrible but motorway driving is okay. But what spoils it are these lane changes. Now why people can't just pick a lane, pick a speed and stay at that speed is beyond me. It drives me mad. You know you're going along perfectly well and then someone cuts in in front of you and now you've got to leave a bit of extra room so you have to sort of slow down again and then you know and then you get to someone who's going at 45 miles an hour and you then have to sort of overtake so you can stick to your speed. It's just I find it incredibly stressful and the great thing is that the empirical data are on my side. So there seem to be lots of people who believe that they can shave you know loads of time off their journey by weaving in and out of lanes and you know there were a couple of moments where we were in traffic jams you know we were stuck in there were two lanes traffic jam and of course one lane's moving a little bit faster than the other and I got very territorial about my lane. I felt like you know people who were leaving my lane were quitters and just you know deserve to be shunned. And then the people who were joining, the johnny-come-latelys who were perfectly happy in the other lane when that was moving more quickly you know jumping into my lane and slowing it down. Basically you know so I had a look and I you know tried to find out if there was any theory here about whether being a rampant lane changer actually does get you there quicker. And it doesn't right? Not really no. I mean when people have tried to do studies where they've had one person drive at the same speed and another person sorry driving one lane and another person drive through by weaving in and out to always get into the lane that seems to be moving the fastest. It's a matter of perhaps two or three minutes an hour you save which as far as I'm concerned is not worth the stress.
Speaker A:Well there are certain moments as well when you're driving where any kind of gains you've been trying to make through changing lanes and so on. There are certain crucial moments like let's say there are traffic lights or roundabout where it's such a disruptive moment in that journey is that it flattens out all this changing lanes and so on. But actually I know this is not what we want to talk about today but I am going to talk about it and you came close to talking about it there. One of the things you were saying is when cars move steadily well the opposite of that and which you've described changing lanes as part of that and quite aggressive driving and and people using their lights too much or rather their brakes too much is what causes traffic jams right? And that's what I find really annoying because you get this sort of cascade of someone sort of pulls in into a lane and someone slams on their brakes and that sets off chain reaction but also people shouldn't be it's because they're driving too close to each other. Anyway I'm going nowhere with this other than sounding like we're on an episode of Room 101 or Grumpy Old Men. So Peter you strike me as a lane changer. Actually no I mean when I was
Speaker C:first you know young man 17 I probably was a bit of an aggressive driver but when I actually conducted my own experiments in this and when I started regularly commuting by car would take it would time how long it would take. I did this over a course for about six months or so every day at times how long the journey took and would vary my driving style as a random to see how if had any effect and yeah I found I found a couple of percent over a half an hour journey so a couple of minutes tops difference between driving you know borderline dangerous to extremely conservative. So that totally stands up to rigorous rigorous experimentation but also myth busters are on
Speaker B: dabout in the UK was built in: Speaker C:It's just not worth it. Maybe we should dive a bit into sort of why. Well exactly and this is
Speaker A:why I want to come on so it's all established this makes us all very grumpy because we are wise rational people okay and so let's talk about so why I mean I think we know the answer so why people why do people do this and I guess you know what can we do about it to stop people doing it is that do we want to provide a solution here I don't know but let's first talk about well why
Speaker C:do people do this. So I dug up a couple of interesting studies that were looking at the psychological effects in driving and lane changing and one positive hypothesis that sounded quite appealing that your perception of progress and speed is dependent on a number of factors and it's also not very accurate most of the time so it depends on whether or not you're moving at that given instance so if you're not moving you're stood still in traffic you feel like you're generally not making much progress. Well to be fair that would be true. But on average across the entire journey you know you were there in that moment so you're focused on that moment so your perception of your overall progress over time is poor and so you've got less of a strategic view much more tactical view and also as you're when you're if you're moving or there's objects moving around you you're more sensitive to objects moving around you if you're if you're moving slower than you are to slower objects if you're moving faster so it looks like more people are making more progress than you are if you're
Speaker B:oh i see what you mean apparently we only spend six percent of our time looking in the rear view mirror so so you know we we don't notice the cars were passing yes i think purely mathematically you will be you will spend more time being passed than you will passing people more time even if the same number of cars pass you because because you'll be going slower when they're passing you so the amount of time it takes for people to pass you is actually longer so for even for a journey where you end up going at the same speed as the other lane that you'll spend more time being passed by vehicles in the other lane yeah so what so what this sort of amount
Speaker C:although also there are micro effects where actually if you're in a lane you it's harder to see the progress of cars in front of you because there's a car in front of you whereas you can probably see further into other lanes so you can see movement in those lanes and they look more potentially more appealing but the so all this amounts to is that a lane change for some people provides a sort of placebo effect of getting to where you want to be you have an objective you want to get to your destination and so performing a lane change gives you some measure gives you a perception of control it gives you some agency gives you some agency which makes you feel better
Speaker B:and we haven't even touched on the issue of social justice which is that people feel that it's unfair if other people are getting ahead and it which is apparently why a lot of um you know why the fashion is is now to have one single line instead of lots of different lines for cashiers because it reduces people's perception of unfairness people are much more likely to feel like they're doing badly we're loss averse we don't we don't you know we'd rather um you know we'd rather not let other people beat us than we would to get somewhere quicker ourselves you know yeah but
Speaker A:what's good about those cues is you're right they may or may not be fairer i don't know but it's something you just it reduces the need for you to worry about whether it's fair or not and that's what i like about it yeah it's something it's one less thing i need to get sort of angry
Speaker B:about that's what i like yeah i mean you comfort yourself that when these when these people are all sort of busting a gut trying to cut in front of you they're not actually gaining anything
Speaker A:yeah well you know i have a fantasy which is i'd like to be i've got many fantasies but i've got a fantasy that i would like to be a plainclothes i'd love to be a plainclothes policeman um or or rather you know one of those unmarked cars because the amount of times that i'm on the north circular and just some idiot in a in a bmw is driving you know absolutely crazily and i'm just sitting there you know in a in a full of impotence and rage and um and just it would just be so good just to give it a bit of blue and just like pull them off i do have one
Speaker B:story of instant karma this is completely unrelated but it does involve a plainclothes policeman which was i was going to work one morning and i was about to have my cigarette on the walk to to work and um a guy came up uh and just said give me a cigarette now he didn't say please right if you had done i'd have happily given him a cigarette but he just asked for a cigarette and i said no and he then knocked it out of my mouth the one that was about to light and immediately a policeman appeared and said uh he was a plainclothes guy took out his license got this guy against the wall and and gave him a good telling off it's fantastic if only we just had those people on call
Speaker A:immediate justice yeah i think the moral is don't smoke okay because that right that's that's what
Speaker B:i really that's what you're trying to tell us um hold on don't smoke other people's cigarettes
Speaker A:okay so but also in this on this question of agency as well because i know that if on a given journey that i might do that journey many many times if i've got a choice of two roads and i know that one is um going to be full of traffic but it's a shorter route um but there's a longer one um where there'll be free of traffic i know and i suspect it's the case with most people that i want to go down the the longer route that's going to take me around the houses but i'll actually feel that i'm getting somewhere but i do know that i'm going to either journey is going to take an hour so i'd rather it's just it's just boring sitting in traffic that's what i mean that's what i find anyway that aside um what i want to i want to take this in the direction of so we've talked about the problems and why it's happened and this perception well i'm interested in the future um and i i'm interested and i guess i'm looking at you peter is technology how are there any developments at the moment taking place in technology that sort of uh that are looking at
Speaker C:this and looking to solve this yeah so i think that a solution is on on the horizon and i think as driverless cars automated automated vehicles become prevalent then this problem will almost go away apart from those instances where uh people want to drive want to drive i want to be in control um because if you have a network if you have a a transport system which is entirely automated um and it's networked so um the individual agents within that system can can communicate um then your your need for this placebo lane changing agency thing goes away because you're no longer the human is no longer involved in driving in in the progress toward the destination but also your your system becomes generally more efficient because all the cars are communicating with each other uh cars are aware of a hazard way before it happens because they're being alerted by cars ahead so the whole system can move quicker and i suspect um you you'll be able to conduct lots of empirical experimentation to work out what are the optimum algorithms are for lane changing to maintain the right flow um but it but but initially um it would make sense to have all cars just pick a lane and cruise at a given speed um at a set distance between each other
Speaker A:um okay that will make sense um and so it's just a question of technology getting it getting to a point where that stuff works right um but it's definitely it's definitely uh seems feasible from from where we are and you know the fact that we use things like ways are you familiar with ways yeah and so um i think fraser you may have mentioned it on a previous podcast i think you are by the way yeah i've got shares um but um yeah okay so i mean all that looks feasible i think the only thing that the downside for me apart from that apart from i'm sure there and i know there have been teething problems where poor people get killed and stuff like that and i can imagine you know accidents in the future happening but i'm sure it'd be far less so if we put that aside for the moment i think the thing that worries me is just it just sounds so boring and well being able to watch a film or read a book yeah because i can watch and that's much more exciting than driving i just well is it like hair raising moment when you have to slam on the
Speaker B:brakes and and you know i just i mean i think in future we're going to look back to to when humans drove and we'll think how the hell did they do that how did humans ever do this task which is
Speaker C:demonstrably impossible for a human to do in the same way that we look back at sort of 18th century astronomy and wonder you know all these banks and banks of people calculating huge log tables for for not for for shipping and for navigation so you think well that was obviously incredibly tedious albeit specialized hard task how did people cope with that yeah that was that was
Speaker B:sort of a normal thing to do but also so the having autonomous vehicles will will eliminate the need for jeremy clarkson and i don't know if that's worth thinking about as an advantage but
Speaker A:well it's funny you should say that because one of the other chaps who does that uh show who are the two other guys there's the short guy and james may and that hamster guy yeah so i think it's james may i'm talking about so he's a very much a supporter of of um of uh electric electric cars okay uh which surprises a lot of people he said no and the reason i i'm in support of it because it's clearly beneficial for for environmental reasons but it and it doesn't worry me about you know that you know if i'm a real petrol head uh because because because what it means is that becomes a more specialist thing and it just becomes a pure fun thing so you can quite imagine that you know in the not too distant future when we're all sort of not driving our driver driverless cars a great fun afternoon is going down the racetrack and sort of bombing around there and um racing
Speaker C:vintage polos and other um everyday cars yeah and i guess you know in the same way that recorded
Speaker B:music hasn't has turned live music into something which i think people it's less of a necessity and more of a luxury um and hand woven things you know are now something that people value simply
Speaker A:for the fact that it's done by a human so let's wrap it up uh any final thoughts anything anything
Speaker C:pithy to round this off with well i like i like the idea of uh top gear being rebranded to top algorithm so you it's about it's like well which which uh which custom algorithm did you use to patch your lane changing um module in your in your test instead of like these testosterone fueled
Speaker B:guys it'll just be a bunch of nerds in front of you in front of a computer yeah okay i think i
Speaker A:just my concern with this is it just brought to my imagination the thought of nick i actually feel really so bad for nick's uh wife and family um on a what a 10 hour 12 hour journey back from the south of france to the uk i can just imagine him all the way just moaning and complaining about these you know these these lane changes and and and just going on about that i'm sure that's exactly what happens so if nothing else the the the the the the the advantage the great thing of this advanced technology is that it will save the pain for families yeah having to put up with people like nick is that a fair summation yeah definitely up for that great there we go okay well um nick peter thank you very much as always you've been listening to the cognitive engineering podcast um thanks for listening and until next time thanks bye
