Planners & engineers are hypnotists
The status quo designs neighborhoods that trick you into being negligent.
Human Factors and Driver Psychology
More than 100 Americans died in traffic crashes yesterday. Another 100+ today. Another 100+ will die tomorrow.
We tend to think of driving as an easy mechanical task of pushing pedals and turning a steering wheel. But operating a motor vehicle on public streets is a complex interplay of human psychology and environmental cues. Our brains often process the road without conscious awareness.
Neurological mechanisms explain why when we’re behind the wheel, we respond to cues like pedestrians or signs without recalling them later. It’s similar to a computer’s RAM—high-speed, short-term memory that makes the machine function faster.
Dr. Patricia Tice publishes
. She talks about driving as a hypnotic state, powered by phenomenological consciousness, dopamine responses to human faces, and mirror neurons. She also, thankfully, talks about this stuff in very straightforward terms that anyone can understand. I highly recommend following her work. Here’s a sample of what I’ve learned from her.Hypnosis
Driving often feels automatic, but it’s not mindless. People operate with a background awareness that processes cues without thinking about thinking. In this state, drivers respond to environmental signals, like swerving to avoid a sign or slowing for a pedestrian. We act without deep analysis.
Have you ever been driving back home and suddenly realize you can’t remember the last 15 minutes? Some researchers claim that in familiar environments we process cues in 35–45 seconds but forget decisions that we made after 90 seconds. The fact that we respond to road features without conscious reflection is why it’s so important for the built environment to intuitively cue safe behavior. We silly humans rely on subconscious processing.
Dopamine
Human faces are powerful attention-grabbers. Seeing another person’s face triggers a dopamine hit faster than conscious thought. This reflex draws drivers’ focus, increasing situational awareness. That’s part of why driving through a commercial corridor in a beach town is so much different in the summer when it’s packed than in the winter when it’s empty.
In a downtown with regular pedestrian activity, drivers are conditioned to expect people, which makes them more aware of their surroundings. You’re on alert for pedestrians even before you see them. Even design elements outside the curbs like high doorways-per-100-feet signal human activity. Buildings and the space between them can be as important to traffic calming as street design.
Empathy
Have you ever watched someone bang their funny bone and cringe even though you aren’t the one in pain? When someone smiles at you, do you feel your face want to smile? Mirror neurons are the type of brain cell that makes that happen. That type of walking-in-someone-else’s-shoes urge
A 2021 study in Accident Analysis & Prevention found that drivers in pedestrian-heavy areas show 20% higher yielding rates due to empathetic responses triggered by mirror neurons. Frequent interruptions like short blocks and driveways break people out of their hypnotic driving state. Land use planners and civil engineers can basically function as therapists by planning and designing streets with visible human activity. Maybe this is the antidote to Car Brain that we’ve been searching for.
Dreamwork
Despite the evidence, challenges persist. Status quo planners favor car-oriented land use regulations and development patterns that lead to driver hypnosis. Status quo engineers favor car-oriented street designs that lead to driver hypnosis.
But there are a growing number of industry misfits who are pushing on planners and engineers to align buildings, public spaces, and infrastructure with our brains’ natural responses. We don’t have to be medical experts to leverage subconscious processing, dopamine responses, and empathetic reactions to significantly reduce crash rates and fatalities. We can build cities and suburbs where safety is intuitive, where empathy is triggered by design, and where our brains are supported—not subverted—by modern infrastructure. We can handle elements of street design as behavioral guidance, not just geometry.
I’m hopeful for the future because even the old fuddy-duddy design manuals used by the status quo allow for designing places that reflect the way people think, feel, and respond. Local land use regulations like parking mandates and single-use zoning are being overturned. Laws that prohibit building neighborhoods at a human scale are being challenged and overthrown, and it’s glorious to behold. Things can get better in the end.
Slip lanes at intersections, where the curved slip lane cuts a pedestrian crossing, seem designed for maximizing vehicular speed rather than pedestrian safety. When walking the dog, I watch the behavior of drivers in my neighborhood's major arterial road intersection. The popular way of approaching the slip lane (and its associated pedestrian crossing) is for drivers to proceed at a high rate of speed, seemingly in order to facilitate merging left after the turn, and then focus their attention on looking backwards at the cars on ghe cross street.
As the drivers go through the pedestrian crosswalk, instead of being concerned with pedestrians and cyclists who might enter the crosswalk, the drivers are looking backwards. The goal: merging with cross street traffic, ideally without slowing down. A few weeks ago, as a driver did this maneuver, two 12-year-old boys were waiting at the crosswalk. Even with the boys a few feet away (and having right of way to walk into the pedestrian crosswalk), the driver followed this "drive fast, look backwards for cars, merge" approach.
The driver had to stop due to oncoming cars, so the boys started to cross, but the now-stopped driver's attention stayed firmly on the oncoming cars on the cross street. When the road was clear of cars, he accelerated forward, with nary a glance around him at the now-walking boys.
TL:DR -- slip lanes are a menace to pedestrians
The urbanist belief that eliminating parking minimums is always good is actually a class issue as well as a safety and economic issue and it is complicated. What I have seen happen in Seattle over the last 10 years is that more and more buildings are built without any parking or with very little parking —yet virtually everyone in the buildings have cars and they park on the streets. Our many older neighborhoods were not built with wide streets. When they are packed on both sides with cars, they become effectively one-way streets that are extremely dangerous. Again, and again a driver ends up in a face off with an oncoming car. One or the other car then has to back up into a sometimes very busy street. There is also the risk of road rage incidents and simply hitting other cars while trying to get through these narrow corridors.
In the neighborhood, commercial districts, this residential parking of cars due to lack of parking garages takes away the parking for businesses, and one by one they have gone under. Instead, Amazon rules, DoorDash and delivery rules and small businesses are crushed.
I have yet to see rent do anything but go up even though of course the claim is that not having parking makes apartments and homes less expensive. I have been trying to get city or state legislatures to require open books on exactly where that no parking provided discount is indicated in lower rent with no luck.
Working class and lower income people often have multiple jobs starting very early and ending very late. I have been that person. I spent daily at least three hours on the bus or walking up to 5 miles in a given day to get to my jobs. When I got a car, my income and my options were exponentially larger. Studies on the increased job opportunities for people with cars have backed my experience up.
When we take away protected parking, we take away protections for those who need to use their car to get to work. Seattle is a high car theft city, and when a low income person loses the only car they have it is an enormous financial blow. I just don’t buy the movement to lift parking minimums as a benefit to society. Here and there it may be appropriate but overall what I see in Seattle is a net negative.