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

ProFound Insights

. 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.