>(This is a question of policy rather than politics, which I usually
>shy away from, but thought experiments have their uses.)
>
>So if I were making policy I would definitely privilege non-motorized
>peds users dramatically over motorized ones; and people without wheels
>dramatically over people with wheels. On the principle that he who creates
>the risk bears the burden of responsibility.
There's some interesting research in the field on this tendency drivers have: they come to see the pedestrian or bicyclist as an interloper - even when said interloper is within the law. What you call the Windshield Perspective (WP) is what Vanderbilt documents in Traffic: the way driving a vehicle makes people increasingly anti-social, yields this kind of bubble effect: a windshielded monad, I guess -- although with apologies to Leibniz who did, somewhere, talk about windowed monads, didn't he? *smirk*.
others here are calling it the stupidity of driving; you refer to it as "anti-social" and "infantalizing". But these are just different ways of saying what Vanderbilt describes citing research from peopel who study traffic, driving, etc. The result of this bubble effect is: the ability for a Suburban driver on narrow width roads, with kids in the car, to drive within two feet of cyclists (clipping) or a school bus driver to refuse to consider that the tailend of the bus is coming within a foot of my body. And yet, at the same time, these people are wonderful, caring human beings. One was very worried about a cyclist hitting a pothole and landing in a ditch in front of her home. I'm sure she would have come to our rescue had it been necessary. But, had she been behind the wheel, she probably would have driven away, as most of the drivers do around here.
One of the interesting aspects of this, for me, is the way drivers come to see the interlopers as doing damage. What Joanna may be saying about driving and stupidity is the tendency for drivers to have to suppress conscious knowledge of the dangers of what they are doing. Thus, the reaction of a driver to the appearance of an interloper on the roads is to be terrified, shocked, jolted.
The cause of this shock is not the driver, but the interloper. People will say things like, "When I see cyclists on the Boulevard, they scare me!" Or they will talk about how they didn't see the bike rider in the lane next to them, and when they finally noticed, the rider "scared the wits out of me." Or people will say, "I almost ran over you riding in the middle of the lane like that. don't scare me like that!" (literally said to me once)
What happens, Vanderbilt says, is that we can fall into a kind of trance when driving. Driving is this incredibly complex activity, and yet we can also end up not paying as much attention as we should, just spacing out, never mind doing things like putting on lipstick, lighting up, fiddling with dvd players, teting... In this state, we look right at the thing we crash into. When a cyclist "suddenly" appears at an intersection, using his right of way, the driver feels "jolted" (their words) to all of a sudden have a higher state of awareness.
This experience makes them feel afraid: they all of a sudden realize they'd been driving half consciously, not aware enough of their surroundings. (One of the more surprising things I learned in this book is that an incredible number of people are killed by locomotives in spite of the loud noise, the loud warning signals, and the flashing lights!)
Some drivers experience shame and vow to pay better attention to the road. A larger number get angry with non-car drivers. Even though the act of walking into the crosswalk or across the street without looking both ways first doesn't harm a car driver, the driver nonetheless perceives the behavior as equally egregious. Walking into the crosswalk is as awful to the drivers of cars and running a redlight is to the walkers of streets.
Vanderbilt explains how this equivalence happens. When drivers are asked about other car drivers' bad behavior, they chalk up that behavior to drivers dealing with bad circumstances or environmental constraints. When asked same about cyclists and pedestrians, the Other these two groups in the sense that they blame the individuals and their personalities for the behavior rather than considering environmental constraints or external circumstances that might have caused the behavior.
" In one study in which drivers were asked how they feel about cyclists, one of the recurring labels was "unpredictable." When asked to elaborate, drivers often blamed the "attitudes and limited competence" of the cyclists themselves, rather than the "difficulty of the situations that cyclists are often forced to face on the road." When asked to describe their own actions or those of other drivers, however, they blamed only the situation. Psychologists call this the "fundamental attribution error."
So drivers, perhaps already stressed out from being late for work or stuck in traffic, then have to negotiate their way around a vehicle they essentially don't understand, causing even more stress, which they tend to attribute to something about cyclists. It's a vicious cyclemost vicious, in terms of actual harm, for cyclists."