DRIVING ON ITS OWN TERMS
Toward the Intrinsic Logic of Driving
Everything affecting driving: legislation, enforcement, design, engineering, education, testing, research, custom, and performance must be considered in the light of driving’s intrinsic logic. Any concept, policy, or opinion incompatible with that logic has to be wrong.
Incredibly though, driving’s intrinsic logic is not the foundation for our standard, accepted ideas about driving. In fact, no such system of logic even exists. In its place we have a collection of often self-contradictory conjectures resulting in a hodge-podge of unsound tenets, prescriptions, and assumptions. Only by understanding driving’s roots, individually and as they interact with each other, can we discover the intrinsic logic of driving. Only by using that logic can we answer driving’s questions, solve its problems, and set its standards.
Driving Defined
To drive an automobile is to operate its controls and direct its course. Operating a vehicle’s controls will make it function. Its engine will start or stop. It will move forward or backward, speed-up, slow-down, maintain a given speed, stop, and turn. Watching someone drive makes it obvious that operating the controls does directly determine the vehicle’s course. This leads to the common belief that operating the controls is driving. It is not! When I was a boy, my father said to me, “Kenny, I could teach a monkey to operate a car, but to teach it to drive … oh, that’s a different story.”
Certainly skill and grace at the controls are to be admired and strived for. They can even make the critical difference in an emergency, but driving is much more a function of the mind than the hands and feet. Driving is about observing, perceiving, analyzing, synthesizing, reacting, preventing, maintaining, choosing, signaling, controlling, judging, evaluating, planning, adapting, maximizing, minimizing, and even synergizing. It is about applying laws, customs, and common sense. It involves using vehicles’ and pedestrians’ position, path, and speed, as well as human body language to predict their intent. It requires familiarity with vehicular and human capabilities and limitations, vehicle dynamics, kinesthetics, traffic flows, traffic situations, road conditions, and the effects of lighting, weather, and visibility. It is necessary to understand the effect of one’s driving and that of others on the total driving scene. All these factors and possibly others influence just exactly what control inputs a driver uses to direct his vehicle’s course with his hands and feet.
A Human Activity
Driving is a human activity, the purpose of which is going. It is based upon and requires human fuzzy logic. It naturally rejects unyielding, mechanical, zero-tolerance judgments. In addition it is inseparable from human emotion.
Total Responsibility
The driver’s direct, personal control of his vehicle is driving’s defining characteristic. The driver is totally responsible for every decision and control input or lack thereof.
Movement
Movement is driving’s purpose. It follows then that the efficiency of that movement is driving’s primary concern. It is the goal. It is the job. It is the foundation upon which everything else is built. It is the first criterion for all judgments about driving. Denying that destroys all hope of discovering driving’s intrinsic logic, let alone of applying it.
How to Play the Game
If moving is the name of the game, and moving efficiently is the goal of the game, every component of traffic must move optimally. This can be achieved only through cooperation. Cooperation is how the game is played. Each driver must perform with skill and grace to produce the most efficient traffic flow. That is the challenge. That is the fun. It’s like being in a great symphony orchestra where each member is doing his individual best and working with all the other members to make the most beautiful music possible.
Safety
Safety is good. All sane people desire safety. Even in war, a quick, clean victory is instantly and automatically preferred to a long, gruesome struggle to outlast the enemy. In other activities focused largely on risk, like extreme sports and dare deviltry, the goal is always to meet the challenge or do the stunt successfully and safely, not just to survive it. Stories of heroism (and foolhardiness) are great fun, but only when the teller has managed to tempt fate, and come out unscathed.
Road safety is good. Happily, our cars are much safer today. Our highways are safer too.Cell phones, GPS, and 911 make emergency communication faster and more accurate. Police, fire, and ambulance services are greatly improved. All these things make our chances of avoiding death and serious injury in crashes much better today than ever before. Modern medical treatment and rehabilitation therapy seem miraculous. Post crash, they vastly improve our chances for survival and decrease the possibilities of life-long impairment. Crashing is safer. In the future, no doubt, it will become even more safe.
Crashing safely is not the point though. The fact is that nobody wants to crash at all. Not crashing is what we really mean when we talk about road safety. When someone says, “Have a safe trip, now.” he is not wishing that you lose only one leg or one eye in the crash, or that the person you hit is crippled rather than killed. He is wishing that you do not crash at all.
Avoiding a crash can be the result of luck, but the wish for a safe trip is not a wish for good luck. It is a wish that everybody driving, walking, peddling, etc, between here and your destination performs well and cooperatively to keep traffic moving smoothly and efficiently – safely.
Conclusion
Those are driving’s irreducible, defining characteristics. Once they are commonly understood, the intrinsic logic of driving will manifest itself spontaneously whenever and wherever reason is applied to any driving question or problem, generating valid paradigm points.