Only Massachusetts requires police details at road work sites. Boston drivers are from Massachusetts. Coincidence? DrivingLikeAss.Com continues its study of the dual phenomena which are Boston: Police road-work details and Boston drivers.

Combining innovative technology with creative research design, DLA develops a psycho-motor test measurement of police detail impact on Boston motorists. Using the Galvanic Skin Sensitivity Index (GASSI) meter—a device that measures electrical conductivity on the surface of the skin to generate a numeric value of the relative “nervousness” of the subject—and the Foot-Leg Attenuation and Latency Normative Comparison (FLATULNC) meter to produce a reaction time score, the Sensate Balanced Derivative (SBD) DLA research finds that police details at road construction sites have virtually no effect on the behavior of Boston drivers.

The new DLA Labs study, Traffic Authority Figures & Their Effectiveness in the Modification of Ass-like Driving Behavior: A DLA Research Study, points to a possible sensory cortex dysfunction among Boston drivers. On the other hand, it could also be that they just like driving like ass.

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In which the DLA Research staff feels unappreciated and misunderstood, but learns a valuable lesson about the power of printed word!

Things got a little heated last week here at the DrivingLikeAss Labs following the publication of Pete DeMarco’s otherwise laudatory column, Who Taught YOU to Drive? ,in the March 30 Boston Globe. The research staff grumbled through DeMarco’s description of their efforts to bring academic rigor to the study of Boston driving behavior as “tongue-in-cheek” and “under the guise of.” They were even willing to let the “you might actually believe them” crack slip. But what really got them steamed were the quotes attributed to DLA’s spokesperson, Jonathan Dower, in which he took single-handed and unabashed credit for everything from DLA’s inception and mission to the actual research itself.

“It’s bad enough that he makes himself look like the DLA braintrust,,” crabbed one researcher, “but you woulda thought he could throw the real workers a bone….you know, like mentioning the hours we spend doing exit interviews at the RMV, which, by the way, he made us do on our lunch breaks!”

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Only Massachusetts requires police details at road work sites. Boston drivers are from Massachusetts. Coincidence? Risking a lifetime of tickets for riding their bikes on the sidewalks and for missing license plate lights, DLA researchers take a look at paid police details.


A dream police detail:  Ensuring public safety in front of Dunkin' Donuts!
Photo Credit: DLA Labs 

On March 12, justanothertrooper posted this entry on the MassCops.Com blog (a web site for New England law enforcement professionals): “NECN is reporting on detail pay for BPD (Boston Police Department).....can always tell when spring is here!”

Can’t argue with him there. Local and state police salaries, swollen by overtime “detail” pay (directing traffic at street or highway construction, special crowd details, etc.), draw the focus of media and (much less frequently) politicians on a perennial basis. The issue is always simmering in the minds of the motoring public since virtually every trip to D’Angelos Marketbasket includes dodging an open manhole or a DPW backhoe digging up a storm sewer…always under the careful supervision of a state or local police office. But it moves to the front burner with the annual news story reading something like “Police Top State’s Highest Paid List”, or –in the case of the Boston Herald—“Cops Cop Top Take-home!”

And so it was earlier this month when the Globe and other news media....

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Previously, on Driving Like Ass, DLA researchers were struck by this question: why does Boston—a city known for the impatience and intolerance of its drivers—have one of the country's lowest adoption rates of electronic toll collection (ETC), or FAST LANE system? In Part Two, DLA heads to the RMV in search of answers. (Click here to see Part One)

It would be easy to pass Boston’s FAST LANE disinclination as just another case of New England Luddism. But, at DLA, when in doubt, we like to head for the data which, more often than not, means “let’s conduct a survey.”

A DLA survey instrument was developed to collect data on drivers’ awareness of the FAST LANE systems, perceived benefits of the FAST LANE system, motivation, and pricing sensitivity.
Photo: FreeFoto.Com

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Electronic toll collection makes so much sense…which, of course, is why Ass-Like Drivers don’t use it.

Last month a friend offered to drive me to New York in her spanking new Prius, of which she was enormously proud and, in an effort to minimize her already dwindling carbon footprint by pursuing some sort of gas mileage record, she had taken to coasting whenever possible. Despite a somewhat erratic driving style, I was impressed with her enthusiasm and commitment, and those quiet, gravity-powered, battery-charging interludes began to lull me into a world far removed from the venalities of Boston driving.

Boston drivers, eschewing all things logical and reasonable, hurry to get in the Cash Only lines
Photo credit: DLA Research Labs

As we approached the Mass Pike toll booths, all the “Get Ticket” lanes were backed up hundreds of yards. The FAST LANE lanes were either wide open or blocked by drivers who didn’t remember that they didn’t have a FAST LANE pass until they were ten feet from the gate and were now trying to squeeze left or right while digging quarters from under the seat.  My friend pulled into a “Get Ticket” lane.

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Does cell phone use while driving make your driving more ass-like? You’d think so, but a hundreds of thousands of Boston drivers can’t be wrong…and our research can’t prove them so. DLA research shows that Boston drivers using cell phones are no worse than a 12 year-old and 87 year-old Uncle Heshi up from Boca. In Boston, nothing prevents us from driving like ass.

We driving research academics are part of a small community so it doesn’t take much to get things buzzing. Last month two things dominated the DLA latte-and-muffin circuit here in Boston: the release of findings from a study by University of Utah driving cognoscenti David Strayer entitled Drivers’ Lane-Changing Behavior While Conversing on Cell Phone in Variable-Density Simulated Highway Environment, and the passage in the Massachusetts House of Representatives of H-4477 which would ban use of cell phones while driving.

Professor Strayer proved to be more media savvy than the State legislature by timing his release for the post-New Year’s news vacuum. The Mass pols, on the other hand, were—not surprisingly—a pound short and several years too late—and their announcement got a balled up in Boston’s Super Bowl paroxysm: Strayer’s announcement made the Boston Globe; passage of H-4477, a bill that could make Massachusetts one of only five states in the nation to fully ban cell phone use while driving, did not.

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Driving in India: Taking it to the Streets with the Mahatma

Don’t just take our word for it. Driving in India is tough and they know it. DLA research staff was impressed by the number of sites and blogs dedicated to confronting national plague of mayhem, danger, and discourtesy. And although I have been firm in reminding them that mayhem, danger, and discourtesy can be found on any corner here in Boston, the DLA staff was equally adamant in maintaining that India’s story was one that had to be told. I relented and agreed to one more posting on driving in India, something of a bibliography of DLA’s web research.

 
Street Signs in India:  Yeah, this will be on the test!

Many of these sites seem to be a result of the gandhigiri wave which struck India following the 2006 musical comedy, “Lage Raho Munna Bhai,” in which an underworld bigwig sees the light after beginning a series of conversation with a picture of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhigiri, essentially the practice of Gandhi’s tenets of truth and “truth force”, is something of a phenomenon in India. Disdained as “flower power” by some, practitioners hand out roses, apply its non-violent approach to social issue protest, launch volunteer work, and, yes, even work to bring gandhigiri to the nation’s driving problems. Thankfully, the DLA staff is made up mostly of MIT grads or near-grads so it isn’t likely that they will be swayed by the idea of handing out roses at the Andrew Square off-ramp. But you never know.

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Licensing + Bureaucracy = Long Lines + Bribery…Massachusetts got 3 out of 4

"You never want to share the road with someone who truly believes in reincarnation"

Anyone within earshot of CNN earlier this month could not have missed the announcement at the New Delhi Auto Expo of Tata Motor’s “Nano”, a one-lakh ($2,500), thirty HP, two-cylinder, one-wiper blade car. Most of the world-wide buzz centered on either the market significance of the new car’s price point or around the spectre of its environmental impact once 30 or 40 million of these things hit the streets. 

Driving in India? You'll need one of these and, well, some big ones. 

But here at DLA, researchers knew that 30 or 40 million new cars would easily equate to 300 to 400 million new drivers. Where and how would they would learn to drive could provide DLA research staff with an in situ opportunity to glean behavioral insights from another country in our effort to understand Boston’s ass-like driving.

Unfortunately, as often seems to be the case, DLA’s trademark—the thoughtful, deliberate response to driving behavior—was, while certainly thoughtful, a bit too deliberate and we were trumped by Somini Sengupta's piece in the January 11 The New York Times, “Indians Hit the Road Amid Elephants.”

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The DLA research staff, exhausted from translating and interpreting Chinese, Polish, and Japanese data, has begged to return its focus to driving research topics closer to home, namely Boston. I am happy to oblige since, as the staff always reminds me, there is no lack of baffling behavior that screams for analysis right here in our own back yard. Furthermore, it is winter and winter is generally accompanied by inclement weather, blessing the eager DLA staff with wonderful, seasonal examples of driving like ass.

But, before closing out our international entries, I want to share some additional data provided by Peter Hessler whose article in The New Yorker, spurred the DLA staff to launch the search for international and cultural factors in ass-like driving.

Thanks for the note, and for the link to your site, which I found hilarious. When I was very small my family lived in Beverly, MA, and the drivers in Boston left a deep impression on my father. He spoke of them often while I was growing up in Missouri.
In the Peace Corps I lived in Fuling, a small town on the Yangtze River. In that town virtually every cabbie had wired his horn so that it connected to a contact point located on the gearshift. A horn on the steering wheel was not responsive enough for their purposes. A friend of mine visited from New York and was overwhelmed by the way they honked. When he finally left, we took a cab down to the docks, and he counted how many times the driver honked during the 15-minute ride. It came to 566, no exaggeration. (I describe this in my first book, River Town on page 66.)
All the best –

Peter

Although virtue is rumored to be its own reward, I would encourage all readers to purchase this book, if only on the grounds that Mr. Hessler was kind enough to respond and because the DLA research staff seldom receives appreciative feedback from readers other than our mothers.

Lots of cars, lots of drivers, not much driving. Is it possible to drive like ass in a country in a country built around civility and solicitude?

Flashing the peace: happy Japanese "paper drivers" celebrate their driving school graduation, never to drive again.

This is the third in a series of studies, inspired by Peter Hessler’s November 26 article in The New Yorker (“Wheels of Fortune”), in which the DLA research staff examines driving instruction and licensing procedures in other countries as a hopeful window into Boston driving behavior. The first entry, “Learning to Drive #1: China vs. Massachusetts” concluded that drivers in China were being taught to drive like ass, unlike Boston where current research points to an innate behavioral component of ass-like driving. In the second installment, “Learning to Drive #2: Poland vs. Massachusetts”, based upon that country’s prehistoric driving and roadway conditions, we established that you can truly drive like ass only if you have no reason, and Poland has plenty of reasons to drive like ass.

Undeterred, the DLA research team pressed on to Japan.

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